Quebec City-based artificial intelligence champion Coveo is the latest Canadian tech firm to file to go public on the Toronto Stock Exchange, as the busy fourth-quarter tech IPO season continues, despite mixed results on the markets.

In a filing Wednesday registering its intentions to go public, Coveo did not disclose how much it plans to raise or the anticipated price per share. BMO Nesbitt Burns, Merrill Lynch Canada, RBC Dominion Securities, UBS Securities Canada, Canaccord Genuity, Oppenheimer & Company, National Bank Financial, Scotia Capital TD Securities and Samuel A. Ramirez & Company are underwriting the offering. It plans to trade under the symbol CVO.

Coveo’s principal shareholders include Elliott Management, Fonds de solidarité FTQ, ​​Investissement Québec, Al-Rayyan Holding LLC, and OGE, a wholly owned subsidiary of OMERS Administration Corporation. Their stakes were not disclosed.

Coveo would be the second tech company that chair and CEO Louis Têtu has grown and taken public from Quebec City. He co-founded Taleo, a talent-management software company, in 1999. The company initially filed to list on the Nasdaq in March 2004, but paused, ultimately going public in a US$66-million offering in October 2005. In February 2012, Oracle announced it was acquiring Taleo for about US$1.9 billion.

Coveo declined a request for comment.

Coveo’s filing comes at a busy time for Canadian tech firm filings, after a summer lull. Vancouver decision-analytics software company CopperLeaf, which was the first tech firm to debut on the TSX in the fourth quarter, soared in its first day of trading and its shares have continued to perform well. Others haven’t seen the same success on the public markets. Toronto-based investor-relations software maker Q4 downsized its planned offering and faltered on its opening day—though, that hasn’t stopped its CEO from considering a U.S. listing down the road. Kitchener, Ont., edtech company D2L, whose shares started trading Wednesday, also downsized its offering, while Toronto car-auction platform E Automotive priced its shares at the highest end of its expected range before its Wednesday debut.

Founded in 2005, Coveo was built to fix “search relevance for enterprises,” according to a letter from Têtu included in the company’s preliminary prospectus. It evolved into helping clients personalize their e-commerce search and customer service using AI. Coveo’s platform “uses machine learning and deep learning to personalize digital interactions at scale for commerce and customer-service workplace applications and websites,” Têtu said in an interview with The Logic last month. “Think about making every company like Amazon or Netflix from a digital-experience and -personalization perspective—that’s what we do.”

Coveo’s clients include what it called “hundreds of the world’s well-known global brands,” especially in technology, health care, financial services, manufacturing and retail. It had more than 475 customers around the world as of Sept. 30, according to the prospectus.

The company has “seen some very healthy growth” in its business during the pandemic, Têtu said in last month’s interview, and the prospectus shows its revenue has grown steadily over the past three years. For its financial year ending March 31, 2021, Coveo’s revenue totalled nearly US$55.3 million, up from about US$43.9 million the previous year. Still, it is not yet profitable. It reported a net loss of about US$600 million for the 2021 financial year and net losses for the two years prior to that. Coveo attributed its operating losses and an accumulated deficit of US$995.8 million, in part, to “substantial investments” it has made to help it grow. The company plans to keep spending on growth—acquiring other companies and new customers, expanding its line of products and entering new markets—and warns in the prospectus it “may have negative cash flow from operating activities” and use some funds raised to account for that.

Last month, Coveo acquired Qubit, a London-based AI-powered personalization technology for merchandising teams, but did not disclose the terms of the deal. Qubit’s roughly 90 staff joined as part of the acquisition, bringing its global headcount to more than 750 people—most of whom, Têtu told The Logic, are in Quebec. Coveo opened an expanded Montreal office in January, and has also expanded its Quebec City location during the pandemic.

Coveo believes the fragmented market it operates within “is ripe for consolidation,” its prospectus states, and wants to speed up the pace of its acquisitions, which have only recently become a focal point for its strategy. Its only other acquisition so far took place in 2019 when it purchased Tooso, an AI-based digital commerce engine company.

The majority of Coveo’s revenue currently comes from North American customers, according to the prospectus. Only eight per cent of its revenue in its 2021 fiscal year came from outside the continent. “We believe that growth in international markets represents a significant opportunity for us.”

Part of Coveo’s mission is to “re-democratize business,” the company said in its prospectus.

“Being able to compete in the data and AI-powered experience economy cannot be solely the realm of tech-first giants to dominate other businesses,” reads Têtu’s letter. “We believe that every company should be able to use the AI-powered relevance tools that allow them to compete effectively and claim their own awesomeness. We think a better world is a world where everyone can participate and compete, because everyone can access the same technology advantage.”