(Reuters) – Venture capital-backed investment in Canadian financial technology companies hit its highest level in almost two decades last year, even as the flow of funds into major fintech markets like the United States declined, according to sector data.

Fintechs, or companies that use innovative technology to revamp everything from banking to fraud security, globally draw billions in investment annually.

In Canada, fintech is revitalizing the startup scene and has attracted a new crop of Canadian venture capital funds looking to invest specifically in young fintech companies.

According to PitchBook, used by the U.S.-based National Venture Capital Association, venture capital financing in Canadian fintech was $137.7 million in 2016, up more than 35 percent on the year. Five years ago, it was $21.8 million and in 2000 it was $7.3 million.

Figures compiled by Thomson Reuters show a rise of nearly 74 percent from 2015 to 2016, to C$264.8 million ($197.41 million), its highest level since 2000, when venture capital investment in Canadian financial technology firms reached C$317.9 million.

The data vary as some investors do not disclose full information, while methodologies can differ on how the information is collected, how many companies are tracked, what is considered fintech and what constitutes a venture deal.

The figures pale in comparison to the United States, where investments reached $4.27 billion in 2016. But the trend in Canada is on the rise, compared with a decline in the U.S. and Britain.

Investments declined at least 30 percent in the U.S. in 2016, while in the UK they fell nearly 25 percent and Singaporean fintech investment sank 65 percent.

Weaker activity in the U.S. and UK was partly due to market uncertainty around the U.S. election and the Brexit vote in the UK to leave the European Union, as well as smaller deal sizes, according to data provider CBInsights and KPMG.

“From a global stage, Canada is a relatively small market,” said Adam Nanjee, who heads the fintech group in Toronto’s MaRS research hub.

“But it’s one of the best markets to build a company around innovation because we have a great test market, great infrastructure for financial services.”

The province of Ontario has among the highest concentrations of tech firms outside Silicon Valley, according to the provincial government, thanks in part to cheaper costs and the cluster of Toronto and Waterloo area universities producing engineers and developers.

The re-invigorated startup community lured home Canadians – such as the founder of online investment startup Wealthsimple, Mike Katchen – keen to trade promising careers for a more supportive and less cut-throat environment.

“There’s no loyalty whatsoever (in Silicon Valley). You’re going to overpay for somebody, they’re going to stay with you for six months and they leave for the next gig,” said Christian Lassonde, founder of Canadian-based investor Impression Ventures.

“Trying to build a successful company in the Valley has actually gotten too hard.”

California-based Lightspeed Venture Partners, early investors in Snapchat and Nest, has been tracking Canadian fintechs for potential investments.

Lightspeed, which has yet to invest in fintech in Canada, is monitoring startups including League, which offers alternative employee health plans, and FundThrough, a lending service for small businesses.

“What we look for are companies … that may start with the Canadian economy, but are thinking beyond Canada,” said Lightspeed partner Arif Janmohamed.

Other foreign players are also taking note. Goldman Sachs invested in Toronto-based Finance it in 2015 and nanoPay in 2016, for example. Meanwhile, Japan’s NTT Data Corp, one of the world’s largest technology services companies, and MaRS announced a partnership in November to help Canadian startups expand into Japan and give NTT access to technology being developed by Canadian startups.

Maturing big-name startups such as Shopify, Wattpad, and Hootsuite helped pave the way, said Wealthsimple’s Katchen, for the next “cohort of companies that are coming of age on the international stage.”

(Reporting by Solarina Ho; Editing by Alan Crosby)

In conjunction with the Davos conference in Switzerland today, Microsoft announced plans to, in the next two years, double the size of its artificial intelligence (AI) research and development group in Montreal, which it established through the very recent acquisition of startup Maluuba.

“Microsoft is excited to engage with faculties, students and the broader tech community in Montreal, which is becoming a global hub for AI research and innovation,” Microsoft president Brad Smith said at Davos, according to a blog post from Janet Kennedy, president of Microsoft Canada.

Google, which has also acquired AI startups and has employed AI researchers internally for years right alongside Microsoft, formed an AI research group in Montreal just two months ago. Both Google and Microsoft have forged connections with Yoshua Bengio, a luminary in the AI field of deep learning, a subsector of AI that involves training artificial neural networks on lots of data and then getting them to make inferences about new data. Microsoft recently backed AI-oriented startup accelerator Element AI, of which Bengio is a cofounder.

Facebook hired another luminary, Yann LeCun, to run its AI research lab in 2013, and Google picked up a different one, Geoff Hinton, through the 2013 acquisition of DNNresearch. The other top figure, Andrew Ng, previously headed up the Google Brain AI project but decamped to Chinese search company Baidu in 2014.

On top of its AI expansion in Montreal, Microsoft says it will additionally make “gifts” to pay for AI research in the amounts of $6 million Canadian ($4.56 million USD) to the Université de Montréal and $1 million Canadian (around $760,000 USD) to McGill University.

While many peer-to-peer payment and personal finance services are geared toward the U.S., a new one has emerged to buck that trend. Koho is launching to the general public — starting in every province in Canada except for Quebec — as a mobile hub to help manage people’s finances. The startup has secured a partnership with Visa to give it a boost out of the starting gate.

A blend of Mint.com, Venmo, and Digit, Koho seeks to provide free banking services to millennials, while also giving consumers easily digestible and transparent access to their financial data so they know exactly were their money is going. Koho appears to be consolidating things so you no longer need several apps to accomplish these various tasks.

Once an account has been activated, users will receive a prepaid Visa card issued by Peoples Trust Company, which can be used anywhere Visa is accepted. The idea is to load the card with just the funds needed to get by until the next paycheck. The expectation is that some money is being put away for savings, which Koho said that it’ll do for you automatically. All transactions made with the Visa card will be recorded within Koho, which provides the tracking needed to encourage financial discipline.

There are no costs for customers to use the Koho service, but the company does charge merchants when the Visa card is used. Through its partnership with the credit card provider, Koho receives a percentage of the interchange fees. In addition, revenue is generated from banking partners through currency exchange and out-of-network fees. However, the company says that none of these fees are passed along to customers.

Koho’s launch comes after more than two years of development and beta testing. “The response during the private beta was amazing,” said Daniel Eberhard, the company’s chief executive, in a statement. “More than 10,000 Canadians signed up; we transacted over $1.3 million dollars. In virtually every metric, Koho is used in a fundamentally different way than traditional offerings.”

Right now, Samsung Pay, Apple Pay, and Android Pay are not supported, but Koho said that the company plans to include them eventually, starting with Apple Pay in the late second quarter.

The company has raised $1.95 million (CAD $2.6 million) in venture funding from the founders of Hootsuite and Shopify, along with Power Corporation of Canada, Gil Penchina, and Stanley Park Ventures.

Koho is available on iPhone today, and an Android version will launch next quarter.

GUEST:

I always feel sorry for Canadian smartphone users. Every time they open the app store they find dozens of new apps, sometimes buggy, sometimes lacking important features. That’s because almost every mobile marketer targeting an international release has the same idea: “Let’s do a soft launch in Canada!”

It made sense in the past: Canada is an English-speaking, developed market with similar consumer behavior and GDP as the U.S., but with a smaller population. That makes Canada an attractive staging ground to test a big market without risking damage to the even bigger market you want to go after down the line.

But when everyone tests their new flavor in the same place, the results aren’t pretty.

Because of all the test launches in Canada, Canadian advertising inventory prices soared and competition increased while engagement decreased. Five years ago, an article in this very publication described Canada as “America’s mobile app guinea pig.” Author Doug Renet explained how a growing number of companies were taking advantage of this “risk-free test market.” He even wrote that he was jealous of Canadians for getting to be the first to try all these new apps.

Well, the risk-free test market is no more. We ruined it. Today, soft launching in Canada is a bad idea. Because new apps enter this marketplace so frequently, rankings are unstable and unpredictable. It is not uncommon for a new app to soar to the top of the app stores one day, only to fall 200 – 300 spots the next. This frequent movement affects user behavior, the very thing developers are trying to test. People who encounter 10 new apps weekly are going to behave differently than those who do not. This competition skews the data. You may be able to drive a lot of initial installs, but your retention rate will probably be dismal because you are competing with this constant stream of new apps that are also soft launching.

Sometimes we soft launch when an app is lacking features or functionality. For example, an engineer might request a soft launch to help debug something or to see when users fall off. This also affects the market. Canadian users’ patience is dwindling. And why spend the time using a buggy app when you have plenty of other new options? Developers have to open their minds and look elsewhere, to other, less-saturated markets.

To determine where to test, consider what it is you are testing. Obviously, if you are soft launching an e-commerce app, you can’t test somewhere you don’t ship to; but if you are testing game play, retention or app usage, other English-speaking or English-savvy markets like Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Ireland, Singapore, or New Zealand can be good choices.

If you are testing monetization, do your research so you understand how the test region differs from other areas you plan to target down the line. For example, if a country’s average GDP is higher than your other target countries, you will have inflated LTVs. Understand these microeconomic differences so you can put your findings in context and adjust your expectations accordingly.

Some developers have begun to try out other English-speaking countries, specifically Scandinavian markets, but eight out of 10 app developers I encounter still choose to soft launch in Canada. These developers realize they can do it elsewhere – South Africa, the Netherlands, even the Philippines – but they stick with what they know, America’s “guinea pig” to the north.

What was once an inspired idea is now a bad one. Canada’s user behavior is no longer indicative of the American market. You will compete with too many apps and generate unreliable data. Choose a different country for your soft launch, based on what you are testing and your long-term goals, and leave Canada alone.

Maor Sadra is Managing Director and CRO at AppLift.

GUEST:

Time and time again, SaaS startups contemplate who they should approach for investment. There’s a general sense in our community that it’s difficult to raise money in Canada. Software startups have this misconception before they do their own digging that they need to go south of the border to raise a round.

Yes, there is more money in the U.S. Yes, companies in the U.S. are raising at higher valuations. But let’s not sell ourselves short on the ecosystem that exists in our own backyard.

SaaS founders, before you pack your bags for a trip to San Francisco – have a look at this:

Above: Sourced from 2016 CVCA Infobase Data

And here is a comprehensive list of the VCs that are actively investing in Canadian SaaS companies TODAY:

• 500 Startups Canada: KEATEXT, Element.ai
• BDC: Axonify, Klipfolio
• Brightspark: Nudge Rewards, Hubba
• Build Ventures: Affinio, AirVM
• Celtic House Venture Partners: FileFacets, Auvik, KodaCloud, Nuvyoo
• East Valley Ventures: Leadsift, Alongside
• Georgian Partners: Freshbooks, Vision Critical
• Gibraltar Ventures: Pressly, CrowdRiff
• Golden Venture Partners: Yesware, Roadmunk
• Hello Ventures: careerJSM, Mydoma Studio
• Highline.vc: Picatic, Hockeystick
• Information Venture Partners: PostBeyond
• Innovacorp: Kivuto, LeadSift
• Inovia: Lightspeed POS, Smooch.io, TrackTik, Top Hat
• Kensington Capital: Real Matters, Vision Critical
• KLASS Capital: TrackTik, 360insights
• Leaders Fund: 360insights, Influitive
• MaRS IAF: PageCloud, Top Hat
• Mistral Venture Partners: Klipfolio, The Better Software Company
• OMERS: Shopify, Fusebill, League, Hootsuite
• Pelorus Venture Capital: HeyOrca!
• Real Ventures: Mindbridge.ai, Vanilla
• Relay Ventures: Touchbistro, Influitive
• Round13 Capital: Hubdoc, Bridgit, Statflo, TouchBistro
• ScaleUP Ventures: Startapp
• Trellis Capital: Funnelcake, TrendMD
• Vancouver Founder Fund: ThinkCX, Thinkific
• Vanedge: Bridgit
• Version One Ventures: Clio, Jobber, Frontdesk, unbounce
• Wesley Clover: Martello, Referral SaaSquatch, Solink
• Whitecap Venture Partners: Real Matters, Affinio, Clearwater Clinical
• Whitestar Capital: Gymtrack, Mnubo, IMMUNIO, Salesfloor
• Yaletown: Showbie

So there you have it. The money is here, and Canadian investors are ready to meet you.

[This post originally appeared on L-Spark’s web site. The infographic part of a series the company is producing for its newly launched blog Voice of the North.]

Lucy Screnci is Digital Content Manager at L-Spark.

GUEST:

I keep hearing, from numerous people, the complaint that Canadian businesses sell too early, especially when compared to their U.S. counterparts. It’s an interesting notion that is always raised when the sale of a large Canadian tech company happens – BlueCat Networks’ recent $400 million sale is a good example.

Rather than just relying on hearsay, I thought it was worth analyzing the numbers to see if it is true that Canadian firms sell too early.

So, if we look at technology companies that have been sold in Canada and the U.S. over the last five years (2012 – 2016) and analyze the mean and median age at sale, we get the results in the chart below:

Above: Data source: Pitchbook

Pretty interesting set of results if you ask me! So in reality, over the last five years, Canadian companies have, on average, either been older than their U.S. peers at the time of a sale (16.2 years vs. 15.5 years) or, when comparing medians, are exactly the same age as their U.S. counterparts.

Just for completeness, let’s look at one more split of the data. The chart below shows the same data on a yearly basis, just to see if there’s any material variance by year.

Above: Data source: Pitchbook

As you can see, there really aren’t any material differences by year, and there isn’t a trend of the gap widening between the two countries.

So the next time you hear someone putting down Canadian entrepreneurs for selling their tech businesses too early, you can let them know it’s simply not true.

Ed Bryant is President and CEO of Sampford Advisors, an M&A advisory firm for Canadian technology companies. Ed has over 20 years of experience, including over 17 years in investment banking with Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and Sampford in Hong Kong, Singapore, New York, and now Ottawa. In that time, he has raised in excess of $20 billion in equity and debt capital and completed over $10 billion in M&A transactions.

GUEST:

Throughout the ’90s, software development executives have considered offshore development as part of their cost management strategy to keep spending down. They did this by outsourcing many functions and projects to Ukraine, India, Mexico, Costa Rica, Argentina, or Russia. On Friday morning last week, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that it had already reached its congressionally mandated threshold of 85,000 visas for the new fiscal year, so we could see a massive bump in offshoring.

After nearly two decades of expansion, software makers have learned a lot of lessons on what works and what doesn’t in offshore software development.

When it comes to outsourcing, India pioneered the practice — with the size, skills, and maturity of its software talent pool, India became the destination for most companies seeking to offshore. However, despite its enormous talent pool, the cost savings came with countless shortcomings.

• Talent retention: India’s labor pool is becoming more expensive, and it’s getting difficult to keep top talent working on your projects. Many developers start on your project with minimal domain knowledge, learn their skills on the job, and then leave once the job is no longer challenging. Companies such as Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, EY and other large multinationals offer top dollar (often at a 30 percent increase) to attract your trained developers and make it incredibly difficult for you to hold onto them.
• Communications: Language and communications have improved over the years but are still imperfect, resulting in offshore workers misinterpreting instructions.
• Time zone differences: Work hour difference continues to be a challenge. Many Indian software developers have to work late into the night to accommodate our time differences. For larger implementations, you need an additional hire (an onshore coordinator) to ensure clear communications from the U.S. to the offshore team.
• Goals alignment: The talent pool of an outsourcing company does not have your company or vision in mind so they are motivated by the type of work and pay.

Over the years, I’ve built engineering teams in Denver, Romania, Berlin, New York, and San Francisco, and each location has its own strengths and weaknesses. Technology hubs in New York and San Francisco have world class concentrations of tech talent, but they are also fiercely competitive markets where top engineers can call their own shots.

Most recently I’ve been really pleased with Toronto’s engineering expansion initiative. The Toronto-Waterloo Corridor has always been in my radar over the years, through Blackberry and the University of Waterloo, and we are seeing an ever growing ecosystem of successful technology startups emerging there. Last year, Thomson Reuters made a large expansion of its Canadian operations with the creation of a new technology center in downtown Toronto. Google has a presence near Waterloo, and the University of Waterloo provides a sizable pipeline of students.

There are several reasons it makes sense to sourcing your software development work from Toronto:

• Increased engineering talent: Canada has a growing world class engineering talent pool. The University of Waterloo has one of the largest co-op programs, and the University of Toronto has a top engineering program. They are on the same eastern time zone as New York. In recent years, many former Blackberry engineers have transitioned into other sectors and seeded startups. The startup community and ecosystem in Toronto and the Corridor is now vibrant and diverse. Shopify, a leading e-commerce site with offices in Toronto, is pushing the envelope on multiple fronts, making startups in Canada bigger and badder. For example, on its engineering website, the company is sharing its work through open source and blogs on best practices. We’ve also seen a major push in Toronto around startups focused on data science and AI/machine learning. All in all, the number of tech savvy engineers to draw from is growing rapidly. More importantly, there are no language or cultural barriers.
• Easy travel: Travel from the Newark airport to the Billy Bishop airport (downtown Toronto) is 45 minutes, which accommodates frequent face-to-face meetings. Last time I checked, airfare is often under $400 round trip.
• Competitive costs: The Canadian government has long offered a research credit for firms that create intellectual property, and these credits can help offset development costs.
• Technology stacks are similar: There is a broad base of common technology knowledge across the U.S. and Canada on using such core capabilities as AWS, Azure, open source stacks, iOS, and Android.

Toronto’s tech scene is rapidly approaching that of San Francisco and New York. If you’re looking to staff or outsource a software development project, you’ll want to give it a look. There’s a lot of talent, opportunity, and innovation right across our northern border.

James C. Chou is CTO at WorkMarket. He was previously CTO of Shutterstock.

Electronic Arts’ Motive studio has grown to more than 100 employees in Montreal, the company said today.

The studio’s chief is Jade Raymond, the group general manager in charge of Motive as well as EA’s Visceral studio in Redwood City, Calif. Motive had to ramp up quickly, as EA hired Raymond away from Ubisoft in July 2015. EA assigned Motive to do work on new Star Wars titles, including the Star Wars Battlefront II game coming later this year.

Blockbuster studios routinely staff up to 100 or more employees as they work on big games like Battlefront or Assassin’s Creed.

Blake Jorgensen, chief financial officer at EA, said during the company’s earnings call today that Motive had ramped up and was finalizing its new office space.

“It’s been exciting to build such a great new team,” Jorgensen said.

Over time, the expansion will be more gradual, with Motive growing from more than 100 people to around 150, Jorgensen said.

Raymond has worked on high profile games such as the original Assassin’s Creed, Assassin’s Creed II, and Watch Dogs. Motive is working on Star Wars Battlefront II as well as an unannounced Star Wars game.

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(Reuters) — Canadian courts can force internet search leader Google to remove results worldwide, the country’s top court ruled on Wednesday, drawing criticism from civil liberties groups arguing such a move sets a precedent for censorship on the internet.

In its 7-2 decision, Canada’s Supreme Court found that a court in the country can grant an injunction preventing conduct anywhere in the world when it is necessary to ensure the injunction’s effectiveness.

“The internet has no borders — its natural habitat is global,” the Supreme Court wrote in its judgment. “The only way to ensure that the interlocutory injunction attained its objective was to have it apply where Google operates — globally.”

Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc, did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

The case stems from claims by Equustek Solutions Inc, a small technology company in British Columbia that manufactures network devices, that distributor Datalink Technologies Gateways relabeled one of its products and sold it as its own online and acquired trade secrets to design and manufacture a competing product.

In 2012, Equustek asked Google to remove Datalink search results until the case against the company was resolved. While Google removed over 300 specific web pages associated with Datalink, it did so only on the Canadian version of its search engine.

The Supreme Court of British Columbia subsequently ordered Google to stop displaying search results in any country for any part of Datalink’s websites.

In its appeal before the Supreme Court of Canada, Google had argued that the global reach of the order was unnecessary and that it raised concerns over freedom of expression.

The Supreme Court rejected Google’s argument that the right to freedom of expression should have prevented the order from being issued.

“This is not an order to remove speech that, on its face, engages freedom of expression values,” the court wrote in its ruling. “We have not, to date, accepted that freedom of expression requires the facilitation of the unlawful sale of goods.”

The global reach was necessary, according to the court, because if the removed search results were restricted to Canada alone, purchasers both in and out of Canada could easily continue to find and buy from Datalink.

OpenMedia, a Canadian group campaigning for open communications, opposed the ruling.

“There is great risk that governments and commercial entities will see this ruling as justifying censorship requests that could result in perfectly legal and legitimate content disappearing off the web because of a court order in the opposite corner of the globe,” said OpenMedia spokesman David Christopher.

Google cannot appeal the Supreme Court ruling. If the company has evidence that complying with the order would force it to violate other countries’ laws, including interfering with freedom of expression, it can apply to the British Columbia court to alter the order, the Supreme Court said, noting Google has not made such an application.

OPINION:

When it comes to nonsensical rulings pertaining to the internet, the blame typically lies with some old U.S. judge who still uses a rotary phone. The legal system cannot keep up with the world’s most transformative technology, which happens to be evolving rapidly and unapologetically. This week, though, it was Canada that royally screwed up.

The country’s Supreme Court concluded, in a 7-2 vote, that a local court can grant an injunction preventing conduct “anywhere in the world.” Specific to the case, this means it can force Google to remove search results worldwide.

The Supreme Court wrote the following in its judgment:

Where it is necessary to ensure the injunction’s effectiveness, a court can grant an injunction enjoining conduct anywhere in the world. The problem in this case is occurring online and globally. The Internet has no borders — its natural habitat is global. The only way to ensure that the interlocutory injunction attained its objective was to have it apply where Google operates — globally.

Maybe I should be thrilled that Canada is so forward-thinking to note that the internet doesn’t have borders. In some ways, that’s progress, given how often we see archaic courts making inane decisions related to the internet.

And yet, somehow, Canada’s Supreme Court couldn’t foresee its ruling being adapted by other countries. If Canada can enforce its laws to limit search results in other countries, does it accept when other countries decide to do the same?

If a country as “free” as Canada wants to limit speech and information access via Google, you can bet your bottom loonie that other countries will do the same. It’s just plain backwards to de-index results worldwide because one country’s court order is violated.

Will Google have to remove everything about Tiananmen Square worldwide because China demands it? Will Google have to remove everything LGBTQ related worldwide because Russia demands it? Will Google have to remove everything about women driving worldwide because Saudi Arabia demands it?

This is an incredibly dangerous precedent.

Need more proof that this is a terrible ruling? The RIAA is happy about it:

Canada's Supreme Court Deals Blow to Google, Win For Music @billboard https://t.co/h6iVjs9X81

— RIAA (@RIAA) June 28, 2017

Google will of course end up deciding which countries’ extraterritorial orders it enforces. Some may argue, therefore, that Canada’s Supreme Court isn’t really accomplishing anything and this is much ado about nothing.

But as a Canadian, that just makes me even more embarrassed.

Sorry.

ProBeat is a column in which Emil rants about whatever crosses him that week.

Alphabet’s artificial intelligence (AI) subsidiary DeepMind has opened its first international research lab in Edmonton, Canada, in partnership with the University of Alberta (UAlberta).

This move represents the company’s first research hub outside the U.K.

Founded out of the U.K. in 2010, Google acquired DeepMind for around $500 million four years later. DeepMind departed its own central London office last summer and moved into Google’s swanky new office nearby.

“It was a big decision for us to open our first non-U.K. research lab, and the fact we’re doing so in Edmonton is a sign of the deep admiration and respect we have for the Canadian research community,” explained DeepMind cofounder and CEO Demis Hassabis. “In fact, we’ve had particularly strong links with the UAlberta for many years: nearly a dozen of its outstanding graduates have joined us at DeepMind, and we’ve sponsored the machine learning lab to provide additional funding for PhDs over the past few years.”

DeepMind has hit the headlines in recent years for a number of reasons — perhaps most notably for its ability to defeat the world’s top Go players using an AI-powered program called AlphaGo. More recently, DeepMind has found itself in hot water for an ongoing data-sharing deal with the U.K.’s public health service, the NHS, a partnership that was deemed to be illegal.

DeepMind’s new Alberta lab will be led by a triumvirate of UAlberta professors, including Canadian computer scientist Rich Sutton, who is a pioneer of reinforcement learning, as well as Michael Bowling and Patrick Pilarski.

Above: University of Alberta computing science professors and artificial intelligence researchers (L to R) Richard Sutton, Michael Bowling, and Patrick Pilarski

Image Credit: John Ulan

DeepMind will also provide “additional funding” to support longer-term AI programs at UAlberta, according to Hassabis.

“Our hope is that this collaboration will help turbo-charge Edmonton’s growth as a technology and research hub, attracting even more world-class AI researchers to the region and helping to keep them there too,” he added.