While the U.S. and Canada duke it out over tariffs between the two countries, a tech company based out of Toronto is announcing a major round of funding led by a homegrown VC. StackAdapt, a programmatic advertising startup, says that it has raised $235 million in equity funding, with Teachers’ Venture Growth (TVG) — the investment arm of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan — leading the growth round.
Intrepid Growth Partners, a firm based between Toronto and London, is also participating, along with four other investors that are not being named.
The funding is significant both for its size and its focus.
In terms of the size, this is one of the bigger funding rounds for a startup out of Canada to date — although it’s not the biggest. Most recently, Fintech Clio raised $900 million; Cohere raised $500 million, and Tenstorrent raised $700 million, all last year.
Funding for Canadian startups is largely reflecting trends that are playing out in other markets. The total number of deals in 2024 was down on the year before, with companies working in the area of artificial intelligence taking an outsized part of what was getting invested.
StackAdapt, which describes itself as a company that “harnesses the power of AI”, is arguably a part of trend. The company launched in 2014 and had more or less grown as a quietly bootstrapped company. That was until 2022, when it took a $300 million investment from Summit Partners. PitchBook data indicates that at least some of that $300 million was in the form of a secondary investment. From what we understand it was a minority investment, which would put the company’s valuation at above $600 million.
The company is not disclosing valuation with this current round.
The size of this round speaks not only to the company’s size today, but also notably how it’s financing the next stage of its growth with local backing.
Programmatic advertising has become, effectively, the building block of how all digital advertising works these days accounting for upwards of 90% of the market, the reason being that it gives marketers a more effective way of measuring how their ads are working, and to whom those ads are being shown; and it gives publishers a more automated way of bringing in a larger volume of ads against their content.
In the case of StackAdapt, the company offers customers across different business verticals — for example, political campaigns, retailers, B2B, travel, healthcare and financial services — and its inventory includes native advertising (sponsored content), display, video, connected TV, audio, games and more.