In keeping with its commitment to help Alberta’s founders navigate a significant funding gap and unlock early-stage growth potential, Metiquity Ventures today announced the closing of its $300,000 equity investment in Calgary-based Takemetuit. Metiquity acted as lead investor in the current $700,000 round.

Takemetuit has developed a unique indoor positioning technology that navigates people to products within 10cm of accuracy in three-dimensional space, without the need for chips or tags to transmit location data. Takemetuit’s patent protected acoustic-based technology is designed to operate in a similar way as GPS technology, using standard mobile devices. Metiquity believes there is a clear need for reliable, cost-effective sub-metre accuracy in the market that is not being met.

Takemetuit has initially targeted the grocery retail industry, which is known for very thin operating profit margins and is currently struggling to deal with the broken economics of its online distribution channel. The global acceleration of online grocery shopping during the pandemic threatens to massively dilute retailer profits without action to improve the economics of the channel. Employee inefficiencies with online order fulfillment and product stocking are major challenges that Takemetuit can solve today

“We are extremely excited to partner with the team at Takemetuit. Takemetuit’s technology provides an indoor positioning solution with low cost infrastructure, that is scalable with large numbers of devices, uses low battery strength, and can deliver the high accuracy the market needs. We believe that Takemetuit has the potential to transform the rapidly growing indoor positioning market the same way that GPS transformed outdoor navigation beginning in the 1990’s.” says Bryan Slauko, Managing Partner at Metiquity Ventures.

“Metiquity is a perfect fit for Takemetuit as we begin to commercialize our proven indoor positioning technology platform. They bring both seed funding and advisory depth as we launch our first projects in the retail sector.” says Don Thompson, President of Takemetuit Inc.

The global indoor positioning market is currently a $7 billion industry and is forecast to grow at an annual rate of over 25% between 2020 and 2025. Metiquity believes Takemetuit is well positioned to capture significant growth in this market.

Metiquity Ventures

Based in Calgary, Alberta, Metiquity Ventures is an early-stage growth equity fund formed to unlock growth potential for innovative founders on-the-cusp of growth and pioneering investors who invest alongside them.

Takemetuit Inc.

Takemetuit’s high-precision indoor positioning platform helps businesses and consumers easily find what they are searching for.

In keeping with its commitment to helping Alberta’s early-stage founders grow their businesses despite the challenges they face in an inefficient and unstable early-stage risk capital market, Metiquity Ventures today announced its $300,000 equity investment in Calgary-based cash flow management software company Helm. This is the first investment made by Metiquity’s new fund.

At a time when many investors have paused their activity, Metiquity identified an opportunity to help a business on-the-cusp of commercialization and growth to accelerate its path and help solve a real problem faced by small businesses around the world. “While Alberta has a growing and supportive ecosystem and has even seen strong venture capital investment growth, the need for investment where we need it the most, in innovative pre-revenue and early-revenue companies, is not being met” says Bryan Slauko, Managing Partner at Metiquity Ventures. “We believe this is a great time to invest in Alberta’s early-stage founders, and with our capital they can focus on building a strong foundation for long-term growth”.

Founded in 2018, Helm provides a software-as-a-service solution that streamlines the cash flow management process, one that is often overly complicated, unfamiliar and not truly accessible to entrepreneurs. Helm empowers business owners and their advisors to make better business decisions by providing a simple, easy to use, yet powerful tool that integrates and digitally transforms the entire process of forecasting future cash flows, scheduling and approving payments, and collecting receivables. Most businesses fail because they don’t understand cash flow. Helm will change that.

The cloud accounting software industry has been growing at a rate of over 30% per year over the past three years, in North America and internationally. Metiquity believes Helm is well positioned to grow with the industry, especially given the industry experience and recognition of its co-founders, Kelvin Gieck and Twyla Verhelst. Kelvin and Twyla own their own cloud accounting firm and that has given them real insight into the stress and anxiety that business owners, their accountants and bookkeepers face around cash flow.

“We believe Helm can be an international success story, built right here in Calgary. We’re excited to partner with Kelvin, Twyla and the team at Helm for our very first investment” says Slauko.

Metiquity Ventures

Based in Calgary, Alberta, Metiquity Ventures is an early-stage growth equity fund formed to unlock growth potential for innovative founders on-the-cusp of growth and pioneering investors who invest alongside them.

With the close of its first investment, Metiquity Ventures is excited to announce the official launch of its inaugural investment fund. Metiquity Ventures Fund I is a Calgary-based early-stage growth equity fund created to help modernize Alberta’s early-stage funding ecosystem by unlocking growth potential for innovative founders on-the-cusp of growth and pioneering investors who invest capital alongside them.

Metiquity believes Alberta’s early-stage risk capital market is broken.

Pre-revenue and early-revenue start-ups on-the-cusp of growth are in desperate need of capital that traditional venture capital funds are not going to provide and local investors are not ready to provide. Alberta’s early-stage capital market is very unstable as a result. A substantial early-stage funding gap persists where promising companies cannot access the capital they need when they need it the most.

Metiquity will make meaningful lead investments in up-and-coming companies using technology to digitally transform and fundamentally disrupt the way traditional industries operate. With the close of its first investment, a $300,000 lead investment in Calgary-based Helm, Metiquity is expanding formal fundraising and will continue to make investments as it works towards its fundraising goal. The fund expects to raise capital primarily from high net worth individual and family office investors in Alberta and western Canada.

“We need to demystify the innovation ecosystem and make early-stage investing more accessible to our local high net-worth investment communities to unlock this important source of capital” said Bryan Slauko, co-founder of Metiquity.

“We are investors first and use a disciplined investment process to rigorously evaluate investment potential. But we know that capital alone is not enough. If the potential is there, we offer our operational expertise to actively support and encourage companies to develop strong business fundamentals. We want to allow founders to focus on stability and long-term value creation over short-term growth at all costs.”

The fund partners with founders in emerging innovation hubs who are creating long-term, systemic business value and are on the cusp of commercialization and significant growth, regardless of industry. Metiquity will make early-stage investments where it can amplify the impact of its expertise and help partner companies accelerate growth by implementing the efficient use of systems, processes, and a well-defined purpose.

Metiquity is partnering with pre-seed and seed stage founders, acting as a strong lead investor and investing $250,000 to $750,000 per portfolio company. With a target size of $15 million, the fund will partner with 20 to 30 companies across Alberta and western Canada. Metiquity will leverage its investment and expertise to help companies access additional equity investment and to unlock non-dilutive funding available through publicly funded programs.

The group behind Metiquity Ventures has been active in the Alberta entrepreneurial and technology communities for many years as investors, advisors and founders. Metiquity is co-founded by Bryan Slauko, Dennis Nerland and Jacques LaPointe.

Jacques LaPointe brings over 25 years of experience in the Alberta technology ecosystem including 13 years in operational roles in industry and 12 years as an investment portfolio manager, angel investor, director and advisor. Most recently, Jacques was a co-founder and former President of Calgary-based Attabotics. He led Attabotics through its very first equity and grant funding and the significant investment and growth that followed during his three-year tenure. Jacques is keenly aware of the significant funding gap that exists for true early-stage risk capital in Alberta.

“Alberta is home to many strong, emerging early-stage businesses with the potential to do great things outside of Alberta’s borders. But it is extremely difficult for founders to go out and raise that first $500,000 from investors. Particularly for businesses that are pre-revenue or early revenue. So many are on-the-cusp of something great but don’t make it because they can’t find the capital and guidance they need to get there.”

Dennis Nerland is an experienced angel investor and respected member of the Canadian legal and business communities. He is a co-founder of the law firm Nerland Lindsey LLP, practicing primarily in the areas of tax and estate planning. Dennis has also been active as a trustee of several private investment trusts and as a director of several public and private boards in the energy, technology and services sectors.

“We need Albertans to support the growth of our early-stage innovation ecosystem. Many of the natural investors in these up-and-coming companies are the families who earned most of their wealth right here as innovators in the energy sector. Our challenge is in mobilizing their capital. Many of these investors and the children they are now transferring their wealth to are not experienced with investing in today’s ecosystem.”

“With Metiquity we’ve created a professionally managed investment fund designed to focus exclusively on investing the smaller dollar amounts needed by early-stage startups in Calgary, Edmonton and other emerging regional markets. We have a team that knows how to evaluate risk and effectively lead these early-stage investments. We believe we can help mobilize capital that’s sitting on the sidelines and start to fill the major funding gap founders are experiencing here in Alberta.”

Bryan Slauko manages the daily activity of the fund. Bryan brings over 20 years of experience as an investment professional, advisor, entrepreneur and director. For the past 10 years Bryan has combined his expertise in investment analysis, market research, due diligence and early-stage growth equity with experience in business strategy, corporate governance and business building, to help unlock growth opportunities, create value and effectively manage risk for investors, early-stage companies and the communities he works in.

Metiquity looks forward to adding new investors and growing the Calgary-based, early-stage fund over the coming months. The need in Alberta is greater than ever. The pace of digital transformation has accelerated. The opportunity to partner with high-growth innovators, job and wealth creators is real.