We’re excited to announce that Leaders Fund portfolio company Drata has raised a $25M Series A led by GGV Capital to continue their mission of building the world leading continuous compliance automation platform. Drata has already helped hundreds of companies automate their SOC 2 compliance process, after recently raising their Seed and launching out of stealth in January, and this funding will help them scale up faster.

In a time where the risk of cyber crime is rapidly increasing, companies are making it a top priority to be proactive and consistent with their security practices. Proving that you as a…

Today marks an incredible milestone for Ada, Leaders Fund, and Canadian tech. Ada has raised $130M led by Spark Capital, reaching a $1.2B valuation and solidifying their position as an industry leader in CX automation.

First off, congratulations to Mike, David, and the entire Ada team on your relentless focus on customer success, and the growth and recognition you’ve realized as a result.

As pioneers in developing the customer experience (CX) market, you recognized in 2017 that the move to online commerce and conversations would accelerate, and that customers would need an intuitive way to harness the power of AI…

It’s wild to think that just a few months ago we were writing our 2020 year in review. Time is flying in the venture world, with Zoom deals continuing to flourish and funding continuing to soar to unprecedented volumes.

For Leaders Fund, we had an exciting quarter of portfolio news, with updates and milestones across the board.

Raises & Acquisitions

This was a busy quarter with TopHat raising a $72M Series D, Manifold being acquired by SNYK, and Zaius being acquired by Optimizely. …

With cyber crime on the rise, and awareness around data privacy heightened, it has never been more important to ensure that company data, processes and systems are secure. Across our portfolio, we’ve seen deals get pushed or fall apart because they could not prove to the customer that their security posture was strong enough. Increasingly, proving that an operation is secure and that data privacy is taken seriously is vital to doing business today. One way to prove that is to get a SOC 2 audit and certification, but SOC 2 certification is hard to get and painful to keep…

It is clear that many of the behaviour changes the pandemic brought on are here to stay. 2020 accelerated the adoption and growth of a number of trends we are excited to invest in; digital transformation, the shift to the cloud, ecommerce software and AI. It feels appropriate to reflect on what has been one of our most action-packed years to date, and look toward 2021 with the hopes to maintain that momentum.

Fund activity

In 2020, we participated in 10 financing rounds, two of which were new investments — one in the robotic automation space and the other in security and…

After Kindred was acquired by Ocado last week, we wanted to reflect on what we learned, and the ingredients that made Kindred successful in a short period of time. We were fortunate to have the opportunity to invest into Kindred at the Series A.

We invested in the company in its early days based on three key beliefs:

1. Team: The strength of the founding team and their vision for the company
2. Market: Transformation coming to supply chain/logistics, enabled by AI and Robotics
3. Focus: Their ability to deliver production quality, highly valuable commercial solutions

This combination of skills, focus and market…

We are excited to announce that portfolio company Spot has been acquired by NetApp.

Firstly, congratulations to Amiram and the entire team at Spot. From the moment we met 3 years ago for a late night drink at AWS Reinvent, it was clear that Amiram was building something special. A great vision usually isn’t enough though. Their tireless drive, work ethic, and technical prowess allowed them to move fast and ultimately achieve this great outcome.

Before that late night drink, we had been spending a lot of time thinking about and researching the future of cloud computing + AI, and…

We are excited to announce that we are fast approaching 100 teams registered to tackle the Fake News Problem and compete for the $1,000,000 winning prize. Full competition details are at: https://www.leadersprize.ca. These teams are from across Canada, and include students, academia, and professionals from both large and small companies.

We selected Fake News for the inaugural competition given the huge impact this issue is having on society. Fuelled by the massive reach and speed of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, it has become significantly easier to spread false and misleading news.

We launched this competition to:

• Inspire…