Ottawa’s Klipfolio Closes $6.2 Million Series A Fund With OMERS Ventures

Klipfolio, an Ottawa-based provider of cloud-based business intelligence dashboard technology today announced a $6.2 million series A funding round, led by OMERS Ventures with an assist from Klipfolio’s seed round investors, including BDC Venture Capital IT Fund, Mistral Venture Partners, Fundfire from Ottawa, BOLDstart Ventures and Acadia Woods, both from New York, and CommonAngels Ventures from Boston.

Klipfolio has come a long way since CEO Allan Wille described the company to the Ottawa Business Journal as “me and a couple of buddies”.

“The new funding will accelerate our growth rate and enable us to invest in product enhancements that will make it fast, easy and affordable for organizations to continuously monitor the health and performance of their businesses,” said Klipfolio CEO Allan Wille.

Although Klipfolio’s cloud-based service has been on offer since early 2012, the company has roots going back to 2001, when it was called Serence.

“With an affordable cloud-based dashboarding tool appropriate to hundreds of different uses, Klipfolio is one of those rare business solutions with a very broad potential,” said Maia Heymann of CommonAngels Ventures, one of the companies who participated in both funding rounds.

In 2012, with the introduction of the cloud-based version of its platform, Klipfolio saw its customer base grow with the addition of 350 new clients, at which time the company had nine employees. In 2013, their client base reached 1,100.

After raising a $1.7 seed round in January, Klipfolio spent the rest of 2014 pushing through significant milestones, including more than doubling its client base to over 2,500 companies who use its business intelligence dashboard technology to monitor KPIs and create data visualizations.

Their client base now includes companies from a wide variety of verticals, including marketing, healthcare, financial services, consumer goods and non-profits.

Klipfolio also doubled the size of its workforce in 2014, to 32 full-time employees, and is about to take over a second floor in its present office space on Gloucester Street in Ottawa.

For both previous investors and OMERS, what seems to have impressed mainly is Klipfolio’s almost perfect client retention rate.

“They are domain experts with significant business intelligence expertise and differentiation in a huge market; exactly the type of team we look to partner with through our investments,” said Damien Steel, a director at OMERS Ventures who will be joining the Klipfolio board.