TechTO

Super.com got profitable first. Then it raised $65 million at a $1.2 billion valuation. TPG led the Series D, announced July 7. The Toronto company crossed $200 million in net revenue last year and grew it more than 50%. It turned profitable in 2025, before the round, not because of it. Read the order again. Profit, then price. Most rounds run the other way. Founded in 2016. Ten years of compounding, and it lands like an overnight headline. Here is the part the headline skips. They built for a market the big banks won't touch. 83 million US households with low FICO scores. Almost half the country sits in or near that group. Back in 2022, they flew almost 200 people to Vegas for a day. Handed each team a $100 check, sent them to cash it at payday stores, then to stretch it into a week of groceries for a family. That is how far they went to understand the customer before building for them. Profitability is not the opposite of ambition. It is the thing that lets you say no. If you hit profitable next quarter, would you still raise? And what terms would you stop accepting? Watch the full 2023 talk on the 83 million households they built for: https://lnkd.in/gJKark-P Read more about the raise: https://lnkd.in/gAHVAWUx Hussein Fazal #TechTO #StartupFunding #ProfitableGrowth #TorontoTech

Four founders. Four problems nobody else wanted to touch. That was Together Toronto this Monday night at U of T Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus. The pattern in the room: the best ideas don't get thought up. They get noticed, in the problems everyone else walks past. ➡️ Nomaan Ahmed, Co-Founder & CEO of Orbits, on finding problems worth solving: don't think ideas up, notice them. Iterate instead of invent. Kill your riskiest assumption before you build. ➡️ Marijana Zubrinic, Co-Founder & COO of HALO Telemonitoring, a nurse practitioner at UHN saw a problem nobody wanted to own. HALO now monitors patients across 31 hospitals and care homes, and cut pre-lung-transplant waitlist mortality from 21% to 5%. Her line stuck with the room: "You don't need to be the smartest person in the room. You need the right people around the problem." ➡️ Afshin Mousavian, Co-Founder & CEO of Actual, on trust: "Don't build features that customers trust. Build a company that customers trust." Then Alex Norman closed the night in a fireside with Yoseph West, Co-Founder & CEO of Relay, the digital bank built in Toronto that now serves 150,000 US small businesses on $1.5B in deposits. His origin was the same lesson in action: he found his first customers by walking door-to-door through Kensington Market, asking owners what they needed. "All they wanted was this big, red, easy button for their finances." Notice the problem. Build the team. Earn the trust every day. Which takeaway stuck with you? #TechTO #TogetherToronto #TorontoTech #CanadianStartups #Founders

Building a company can be the loneliest thing you do. Tonight is the opposite of that. Together Toronto is back this evening at U of T Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus. Four founders are telling the honest version of building here: Yoseph West (Relay), Nomaan Ahmed (Orbits), Afshin Mousavian (Actual) and Marijana Zubrinic (HALO Telemonitoring). It's the format that keeps working: no keynote marathon, just founders, operators and investors in one room long enough for the real conversations to happen. Last time, people left with co-founders and customers. 🎟️ Grab your spot here: https://lnkd.in/e7UwY5k4 #TechTO #TogetherToronto #TorontoTech #CanadianStartups

Before Relay held $1.5B in deposits, Yoseph West was knocking on doors in Kensington Market. He'd run Facebook ads for a banking product and gotten exactly three leads. None of them would take his call. So he went to the customers himself - door to door through Koreatown and Kensington Market - asking owners what actually broke in their financial back office. The answer, over and over: a big red easy button for their money, so they could get back to running the business. He'd spent a decade near that problem (Wave, then Hubdoc) and kept landing on one fact: every small business owner lives in their bank account. So he and Paul Klicnik asked what nobody was building around - what if we were the bank account? That was Relay. Six years on: 150,000 small businesses, $1.5B in deposits, $85M a year in revenue. It wasn't linear. In 2021 their partner bank fell through and they moved $225M in customer deposits to a new one - a migration people warned would "rain hellfire" on the team. Run rate went $1.7M → $5M → $28M in two years. The growth curve wasn't the strategy. Standing in front of customers before he had anything to sell them was. Come meet Yoseph and dive deeper into his journey at the next Together, on Monday, July 6. Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/e7UwY5k4 #TechTO #CanadianTech #Fintech #Founders #TorontoTech #BuildInPublic.

1.7 billion people used AI last year. About 3% paid for anything (Menlo Ventures, 2025). That gap is where the next decade of consumer companies gets built. The shift driving it: AI is moving from "answer this" to "do this." A bot that answers your question is useful. An assistant that knows your calendar and inbox, and acts on them, is a different product. The winners won't be the flashiest demos. They'll be the agents people trust enough to act on their inbox, their money, their family's logistics. Canada is set up oddly for it. Deep AI talent in Toronto, Montreal, Waterloo. But the capital chases enterprise, and consumer stays underfunded. Nomaan Ahmed and Erik Tillberg, co-founders of Orbits are building anyway. Out of #Toronto, they are making Bit, an assistant for the household admin parents drown in after the 9-to-5. The family group chat is where coordination goes to die. "Grab milk." "Lucy has a dentist appt Thursday at 3." All said, all scrolled past. Bit turns each one into the right action. Milk on the list. Appointment on the calendar. The restaurant call made for you. Nomaan's read on the category is blunt: "Consumer is brutal. Someone hands you $15, then you figure out why they never came back." No Stanford lineage. No YC badge. Building it anyway. He's on the Together Toronto stage July 6, walking through how. If you're building consumer, backing it, or want the honest version of what it takes, this is the room. 🎟️ RSVP: https://lnkd.in/e7UwY5k4 #CanadianTech #TechTO #ConsumerAI #BuildinPublic

Who's hiring in Canadian tech right now? 🇨🇦 Five roles on the TechTO job board worth a look this week: → CoLab: Strategic Development Specialist to open its biggest Aerospace & Defense accounts alongside an AE. St. John's or Toronto, $90–110k + commission. → Relay: Influencer Marketing Specialist to run the affiliate program and grow into a full creator-program owner. Remote, $90–110k. → Clutch: VP & General Counsel to build the legal function from zero, reporting straight to the CEO. Toronto-based, full-time. → Spellbook: Senior People Operations Partner to scale a distributed team without losing what makes it special. Remote, C$109–137k. → commonsku: Software Engineer II to build the APIs and integrations behind its new Enterprise offering. Remote-first, C$100–115k. That's five featured. Across these teams alone, 60+ roles are open. Hiring, or looking for your next move? The full board, powered by Gurulink is at jobs.techto.org. #TechJobs #CanadianTech #Hiring #StartupJobs #TechTO

Your investor is not your boss. Eva Lau of Two Small Fish Ventures put it sharper than anyone we've heard: stop treating the person who funded you like a manager. Not your boss. Not your spouse, you brief on everything. But your in-law. The in-law has opinions. "You should do this. You should do that." You listen, you nod, and you do it your own way, same as you would with your mother/mother-in-law. The one thing they actually ask? Make them proud. We've watched the best founder-investor relationships run on exactly this. The money buys a seat, not the steering wheel. ⏩ Watch the full take here: https://lnkd.in/gpYpq8HQ Founders, does this match how your best investor actually shows up? #TechTO #CanadianTech #VentureCapital #Founders

Trying something a bit different for our next TechTO Together Toronto on July 6. Usually our community booths go to organizations that support startups. This time, I want to open up spots to early-stage founders who are in the weeds doing customer discovery and trying to find product-market fit. Here's the idea (inspired from The Mom Test Book by Rob Fitzpatrick). You don't pitch. You spend the hour talking to the ~350+ technologists in the room, finding the ones who have your problem and listening to what they do today. Not "would you use this?" but real feedback. The one that tells you what to build next. Most early founders I meet are heads-down building. Building is the easy part. Finding out fast whether you're building the right thing is the hard part. And this one hour will help you get that signal in real time. 🚨You're a fit if: you're full-time on your startup, have a working product or prototype and your customer is someone who'd be in a room full of tech people. Link below! What's the one thing about your product you're afraid to find out? #TechTO #TorontoStartups #CustomerDiscovery #CanadianTech #TorontoTech #EarlyStageStartups