The Best Kept Secret in US Venture Capital

07

Apr 2020

Information Venture Partners (“Information VP”) is a leading FinTech venture fund focused on companies building disruptive technologies relevant to financial services. Collectively, our team has over 60+ years of related experience having been on both sides of the table – as founders and executives of start-ups with successful exits and as seasoned investors who have navigated the last three recent down cycles with a steady hand. Combined with our prior experience running RBC Venture Partners, we have unique insights into how the financial services industry acquire and adopt technologies.

This past year, we celebrated our 5th Anniversary and added our first international office in New York City.  We’d like to take this moment to re-tell our story.

What Sets Us Apart

Partnering with Passionate Founders for the Long-Term: We invest for the long term and are known for being partners through ups and downs of a company’s life cycle. Our investments in Adaptive Insights in 2007 and Verafin in 2009 during challenging financial times have seen material exits and shared wins with our CEOs.  More recently, we continue to work hard to support our companies and CEOs now navigating through the financial impact of the COVID-19 virus and shared that guidance in our letter to our CEOs.

 Our Network and Access to the Hidden Gems: Our extensive network in North America allows us to spot “hidden gems” in developing sectors where others may overlook.  A key factor to success is betting on seasoned executives with extensive domain expertise and a passion to help incumbents compete in this new digital age. The companies that excite us have passionate founders who are collaborative, innovative, and have deep domain expertise in the areas they are trying to penetrate.

Information VP’s historical and current investments.

Our Portfolio and Investments:

Our thesis focuses on technologies that enable incumbents to compete and win in this digital paradigm and is aligned with data indicating that the financial services industry  will continue to be significant buyers of technology.

  • B2B FinTech & InsurTech – Companies that exclusively sell into financial services and/or the insurance verticals. Businesses such as Sensibill, LendingFront, and Knowtions Research help incumbents modernize and leapfrog the competition while respecting the heritage of back-office systems and silo’ed product stacks.
  • SaaS for Financial Services – During this time of dynamic change that requires massive re-wiring of human behavior, we also believe in technologies that facilitate the actionable exchange of information in a human way – our most recent investment in ThoughtExchange allows for exactly that. Leading businesses such as Coconut Software, Flybits, and Verafin are driving deep change and innovation in digital engagement and collaboration.
  • Cybersecurity – As the one of the biggest buyers of cyber software, financial services seeks to protect consumers, partners, and employees alike from advanced cybercrimes. We are proud to be early backers of some of the most reputable companies fighting to combat this at the front line including eSentire and BigID.
  • Financial Software –We see major opportunities for companies to become a critical component of the Office of the CFO, following the megatrend around the Future of the Workplace. To that end, we have invested in companies such as Procurify, YayPay, Q4, and Adaptive Insights.

Community and Diversity: Diversity is built into the backbone of everything we do – from our portfolio construction, to our team, and network of business leaders and ecosystem partners. We are also proud to be active in the CVCA Diversity Task Force and many more similar organizations that support diverse voices in venture and company building. In addition, giving back to the community is engrained in our culture.  We are heavily involved with The Upside Foundation, which helps to enable founders of early-stage Canadian companies build social responsibility into their business by pledging equity to the charity of their choice, while also giving them the opportunity to join a group of like minded entrepreneurs .

We are excited for what’s to come in the next few years and look forward to being a key part of the next wave of high growth companies in North America.