Our Journey with Igloo Software

In our increasingly digital world, employee collaboration is a topic that is front and center in the minds of many team leaders. Our workforce is changing to include a more global and distributed workforce, flex-hours and work arrangements and an ever-increasing pace of rapid market changes. The need for effective team collaboration today is more vital than ever. It was this problem set that led Founder and CEO Dan Latendre to start Igloo Software.

Dan had created the software for Igloo while working at the Waterloo based Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), Sponsored by Jim Balsillie, an advisor to our fund at the time. Jim believed, as did we, that Dan had the software and the entrepreneurial drive to create a leading enterprise 2.0 software company. As we mention in our whitepaper Beyond Enterprise Software, enterprise 2.0 software, or enterprise social software, is the evolution and transformation of the networked enterprise. The essence of enterprise 2.0 is the democratization and transparency of information to facilitate interactions with customers, integration with partners and sharing of knowledge internally and externally. Dan agreed with our assessment, and in February 2008 we moved forward in spinning Igloo out of CIGI. We worked together to create Igloo Software with us being founding shareholders and the lead of their Series A round.

“We have enjoyed working with the whole team at Information Venture Partners. Dave and Rob have been trusted colleagues from the start,” said Dan “along with other board members, they have helped guide us in the right direction for our company.” We couldn’t agree more with this sentiment. It has been a pleasure to work with the rest of the board and the team at Igloo, watching them grow the business and meet their ever more ambitious milestones. At the time of our exit, Igloo has become the leading enterprise digital workplace solutions platform with over 10,000 digital workplaces across 80+ countries and a consistent 50{0573984a2b8f609c30111d9663e55dcffe5bf46757f544e848868cbca776ed36}+ annual growth rate.

Although our journey as investors with Igloo has come to a close, we will still be keeping the team on our radar as we watch them grow with seasoned growth equity investors Frontier Capital. Frontier’s experience in driving growth and creating value for SaaS companies, specifically in the human capital management sector made them a natural fit for Igloo. “As the next generation of employees redefines both the physical and digital workplace, we see a rapidly expanding market for innovative solutions that enable an organization to better engage its workforce by fostering collaboration and connecting employees with the right information at the right time,” said Andrew Lindner, co-founder and managing partner at Frontier Capital, who will join Igloo’s board.

The next step for Igloo is to become the standard bearer for enterprise software start-ups in Kitchener-Waterloo, truly demonstrating Canada’s ability to produce global leaders. We wish the team at Igloo the best of luck on future endeavors and are excited to see what the future holds.