EXECUTIVE BRIEFS
RETAIL
VENTURE CAPITAL
Farm Boy rescues Rideau Bakery brand
A Gatineau firm that develops an end-to-end solution for the order and delivery of stone, sand, gravel and other raw materials in the concrete industry has landed a major round of seed capital. Brokrete, which won a Bootstrap Award as disruptor of the year in March, recently closed a $500,000 pre-seed round with angel investors Ronald Richardson of Ottawa and Avlok Kohli of San Francisco. While contemporary apps such as Uber solve the “one-phonecall problem” of ordering a taxi, founder Jordan Latourelle says Brokrete is saving contractors upwards of five or six calls to get concrete delivered to a job site. Co-ordinating between suppliers, on-site workers and truck drivers can quickly become a time suck for contractors, some of which are placing multiple orders a day. The Brokrete app is free for contractors and for suppliers up to a point. Once a concrete supplier is using a fleet of more than 20 trucks, the premium version of the app kicks in, giving the firm its cut. The company has seen some early uptake from major players in the construction industry: Concrete giant Lafarge is signed up to supply materials in Ottawa-Gatineau. Richardson, who invests with Ottawa’s Capital Angel Network, says there are a lot of things to like about Brokrete. He was impressed with the returns the company was seeing on its “sweat equity” – with only a few thousand dollars invested in the bootstrapped firm, it was seeing exponential returns before scaling even began.
After announced it was closing its doors for good in early July, an iconic Ottawa business has found a “white knight” to revive its venerable brand. Rideau Bakery’s owners said July 10 they reached a deal to sell the historic family enterprise’s assets – including its name and recipes – to grocery chain Farm Boy. Terms of the transaction were not released. Farm Boy co-CEO Jeff York said the deal is a “great fit” for his chain, which was launched in Cornwall in the 1980s and grew into a widely recognized local brand in its own right before being acquired by Nova Scotia-based grocery conglomerate Empire Co. last year. “I think it’s a great day for Farm Boy to be able to make a deal with the owners of Rideau Bakery and actually keep a great local brand alive,” he said, noting the bakery had already been selling its goods to the grocery chain for years. Founded nearly 90 years ago by brothers David and Abie Kardish, the Rideau Bakery abruptly shut down its two locations over the Canada Day weekend, with current co-owner Louis Kardish telling various media outlets the closure was due to a combination of business and health concerns. The bakery’s two locations – the original on Rideau Street and another on Bank Street in the city’s south end – employed a total of about 40 full- and part-time staff. York said Farm Boy was interviewing some of those employees to work at the Bank Street facility, which will continue to operate as a bakery but will no longer have a storefront. The Rideau Street location will remain closed. The veteran grocery executive said his priority right now is to “get up and running as quickly as possible” at the Bank Street location. He said bread products will be rolled out first, followed by pastries and other items. “There’s a lot of demand from the community for the bread products,” he said. “Over time, we’ll look at introducing more items into the assortment.”
AUGUST 2019
Gatineau firm lands $500K in seed funding
OBJ.CA
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Steve Cody
Bruce Linton
TECH
Ruckify eyes U.S. listing in 2020 Two of Ottawa’s serial entrepreneurs are setting their sights on a public listing for their latest venture, citing a torrent of investor interest as grounds for their ambitious goals. Steve Cody, the founder of the Better Software Co., and former Canopy Growth CEO Bruce Linton are also the co-owners of Ruckify, an Ottawa-based rental marketplace that connects owners and renters in the same way Kijiji connects buyers and sellers. Ruckify launched to much fanfare at an event in Ottawa last October. Linton received a rockstar ovation from the crowd as he’d just come from a whirlwind day of media tours – Ruckify launched the same day as recreational cannabis became legal in Canada – and he and Cody were joined onstage by Brett Wilson, former star of CBC’s Dragons’ Den and an investor in Ruckify. Today, the rental marketplace is live in Ottawa, Calgary and Nashville, with launches underway in Edmonton, Winnipeg and Austin. Ruckify is looking to operate in 50 cities across North America before the end of the year.
Cody says the firm has raised its funding to-date from some high-networth individuals. He isn’t specific on how much the company has taken in, saying it’s not a lot “relatively speaking,” but Linton said in a recent interview with Proactive Investors that Ruckify has raised up to $18 million. Cody says the company doesn’t want to go the typical venture capital path of raising a seed round, then a series-A, and so on. He says there’s been enough interest from investors on both sides of the border that he and Linton are confident they can secure a public listing on a U.S. stock exchange in the spring of 2020. Ruckify, which earns its cut off the top of every transaction on the platform, currently employs some 50 people in Ottawa and a few more on the ground in each expansion city. Cody and Linton bought back Better Software last year and the two firms now share space and some employees – including chief technical officer Graham Brown, who spent two decades building products at Ottawa tech company Corel.