On Thursday, June 2, Affinio – one of our portfolio companies – presented at the Microsoft Accelerator’s Machine Learning Demo Day in Seattle, Washington. It was the culmination of a pretty exciting four months for the company. Back in February Affinio was selected to join the third Microsoft Seattle Accelerator, winning out against hundreds of companies applying from over 50 countries. In discussing this cohort’s special focus on cognitive technologies, Microsoft cited a Deloitte study that found over $1 Billion in venture capital has been invested in machine learning and data science in the last two years alone. During their time…

At Build Ventures we are excited to see the continued progress of Affinio, a marketplace intelligence company based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Build Ventures was an early investor in Affinio and today we are part of the company’s Series A round. Here is the press release announcing the news: Innovative Content Tech Continues Hot Streak with $4m Investment in Affinio Deep-learning based social-affinity startup will focus on global growth and continued R&D HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, November 2, 2015 – Affinio, a fast-growing marketing intelligence platform, today announced a Series A investment of $4 Million, led by venture fund Whitecap Venture…

Rob and I are happy to welcome AirVM to the Build portfolio. We recently took part in the company’s $8 Million Series A round, which was led by RHO Canada Ventures, ourselves, as well as previous investor Wesley Clover. AirVM was founded in Saint John, New Brunswick by Josh Vautour and Jamie Pitt as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, hosting virtual machines for enterprise clients. Josh and Jamie became intimately aware of the pain points IaaS vendors had in running their businesses and transitioned to a product company with the launch of  AirSembly in 2013. Jamie heads up the R&D…

We are happy to welcome InteraXon to the Build Ventures’ portfolio. We recently invested in the company’s $10 million Series B round, which was led by OMERS Ventures with participation from existing investors Felicis Ventures, Horizons Ventures and Flextronics Lab IX. As we dug into the company, we got excited about the product and its potential, the traction to date and the depth of the management team. InteraXon has developed Muse, a brain fitness tool that measures a user’s brain waves using seven finely calibrated electroencephalography (EEG) sensors – two on the forehead, two behind the ears working together with…

It’s hard for Rob and I to believe but Build Ventures just had its two year anniversary. There was a surprising amount of ‘administrivia’ involved in setting up a first fund and a lot of fundraising meetings which took the fund from $48.5M when we launched to $65M today. Most importantly, of course, was getting out across the region to meet companies and begin building our portfolio. To date we’ve made six investments: Introhive, Affinio, Smart Skin, Resson  and Celtx. For those counting, the sixth just closed and will be announced soon. One thing which clearly got neglected was our blog. There…

Build Ventures is entering Newfoundland and Labrador with a major investment, supporting Celtx — a startup whose software is being adopted by companies in film, video and theatre around the world. With CEO Mark Kennedy at the helm, the St. John’s-based company began 15 years ago with the simple idea of taking a range of film production processes—from script writing, to production notes and set designs—and moving them from paper to digital. “This is a tremendous opportunity,” says Kennedy. “We’re reinventing how an industry does its work, and it’s a global business. We make 95 percent of our money outside…