Kitchener-based Shinydocs eyes U.S. expansion
Posted Mar 23, 2023 07:00:00 PM.
A Kitchener-based software company is preparing for expansion after raising more than $16-million in new financing.
Shinydocs bills itself as an aid for companies looking to better use the data they create to drive business growth and results. It was first launched in 2013 and was also recently named one of FoundersBeta's Top 100 Tech Companies to Watch for in 2023.
The premise of the product is, essentially, big businesses produce so much new, valuable information on a daily basis they can't possibly be storing it all properly.
“What ends up happening is we just email it to each other, we save it on the shared drive somewhere, and it's out there wherever it is,” said Shinydocs CEO Jason Cassidy. “And what we end up doing is recreating data, it becomes lost, perhaps there's security issues.”
So what Shinydocs is offering is software and services meant to help those companies better store, secure, and access that information as needed using a search engine-style approach to 'crawl' through corporate documents. It says the software is also already being used by a number of leading organizations within the oil and gas/utilities, government, and financial services sectors.
Meantime, when it comes to the $16.25-million dollars the company recently raised, Cassidy said some of that will be spent growing the sales and support teams.
“We are going to hire more people, for sure, to sell, support, manage with our customers [and] help them understand their data,” he said, adding they'll be looking to onboard about 20 more staff by the end of this year, bringing their total staffing numbers to around 100.
“But we do need to stop keeping it a secret,” Cassidy continued. “We need to get to more trade shows [and] we need to invest in having an American presence.”
He said he expects about 60 per cent of the funding will be spent building out the market and getting to better know the company's customers while the remaining 30 to 40 per cent will go toward making the product itself more smooth and easy-to-use.
