Canadian AI search tool Coveo raises $172m to hit unicorn status
Canadian AI-powered predictive search tool Coveo has raised CAD $227 million (US $172 million), sending it to unicorn status at a valuation “well above” US $1 billion according to its CEO, TechCrunch reports.
“I don’t like unicorn because a unicorn is a mythical creature,” Coveo’s CEO Louis Tetu tells Financial Post. “Coveo is real. It has real revenue. It has real customers. It creates real value, and it’s in a real market.”
The Quebec-founded start-up has now raised a total of US $402 million since 2018
Led by Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS), the round saw participation from US private equity firm Evergreen Coast Capital, Montreal-based Fonds de solidarité FTQ and cloud-based investor IQ Ventures.
The Quebec-founded start-up has now raised a total of US $402 million since 2018, taking a massive jump from its $370 million post-money valuation last year according to PichBook data.
Growing by 60 employees per quarter, the start-up will use the new capital for “aggressive growth” and probably make some acquisitions too, Tetu tells Crunchbase.
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The interest in the company comes against the backdrop of fellow enterprise search solution Algolia raising $110 million last month, and the estimated market share of $100 billion that these personalised search engine tools hold annually.
Current customers include Salesforce, Visa, American conglomerate Honeywell, a Fortune 50 healthcare company whose name the CEO did not disclose and “an Amazon competitor [which] does $21 billion in sales annually” that the CEO also did not name.
“The continued and growing regulatory pressure around privacy [e.g. GDPR] is good, it’s the will of the people and legislation will go that way,” says Tetu.
“The world is going cookie-less. But we can’t ignore the arbitrage between privacy and utility. If I understand what you will do with my data and use it to provide more relevance, that can be excellent, too.”
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