While the U.S. and Canada duke it out over tariffs between the two countries, a tech company based out of Toronto is announcing a major round of funding led by a homegrown VC. StackAdapt, a programmatic advertising startup, says that it has raised $235 million in equity funding, with Teachers’ Venture Growth (TVG) — the investment arm of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan — leading the growth round. 

Intrepid Growth Partners, a firm based between Toronto and London, is also participating, along with four other investors that are not being named. 

The funding is significant both for its size and its focus. 

In terms of the size, this is one of the bigger funding rounds for a startup out of Canada to date — although it’s not the biggest. Most recently, Fintech Clio raised $900 million; Cohere raised $500 million, and Tenstorrent raised $700 million, all last year. 

Funding for Canadian startups is largely reflecting trends that are playing out in other markets. The total number of deals in 2024 was down on the year before, with companies working in the area of artificial intelligence taking an outsized part of what was getting invested.  

StackAdapt, which describes itself as a company that “harnesses the power of AI”, is arguably a part of trend. The company launched in 2014 and had more or less grown as a quietly bootstrapped company. That was until 2022, when it took a $300 million investment from Summit Partners. PitchBook data indicates that at least some of that $300 million was in the form of a secondary investment. From what we understand it was a minority investment, which would put the company’s valuation at above $600 million.

The company is not disclosing valuation with this current round.

The size of this round speaks not only to the company’s size today, but also notably how it’s financing the next stage of its growth with local backing. 

Programmatic advertising has become, effectively, the building block of how all digital advertising works these days accounting for upwards of 90% of the market, the reason being that it gives marketers a more effective way of measuring how their ads are working, and to whom those ads are being shown; and it gives publishers a more automated way of bringing in a larger volume of ads against their content. 

In the case of StackAdapt, the company offers customers across different business verticals — for example, political campaigns, retailers, B2B, travel, healthcare and financial services — and its inventory includes native advertising (sponsored content), display, video, connected TV, audio, games and more. 

Developments like the rise of AI (along with other kinds of automation) have shifted the landscape for programmatic advertising, leading to potentially higher incidents of ad fraud. Other issues that programmatic advertising faces include more difficulty controlling brand safety and data protection, given the amount of data used to power its ad targeting. 

That’s the challenge but also opportunity for companies like StackAdapt. 

“Following the 2022–2023 lull, companies are shifting their focus toward growth and increasing their investments,” said Vitaly Pecherskiy, the CEO who co-founded the company with Yang Han, and Ildar Shar, in a statement to TechCrunch. “That said, growth at all costs is no longer the priority. Companies are looking for solutions to drive their business forward while prioritizing cost-effectiveness through automation and AI. As a result, we are seeing strong demand for our product.”

StackAdapt, he said has built its AI on “a decade of experience analyzing ad traffic patterns and understanding their evolution,” which it uses to help combat ad fraud and bot traffic.

“We are proud to support StackAdapt, a leading Canadian technology company, on its trajectory to becoming the global leader in AI-driven, end-to-end advertising,” said Rick Prostko, senior managing director of TVG, in a statement. “The company has been able to demonstrate consistent growth and profitability while building the future of advertising and marketing technology. We have been impressed by their exceptional team, visionary leadership, and relentless focus on delivering customer value.”