Canopy Labs

01 / WHAT IT BUILT

What the company did

Canopy Labs was a Toronto-based predictive customer analytics startup founded in 2012 by Wojciech Gryc and Jorge Escobedo, incubated at Y Combinator. It offered a self-serve SaaS platform that imported businesses' existing customer data — emails, e-commerce, social media, voicemail and call-center recordings — and applied statistical models to rate customers on risk, value, sentiment and engagement, helping mid-sized businesses prioritize sales leads and customize marketing. It raised $1.5 million in December 2012 led by BDC Venture Capital IT Fund with Valar Ventures (Peter Thiel-backed) participating, and was later acquired by Drop, a Toronto mobile rewards app, to power Drop's payments-marketing machine-learning efforts.

03 / EVENT HISTORY

Events in the structured record

1. 2012
   Founded and incubated

   Founded in Toronto by Wojciech Gryc and Jorge Escobedo and incubated at Y Combinator; launched a self-serve customer-modeling product.

2. 2012
   $1.5M raise

   Raised $1.5 million led by BDC Venture Capital IT Fund, with Valar Ventures and angels participating; also launched a free product tier.

3. 2013
   Growth milestone

   Platform was analyzing over 100 million customer activities and transactions; launched a revamped website while serving retail, sports and daily-deals clients.

4. 2018
   Acquired by Drop

   Acquired by Drop, the Toronto mobile rewards app, with Drop CEO Derrick Fung announcing the deal as part of building 'payments marketing' machine-learning capabilities on Drop's transactional data. (The acquisition was described as 'recent' in Drop's August 2019 Series B coverage.)