Clayton Feick, Chief Executive Officer, Ontopical.
Ontopical,
located in the heart of Calgary’s tech hub, helps companies
find and win more government business by detecting early signs of
new business opportunities. They do that by collecting vast amounts
of raw government-produced data found in meeting agendas, minutes,
budgets, plans and videos generated from more than 16,000 municipal
councils and committees, transportation authorities and school
boards.
“We’ve built a sophisticated AI model called Oliver
that is trained to read all of this content,” says Clayton
Feick, Chief Executive Officer of Ontopical, who joined the company
last year. “Oliver sifts through all this data and finds early
opportunities for businesses wanting to sell into local government,
along with actionable answers about those opportunities in order to
win the bid. Oliver is really the copilot in navigating through the
almost one million pages a week that we collect across North
America.”
The challenge for those looking for work from government
entities is that everyone has access to requests for proposals when
they are issued. The value of subscription-based Ontopical is that
it aids companies in finding an early opportunity even before the
RFP stage. Users can also use Ontopical to monitor what their
competitors are doing to see if there are certain keywords or
topics that are being discussed related to a government grant or
special program that may affect their industries.
Ontopical was founded by Derrick Koenig, who is also the Chief
Product Officer. A former engineer, Derrick found it challenging to
find new business in the public sector ahead of the competition and
so that is now the problem the company is trying to solve: how to
find new opportunities for businesses within governments —
mainly local governments and get the context to engage early and
craft a winning bid. Some of Ontopical’s clients include large
enterprise construction, engineering firms and telcos in Canada and
in the U.S., healthcare, energy and software technology firms who
sell into cities are also large consumers of the service.
In September 2023, the company secured $3.3 million in a seed extension
financing round. Clayton says raising venture capital was
challenging last year, primarily due to the market realities of
rising interest rates. “VCs were cautious,” he says.
“We were fortunate to stand out and get a strong seed deal
done with terrific Canadian VCs in B.C., Alberta and Ontario
— which was our focus for this round. Namely, Rhino Ventures,
Graphite Ventures and also Yaletown Ventures through their
Alberta-focused Accelerate Fund III.”
Goals for 2024
Ontopical is growing its team in Calgary and will continue to
serve clients in the engineering, construction, technology,
telecom, energy, utilities, consulting and healthcare
verticals.
“There’s an industry-wide race to see how golden
nuggets of information can be extracted from all this government
data using machine learning and LLMs. We believe that we are
leading the pack here in North America and Ontopical will continue
announcing some exciting partnerships in 2024,” says Clayton.
Ontopical recently announced a partnership with leading
Texas-based RFP platform BidPrime, to distribute Ontopical’s
data to the American SMB market.
Working with Osler
When it came to choosing to work with a law firm, Clayton says
his past experience working with Osler informed the choice to
engage with the firm and specifically Michael Grantmyre, partner
with the Emerging and High Growth Companies Group, along with
associates Jacob Young and Patrick Musgrave.
“I always tell Michael Grantmyre we wouldn’t have got
our financing done without Osler and his guidance,” he says.
“Previously, I helped grow two Canadian startups and both were
fortunate to have successful exits. In 2018, I ran sales for Quandl
in Toronto, which was sold to Nasdaq and Osler was on that deal. In
2021, I was chief revenue officer for Montréal-based Flinks
and Osler helped us in a $100 million in a deal with National Bank of
Canada. It was natural for me to look to Osler when joining
Ontopical and Michael really has established the top high-growth
venture practice here in Alberta. He and his team have been
tremendous advisors and real partners. They’ve been flexible,
approachable and dependable. Osler understands the unique
challenges of leading a fast-growing business, dealing with many
constraints.”
Advice for other founders in 2024
After the difficult year that was 2023, founders should be
focused on building up their companies to make themselves more
attractive.
“Keep building, especially during this economic slowdown.
Alberta is very business friendly and has a fast-growing tech
ecosystem, which is supportive. I would encourage any founder to
take advantage of this. There is such an enormous opportunity to
apply data, code and AI models to business problems. Take risks but
not with your legal counsel,” says Clayton.
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