Rebecca Kacaba chief executive officer and Mat Goldstein chief strategy officerSUPPLIED
DealMaker is providing businesses with greater access to capital – and democratizing investment opportunities for everyday investors – becoming one of Canada’s fastest-growing companies in the process.
The Toronto-based financial technology company has built an e-commerce-style digital platform that enables companies to easily raise capital online and market their raise to the broad public.
“Our innovation is advancing the equity crowdfunding space by increasing access to capital for minority founders and investment opportunities for those not behind the gilded gates of Wall Street,” says Rebecca Kacaba, who co-founded the company with Mat Goldstein in 2015.
The founders liken the platform to a Shopify solution for capital markets, making it easy for brands to transition from traditional venture capital (VC) raises to a more global, digital solution.
“Our message is the same, and our trajectory is the same,” Mr. Goldstein says. “If you want to raise capital on the internet, you don’t have to custom build your own website; you can use our platform and our payment technology and raise capital globally. And that’s true whether you’re a small brand or if you’re the Green Bay Packers, who used our platform for a massive online capital raise.”
Ms. Kacaba and Mr. Goldstein, who both have a background working as lawyers in the capital markets industry, came up with the idea for DealMaker in 2015 while running a startup practice for their law firms.
“We saw a huge pain point in the market where our clients were suffering, where processes were expensive and obsolete, and it was ripe for disruption,” Ms. Kacaba says.
The co-founders began building their company soon after and launched a beta product with their first paying customers in 2018. In the four years since, the company has achieved extraordinary growth of 500 per cent to 600 per each year.
DealMaker has processed more than $2-billion in transactions to date, which its founders say is more than double any of its American counterparts or other competitors. The market-leading platform was also utilized in eight of the 10 largest digital capital raises in North America.
“We’re not happy until we’ve completely owned and dominated this market globally,” Ms. Kacaba says. “I call it ‘unapologetic ambition,’ which is rare in Canada, but we think to play in the U.S. space, you need to be prepared to move quickly and be aggressive – and that’s what’s allowed us to take such a large market share in a competitive country like the U.S.”
According to 2022 statistics for the U.S. capital markets, 2 per cent of VC funding in the past has gone to women and minority founders, while more than 30 per cent of the capital raised via digital equity crowdfunding goes to these diverse entrepreneurs.
“We are helping to democratize access to pre-IPO investments for the everyday person. Prior to 2015, that wasn’t possible. We are hoping that with our technology, we can meaningfully shift access to wealth and early investment opportunities to a broader segment of society.”
Advertising feature produced by Globe Content Studio with Deal Maker. The Globe’s editorial department was not involved.