Ottawa’s Mydoma Studio, whose specialized project management software for interior designers now has about 5,000 users, was acquired by California-based Studio Designer last week.
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A local software company has joined forces with a U.S. firm to create a multinational organization with designs on being a juggernaut in its space.
Ottawa’s Mydoma Studio, whose specialized project management software for interior designers now has about 5,000 users, was acquired by California-based Studio Designer last week. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Mydoma CEO Sarah Daniele, an interior designer by profession, founded the company with her husband and business partner Thomas Martineau nine years ago after getting frustrated with the lack of automated solutions to help her communicate with customers.
Since then, the firm has grown to 20 employees. But Daniele said Mydoma – which was originally bankrolled with $50,000 from the founders’ friends and family before landing a $275,000 investment in 2016 from the Capital Angel Network, the Wesley Clover Foundation and a few private investors – needed an “injection of financing” to continue expanding.
She and Martineau looked at various options to beef up the company’s financial war chest, including another fundraising round. But they ultimately decided it would be best for Mydoma to find a “strategic partner” to help get it to the next level.
In a serendipitous turn of events, Studio Designer president Tyler Vieira approached Mydoma just a few months later in August 2023 to inquire about a potential deal. From there, the seeds of the deal were sown.
“We’ve been doing this a long time and we really believe working with other experts in the industry is going to help Mydoma grow bigger and better,” Daniele said.
With 15,000 customers, Studio Designer is the runaway leader in its field. Founded three decades ago, the company is popular among interior designers due to its comprehensive platform that offers services such as project management, design tools and accounting software tailored specifically to their business needs.
“It became clearly obvious that we were missing a more robust financial set of tools,” Daniele explained. “It was something we didn’t have the experience to build, and to be 100 per cent honest, it’s something I never wanted to build. (The acquisition) was perfect timing.”
Vieira said Mydoma's management tools aimed at smaller, up-and-coming organizations are “very complementary” to his firm’s offerings, allowing Studio Designer to provide an end-to-end business solution to customers of all sizes.
“We were talking to designers about who makes great software, and Mydoma kept coming up,” he told Techopia this week. “I think Sarah’s done a really amazing job building a wonderful product.
“Software is becoming more and more complicated to build,” Vieira added, explaining the acquisition “gives Mydoma customers expertise that it was just hard for them to get as part of a smaller company.”
Studio Designer plans to retain all of the Ottawa firm’s employees. Daniele, who will remain part of the senior management team, said shedding the CEO’s duties will allow her to play to her strengths as a product developer.
“It’s lonely carrying it all by yourself,” she said of life as an entrepreneur. “I thrive on working with a team, and that was (the company's) next iteration.”
The deal solidifies Studio Designer’s status as the dominant player in a niche field. Vieira estimates that the firm’s main competitors, Canadian company DesignFiles and U.S.-based Design Manager, have about 5,000 clients apiece.
But he figures about half of all interior design firms in Canada and the United States still aren’t using specialized business management software, presenting a major opportunity.
“There’s still a lot of room, I think, to convert people to more tailored software.”
