Signiant announced this week that it has received a “majority growth investment” from Boston-based Battery Ventures, a tech-focused venture-capital and private-equity firm whose previous investments include online workplace-review platform Glassdoor.
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An Ottawa-born company that specializes in file-transfer software for the media and entertainment industries says it plans to hire more workers at its main product-development hub in Kanata after getting a major cash infusion from a U.S. investment firm.
Signiant announced this week that it has received a “majority growth investment” from Boston-based Battery Ventures, a tech-focused venture-capital and private-equity firm whose previous investments include online workplace-review platform Glassdoor.
Terms were not disclosed, but Ian Hamilton, Signiant’s Ottawa-based chief technology officer, said the deal will be good news for the capital’s tech sector.
Battery is “confident in Signiant’s business and wanted to own it so they could grow it,” Hamilton said. “It’s great for all of our Ottawa-based employees.”
Signiant was launched in Kanata 25 years ago as a spinout of Nortel with 10 employees. Originally a managed service provider that used IP developed at Nortel to offer secure, automated file transferring between businesses over the internet, the firm was backed by a pair of VCs from Toronto and Boston.
Massachusetts-based North Bridge Venture Partners became Signiant’s majority investor in 2006. Like many software firms, the company has changed its business model over the past 15 years, moving from a licensed approach that required up-front payments to a cloud-based, software-as-a-service model.
Today, virtually all of Signiant’s revenues come from monthly subscription fees. The firm’s customers include NBCU, Warner Brothers Discovery, Ubisoft and the National Hockey League, and the company says it has a user base of more than a million people at 50,000 businesses.
Now headquartered in Lexington, Mass., Signiant has more than 200 employees worldwide. Its workforce includes 65 people in the National Capital Region, where its main engineering, product management and tech support facility is located on Hines Road in Kanata.
“We’ll continue to grow as fast as we can,” Hamilton said. “(Battery) have bought us as a platform asset.”
Meanwhile, Signiant’s technology has also evolved. Its bread and butter remains software that transfers large digital media files quickly and securely between platforms such as streaming services, but its tech stack also allows customers in different locations to work together on the same files.
In a news release this week, Signiant said it plans to use the latest funding to finance new R&D and go-to-market initiatives as well as potential M&A activity.
The firm acquired a pair of companies – German media-processing software maker Lesspain and Denver-based media workflow orchestration platform Levels Beyond – in 2021. Signiant said it “remains committed to pursuing future acquisitions” to expand its geographic footprint and product offerings.
“As the production of media content becomes more specialized and complex, owing to advancements in video and sound quality, and fancy visual effects, it means media files have gotten larger and more difficult to move around and track,” Battery Ventures partner Dave Tabors said in a statement.
“In our view, Signiant has cracked the code on how to tackle this problem, building a robust SaaS business to facilitate the transfer of these files in a secure way. And we see the opportunity to grow the company’s market even more.”
After years of steady growth, Signiant had “a bit of a bumpy” 2024 as the fallout from the protracted actors’ and writers’ strike in Hollywood the previous year took its toll on the entertainment industry, Hamilton said.
However, he said he’s confident the company is “back on track” and is forecasting strong revenue growth in 2025.
“Things look good,” he said. “We have a lot of employees in Ottawa and plan to have more employees in Ottawa.”
