Institutional Investors and Initial Public Stock Offering

Shopify Inc.: He cited software-maker Kinaxis, which gained 90 per cent since going public last year, and e-commerce platform Shopify Inc., which attracted big institutional investors and reached a billion-dollar valuation after an initial public stock offering last month, according to The Toronto Star. Canadian tech startups have matured since the launch of the Apple and Android mobile operating systems and many are profitable, Moschopoulos added. What we have in the Canadian marketplace are investors in the private companies who are willing to invest in every stage of growth and that is a relatively new phenomenon, said Jim Orlando, managing director of the venture group of OMERS, the Ontario municipal employees’ pension fund.BMO technology analyst Thanos Moschopoulos said institutional investors have noted the strong performance of tech stock indexes on both sides of the border and have been impressed by Canadian successes. As well, a long-term decline in commodities has shifted the focus to technology, which accounted for just 1.6 per cent of the value of the TSX last June. This year, the TSX IT sector is nearing a 52-week high versus a 22 per cent decline for the materials index, with data from Thomson Reuters showing Canadian venture capital investment at it highest level since 2002. That was down sharply from 41 per cent in 1999-2000, when the index was dominated by companies such as Ottawa business intelligence software giant Cognos Inc., acquired by IBM in 2008. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.