Minutebook raises $3.5 million from multiple Vancouver-based investors

Vancouver-based startup Minutebook — which creates automation and collaboration tools for lawyers, company builders, employees, and investors — has raised CAD $3.5 million in seed funding.

Significantly, a number of local names contributed money to the hometown deal, including Clio co-founder Rian Gauvreau, Nimbus Synergies CEO Paul Geyer, Nimbus Synergies co-founder and partner Jason Robertson, and Red Thread Ventures.

What does the company do? Minutebook is designed to eliminate the human-error-prone movement of ownership data between multiple siloed information systems. “Call it cap table software, call it legal technology, call it fintech,” says the announcement on the company’s website. “Whatever you call it, our objective is to eliminate manual data entry and free up lawyers and their clients to focus on the highest value activities.”

What will the money be used for? The company will spend the proceeds on rolling out its go-to-market strategy in order to grow its customer base, which already includes pharmaceutical companies, private equity investment firms, and organizations of all sizes from early-stage startups to Series B. Minutebook also plans to hire sales, customer success, product management, and engineering talent in the near future.

Why should you care? Even if you’re not interested in using the software for your business, the Minutebook deal is interesting for local entrepreneurs because of the company’s leader. CEO Ryan Wilson is now a four-time successful founder, having created telehealth app Medeo (sold to QHR Corporation in 2014), payments and fintech company Kubera, and brewery ordering organization Ollie Order (sold to Next Glass in 2021).

Why the deal matters for Vancouver: Vancouver is often criticized for lacking VC or angel investors that are based in the city — a factor that some foreign venture capitalists cite as a barrier to considering B.C. companies, arguing there are few individuals or organizations to co-invest with. Minutebook’s latest deal proves that there is local money willing to support local companies, which may start building momentum for the future.

Who said what? “While raising capital from investors, I always felt the process of private company investing was needlessly manual, and should be as easy as buying a pair of sneakers on Shopify,” Wilson wrote of the announcement on LinkedIn. “When investing in funds and private companies, I always hated going to the bank to send wires and filling out the same information on accredited investor paperwork. When it was time to sell my companies, during the due diligence process I learned that ‘time kills deals.’ I was frustrated with the number of places corporate records tend to live in the modern enterprise. Finally, when engaging with my lawyer, the lack of a single source of truth and self-serve access to our documents seemed strange in this era of online banking and self-serve everything. Today, the Minutebook Technologies team launches the answer to this opportunity and the solution to these problems.”