Canoe CEO Letter
As 2019 gets underway, I want to take a moment to review Canoe’s eventful 2018 and look ahead to the new year.
2018: Development, Launch, & Growth
After years of development, building, and intense focus, we publicly unveiled Canoe in November 2018.
We positioned Canoe as a solution to streamline the investment document management and data extraction process, leveraging our proprietary technology to automate the frustrating, time-consuming, error-prone, and costly manual workflows related to alternative investments. Under the direction of Canoe’s Head of Sales, Michael Muniz, our partners, the media, and the broader marketplace responded extremely positively to our launch, and less than a month later we landed an important new client in the Investment Consultant & OCIO space, Canterbury Consulting.
Throughout the year, Canoe was successful at expanding our client roster across RIAs, Investment Consultants, Service Providers, and Multi-Family and Single-Family Offices. At year-end, clients were relying on Canoe to automate data extraction, data management, and other operational processes for the benefit of hundreds of institutional investors, advisors, and family offices. All of Canoe’s pre-go-to-market clients have renewed, with the majority partnering for multiple years. At year-end, the majority of our clients have engaged Canoe for multi-year partnerships.
Canoe’s engineering team, under the leadership of Co-Founder and CTO Wei Wang, has directed our ongoing product evolution. Progress in this area during 2018 has successfully expanded Canoe’s addressable market, fostering a network of diverse relationships across the entirety of the alternative investment ecosystem.
We entered 2019 having introduced a sharp new brand, launched a redesigned web presence, and moved into new offices. These actions will better communicate our value proposition and accommodate expansion as we drive growth to ensure more, successful, long-term client partnerships.
2019: A Year of Growth
The entire Canoe team today is laser-focused on identifying and deploying resources to accelerate growth and achieve our aggressive sales, client service, and engineering goals for 2019 and beyond.
Our team has grown, and we continue to source impactful Sales, Client Success, Product, and Engineering talent. We expect our recent investments in sales and marketing to accelerate the monetization of the technological innovations we’ve developed over the past few years.
Canoe was honored to learn that we were nominated to receive The Family Wealth Report Awards 2019. These awards showcase ‘best of breed’ providers in the global private banking, wealth management, and trusted advisor communities. Win, lose, or draw, receiving such a nomination for demonstrating innovation and excellence so early in our life cycle was high praise and validating. The team looks forward to the award ceremony next month.
2019 will bring a number of exciting announcements highlighting new relationships and continuously demonstrating how Canoe is ushering in a new era in data management. Canoe’s status as a leader in providing intelligent data solutions will also have us attending a select number of strategic events that will put us squarely in front of our target audiences. The allocator world is in desperate need of a solution that streamlines the manual processes related to alternative investment reporting, and we’re thrilled to bring that product to market for years to come.
As we say around the Canoe office – “keep paddling.”
Seth Brotman, CEO