Cherif Habib, co-founder and CEO of Dialogue Technologies Inc., is seen in the company’s office in Montreal on Feb. 12, 2018.Two Canadian online companies that have experienced soaring demand during the pandemic held meetings with investment bankers in the past month to explore initial public offerings.
“I don’t think there’s any secret – the public markets are open for good technology companies,” said John Baker, CEO, founder and majority shareholder of D2L, which provides online learning tools for grade school, university and corporate clients and last raised outside venture capital in 2014. “We’ve made a decision to strongly consider it. … It’s probably a strong potential outcome.”
A third, Montreal online payments processor Nuvei Corp., filed last week to go public on the Toronto Stock Exchange. They have been joined by recent U.S. IPO filings from high-profile tech companies Palantir Technologies Inc., Snowflake Inc. and Unity Software Inc.Other public Canadian tech companies, including Kinaxis Inc. and Enghouse Ltd., have hit historic highs this year, driving up the S&P/TSX information technology index 38.5 per cent in 2020, compared with a 3.