Team FYLD recently attended Koru’s Demo Day 2022, as one of the venture foundry’s nine established companies. In this blog, we’ve outlined what Koru and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP) are and how they kick start digital ventures, as well as learning what key leaders across the businesses think about FYLD as a key Koru success story…
What is OTPP and Koru?
OTPP is one of the largest pension plans in the world. It strategically invests across key markets and sectors to deliver steady returns. Koru is a digital venture foundry created by OTPP that builds new innovative business models, experiences, and cutting-edge technologies to drive disruptive growth for OTPP’s portfolio companies.
This has resulted in nine companies being established so far, spanning industries as diverse as fintech to field workforce management. These companies are working with OTPP and its portfolio of investment companies to rapidly validate products for enterprise that have the capacity to scale at pace and transform industries.
With another two companies incubating in stealth, Koru demonstrates OTPP’s investment partnership model of testing, creating and building scalable new digital businesses, while working alongside portfolio investment companies to create further value.
The Koru Demo Day is an annual event and is a milestone in the calendars of Koru’s venture companies. The Demo Day provides companies with the opportunity to demonstrate and share key successes and learnings from the past year along with their projected growth in the next 12 months. The showcase included business updates, live product demos and Q&A sessions with the founding CEOs.
Leadership insights
Shelley Copsey, CEO at FYLD, commented:
“FYLD is undoubtedly a success story of the Koru venture foundry. We recently celebrated a major growth milestone, embedding the FYLD platform in over 100 companies across the world following one year of commercial trading.
“Koru and OTPP’s partnership have been invaluable in us reaching this stage of our growth and will continue to be important as we prepare to embark on our Series B round of fundraising. We plan to scale further by extending our global reach in new international markets and sectors.
“2022 has been a fantastic year for FYLD and Koru’s Demo Day provided a perfect platform for us to share our successes and learnings with Koru, the broader OTPP investment team and the other eight venture companies.”
Dale Burgess, Senior Managing Director, Infrastructure and Natural Resources (INR) at OTPP, said:
“I was impressed with the progress each of the Koru ventures has made over the past 12 months. In my role leading the OTPP INR investment team, I have come to know FYLD well – its product has application to a lot of our INR investment companies.
“The response we are seeing across those companies to the FYLD value proposition of AI-driven productivity, safety and sustainability for field workforces is strong, particularly off the back of market proof points such as 12% uplifts in productivity and 20% reductions in safety incidents and injuries. I expect we will see multiple large scale deployments over the next six to 12 months.”
Bryan Marcovici, Managing Director and Managing Partner at Koru, commented:
“The Koru Venture Foundry is unique. We leverage the deep industry expertise of the OTPP portfolio companies and through partnering those experts with people who have expertise in building new ventures we have established nine game changing companies across the past three years.
“FYLD is one of our earliest ventures and is clearly demonstrating that our model works – it is now deployed to four OTPP investment companies in addition to the direct market traction it has achieved. I’m excited to see the progress each of our ventures makes across the next 12 months.”
You can find out more about the other venture companies at the links below: