ST. JOHN'S, N.L. — Newfoundland financial technology company ClearRisk is running a hot streak when it comes to growth.
“We’ve been growing in the double-digits for several years,” said Craig Rowe, CEO and founder of the St. John’s company. “Last year, even though the pandemic was on, we still grew 30 per cent. We grew 40 per cent the year before that.”
In a world where businesses are starting to think about post-pandemic operations, Rowe believes there’s an opportunity to accelerate that growth further. That’s because COVID-19 shined a spotlight on the need for businesses to address risk management.
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This is ClearRisk’s bread and butter. It offers risk-management software and data solutions to address claims, incidents and business continuity planning, among other matters.
“The pandemic, we don’t know, certainly, what’s going to happen,” Rowe said. “But because we’re risk-management software and we help large organizations be more resilient by doing a better job managing risk, we think there’s a good chance a lot of companies — after the pandemic and as we get to the tail end — will seek to find solutions that will help them be more resilient for whatever happens next. There could always be something else. The better planned a company is, the better they survive things like the pandemic.”
Building capital
Believing that demand for ClearRisk’s services will increase, the company is taking steps to accelerate that anticipated growth.
Earlier this week, ClearRisk announced it secured $1.65 million in repayable growth capital from BDC Capital. That money will be pooled with $800,000 obtained from three new sales contracts, $358,501 from the provincial government announced late last year and additional funds obtained from RBC and ClearRisk shareholders. Altogether, this gives the company $3.3 million in combined growth capital and new sales to work with.
“You can grow in two ways ... One, organically, which is you take your sales and you pump that back into growth, or if you want to speed that up, you take in additional capital and you pump that into growth as well,” Rowe explained.
Recurring revenue
The company presently serves more than 150 organizations in North America. All contracts ClearRisk engage in are for at least three years, giving the company recurring revenue to pump into its expansion efforts. In anticipation of increased demand, ClearRisk has dedicated a lot of time to enhancing its existing products.
The company has more than 30 employees and almost doubled the size of its staff over the course of 2020. Rowe expects his staff complement could double again this year. In the very near future, Rowe said ClearRisk will announce three new senior hires that directly address diversity in the tech sector — all three new hires are women.
“We’ve deliberately been working on trying to be as gender-balanced as possible,” he said. “The tech sector is generally only 21 or 22 per cent female, and we’re close to 40 per cent. We’re proud of that, and we’re working to get to full parity, because if only 20 per cent (in the sector) is women, then we’re really missing out on a lot of talent and a lot of opportunity.”
Andrew Robinson is a business reporter in St. John's.
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Twitter: @CBNAndrew
