Montreal’s Axya, an artificial intelligence company that helps manufacturers automate procurement, has raised $17 million CAD in Series A funding led by Toronto’s McRock Capital, the company announced Thursday.
The round combines $12 million in equity with $5 million in venture debt from CIBC Innovation Banking, according to a company statement distributed on Newswire. Yamaha Motor Ventures joined as a new investor, alongside existing backers the Business Development Bank of Canada’s Industrial Innovation Venture Fund and Montreal’s Real Ventures.
Axya’s platform integrates with enterprise resource planning systems such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics and Infor to let manufacturers manage sourcing, quotes and supplier communication in one place instead of over email and spreadsheets. Chief executive Felix Belisle-Dockrill, a mechanical engineer who previously worked in supplier quality for two aerospace manufacturers, said procurement remains one of the most fragmented functions within manufacturing organizations, despite years of digital transformation spending elsewhere in the business.
The company counts GE Aerospace and Vancouver-based satellite and robotics firm MDA Space among its clients and says its supplier network now includes more than 80,000 companies. Axya reports its annual recurring revenue has doubled over the past year and that customers renew and expand their contracts at a net rate of about 140 per cent, though it did not disclose specific revenue figures.
McRock Capital partner Udit Bhatnagar said the firm sees an enormous market opportunity for industrial AI in the everyday work that keeps factories running, a bet that fits McRock’s broader focus on AI enabled industrial software since it launched a dedicated fund for the category in 2024.
The financing lands as data on Canadian supply chains suggests procurement is still catching up to other parts of the manufacturing business. A survey cited by Inside Logistics found only about 45 per cent of Canadian organizations have restructured their procurement and supply chains since the pandemic, and just 61 per cent say they feel adequately prepared for future disruptions. That gap sits at the centre of Axya’s pitch to investors: manufacturers have digitized design, production and finance, but sourcing decisions worth hundreds of millions of dollars a month, in Axya’s case, still run on scattered spreadsheets and inboxes.
The round also fits a broader pattern this fall of Canadian institutional and bank capital moving into artificial intelligence aimed at industry rather than consumer products, following Royal Bank of Canada’s $1 billion technology growth fund announced earlier this month and Intrepid Growth Partners’ US$525 million AI focused fund, both aimed at keeping growth stage technology companies funded domestically. Axya said it plans to use the new capital to expand its risk detection and automation features, grow its team to 55 people by the end of the year from 40 currently, and deepen its push into the U.S. market.
For Canadian manufacturers, many of them small and mid sized suppliers in aerospace, defence and heavy equipment, the wager is that AI driven procurement tools can free up staff time and reduce the kind of sourcing errors that ripple through tight margin supply chains, at a moment when Ottawa and industry groups alike have been pressing the sector to modernize faster.
