A young Victoriaville company specializing in remote monitoring is preparing to make acquisitions abroad and has just obtained 170 million in financing to support its ambitions.
“We are working on two acquisition projects, one in Europe and one in the United States,” says Danny Angers, one of the co-founders of Vosker, in an interview.
Founded only six years ago in the Bois-Francs region, in Center-du-Québec, Vosker is experiencing very rapid growth. Chief Financial Officer of the company, Danny Angers expects revenues to reach 235 million over the next 12 months.
The plan, he says, is to grow turnover to 1 billion within five years.
Danny Angers adds that Vosker has managed to double its profitability over the past two years and expects the company to double its profitability again in 2024 for the third year in a row.
“What allows us to have such profitability growth is the proportion of our revenues that are recurring,” he says.
The 32-year-old entrepreneur explains that 60% of revenues come from subscriptions, a factor that inevitably contributes to reassuring the financial partners (National Bank, Scotia, Royal, Desjardins and Export Development Canada) who have just financed Vosker.
This financing is a way for Vosker to demonstrate its financial capacity to the companies they wish to acquire. The money obtained will be used to support the growth plan and recapitalize its debt structure under better conditions.
Danny Angers already knows full well that the funds obtained this spring are insufficient. “We’re going to need more,” he said. We will return to financing fairly quickly to raise a very similar amount to support our acquisition projects. »
Danny Angers specifies that the acquisition targets can prove to be very complementary to the Vosker platform and help accelerate growth.
The company’s three main market areas are the monitoring of construction sites, the monitoring of agricultural sites (technological agriculture) and the monitoring of houses or chalets.
At the start of the adventure, the cameras operated using batteries and the technology made it possible to detect movements and be activated only during an event. Little by little, customers began to request remote viewing, but data transfer was a problem, and it was from that moment that the company’s destiny changed. Management wanted to build a giant in surveillance connectivity by creating a technological platform transmitting notifications and images to users according to their needs.
Danny Angers says Vosker has over 1 million users. “We’re going to get to almost 3 million cameras deployed around the world in the next 12 months,” he says.
Vosker’s workforce today stands at approximately 350 employees, two-thirds of whom are in the Montreal region. These employees from the Montreal region will also be grouped together in the Telus tower, in downtown Montreal, in the coming weeks.
The design and programming for the products are entirely carried out in Quebec while the manufacturing is subcontracted to Asia. Vosker’s management team also continues to benefit from the mentorship of Stéphan Crétier, from Garda, who became a minority shareholder two years ago after injecting 60 million into the company.
Danny Angers underlines that management could soon open up the company’s capital again to let in new shareholders who could bring, like Stéphan Crétier, relevant expertise and experience for the development of Vosker.
