In the past five years, St. John’s, Nfld., has produced two billion-dollar companies. First up was Verafin, a fraud detection and anti-money laundering software company that was purchased by Nasdaq in 2021 for US$2.75 billion. It was followed by Kraken Robotics, a manufacturer of subsea robotics and sensors for underwater exploration and defence, which publicly trades on the TSX Venture Exchange and has a valuation of about US$1.3 billion.
Hot on their heels are CoLab Software, billed as the world’s first design engagement system for large engineering teams, which raised $72 million in 2025, and Spellbook, which builds generative AI systems for lawyers and raised $50 million, also in 2025, and expects to hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2026. These results place both companies on the potential unicorn track – a privately owned startup that reaches a valuation of over $1 billion – and this run of successes places Newfoundland and Labrador’s tech sector in rarified company, alongside other global unicorn breeding grounds.
Be Giant sat down with Andrea King, Verafin’s former head of customer success and new CEO of TechNL, the provincial hub for tech entrepreneurship, to find out how big tech ambitions are taking root on The Rock.
You came home to St. John’s to work for Verafin, Newfoundland and Labrador’s first tech unicorn, after living all over the world and working in everything from sustainable finance to the World Bank. How does all that feed into how you will inform the startup ecosystem in Newfoundland and Labrador?
I used to think my career looked like a drunk person trying to walk on a fine line. I used to be self-conscious about [being] too sporadic – international government, small business, retail, too many random things. But the more I think about it now, there are all these different experiences that I put in my backpack and they give me this great holistic view.
What attracted you to Verafin?
Everybody kept saying, “You obviously have to talk to Jamie” [King, Verafin CEO], because Verafin’s the biggest thing here, and I had done my master's thesis on corruption and foreign investment in Eastern Europe. I'd also done a lot of volunteering with organizations to stop human trafficking, which is one of the things that Verafin can catch. Those two random experiences led to this conversation with Jamie and me joining Verafin.
At the time, it was still a very fluid, flat organization; they just wanted to get the right people on the bus. I ended up working with new markets, the marketing team and government relations. Part of Verafin’s superpower was keeping people, and that intellectual knowledge and historic knowledge of the company just made the employees that much stronger at growing the company.
Verafin got the St. John’s tech rocket ship going, followed by Kraken, CoLab Software and Spellbook. What is happening right now in St. John's?
Verafin was one of the biggest deals in Canada, and that exit gave everyone here this massive boost of confidence that you actually can do it here. That mattered so much because it's very easy to think, “Oh, we're in the middle of nowhere, it's a fishing and oil province and we can't build a tech company here.” But that evidence says that yes, we can. We have the people. It is possible.
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That, I think, was the big difference. It doesn't hurt that there are so many experienced people who left Verafin and went to start their own companies, or joined other startups. That helps all the other startups and growing, scaling companies here because they’ve got that experience, so investors can then say, “These people have done this before.”
You have to be a bit stubborn, have this tenacious grit to be successful here, and be weirdly optimistic that you can live here and everything's going to be okay. It is very, very hard, so if you don't have a kind of psychotic level of optimism, you're not going to make it. Those natural characteristics of Newfoundlanders give us an edge. Everybody here is very connected and helpful, so smaller companies can learn directly from the Adam Keatings [CoLab CEO] and the Scott Stevensons [Spellbook CEO].
An American VC once told an audience of East Coast entrepreneurs that he liked to invest in Atlantic Canadian companies because it’s just a little harder to get a company going up there, so when a company was ready for investment, it was stronger. Have you seen a change in the way capital flows into Newfoundland’s tech scene?
I will say on the capital side, the programs that the Newfoundland and Labrador government, ACOA [the federal Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency], TechNL and Genesis offer do really enable companies to get rolling pretty quickly.
We hear a lot that Canada has a difficult time scaling companies. What is required to get Newfoundland companies big enough to innovate, employ people and support a strong ecosystem that is sustainable rather than boom and bust?
That’s the million-dollar question. We are very good now at helping to launch and get companies to that first level of scaling. CoLab and Spellbook are really good examples; they’re growing.
Obviously, it's talent. We know growing companies need sales folks and customer success folks, not just tech developers. We also need to help them find senior people from outside and ideally help those folks move here. I'm always interested when people have moved to Newfoundland with no connections. Often, it's Newfoundlanders saying, “I moved away, married somebody from Toronto, brought them back.” How do we get more people to relocate here? That is going to be an interesting challenge.
What brought you back?
I was living in Maine, which felt very safe, but my child was in Grade 1, and came home and said, “So, Mom, if you're in the bathroom when the shooter comes in, you have to stand on the toilet and hold your breath so that they won't know you're in there.” I thought, “okay, that's good information, but you're six years old.” Then they sent the Scholastic flyer home and it had Kevlar bulletproof backpacks with Hello Kitty on the back. I thought, “I'm out. I can't do this.”
What does success look like for the tech sector in St. John’s?
Making sure that the funding is there at the right time from the right places, and that it's fast and easy to get for the right companies. Closing the gaps that companies are struggling with to find the right people here and helping build up that talent funnel. I'd love to see tech companies actually relocating to Newfoundland, looking here and going: “Wow, what is happening there is so exciting. We're going to move the whole company there.”
