The small but mighty St. John’s, Nfld. tech scene has garnered attention in recent months for being an “unlikely” hub for startups, and rapidly scaling companies such as CoLab Software have helped build that reputation.
“That’s a huge Newfoundland advantage… the connections are so rich between people that people want to be here and they want to come back.”
CoLab makes an AI-powered engineering design platform that helps engineers plan out complex products before they are manufactured. The scaleup was founded in 2017 by two Memorial University graduates who did co-ops in Silicon Valley and later went through Y Combinator before returning to build in Newfoundland. Since then, it has raised more than $100 million USD ($140 million CAD) from local and US investors, grown its team to roughly 250 people, and was reportedly last valued at around $500 million USD. It has also landed big-name clients like Bombardier and Ford.
As CoLab’s chief strategy officer, Taylor Young works side by side with co-founders Adam Keating and Jeremy Andrews to guide the company’s direction, orchestrate partnerships, and lead corporate development. BetaKit sat down with Young to learn more about CoLab’s business journey and the advantage of running the business from Newfoundland.
The following conversation has been compiled from BetaKit’s interview with Young, as well as her on-stage remarks at the techNL conference on Tuesday. It has been edited for clarity and length.
CoLab has been around for nine years now and has a mature product. What’s the landscape like for engineering software and AI?
The engineering software landscape has gotten almost no attention over the past 30 years. When you compare it to almost any other B2B (business-to-business) realm, from life-saving medical devices to airplanes to rocket ships, they are still using 30-year-old technology.
You have the incumbents—the computer-aided design and product life-cycle management companies—then you have thousands, lately, of very small technology startups that were not around when CoLab started, and then you have a small group of us that have been doing this for 10 years or so.
For our customers who are desperately trying to understand how they transform in the age of AI, and who face increasing pressure to do everything faster, who do they bet on? There’s no one right answer, but we are getting chosen a lot as that partner, I think, because we’re in a real sweet spot of maturity.
In a fast-growing startup, how do you prioritize what to work on and what to put aside?
Sometimes, some things feel good to solve because they’re easy or actionable, but that doesn’t mean they’re the things you should work on. In the early days of getting a company off the ground, you have to train yourself to say no to most things.
We needed to pick a market that was small enough that we could win, but referenceable enough to other markets that it could help us tap into that growth. For us, it was industrial equipment and HVAC—not the most exciting technology in the world. We had to do that for a long time and focus on a small subset of use cases until we earned the right to do more.
How do you follow where the market’s heading versus leveraging feedback from customers?
Customers show you the problems and, generally, we show them potential solutions. I think that was simpler before AI-driven product development. We used to be able to identify problems and build solutions specific to a use case, and it was very clear for a customer to wrap their heads around if they wanted it or not. Now we can build things a lot faster that are a lot broader.
We’ve gotten into a mentality of trying more and putting more in front of the user. We work with very large companies—that means the person who is buying the tool, and the people who will use it, could be several layers removed, with hundreds of people between them. So you have to put stuff in front of them and wait and see.
What would you say is the biggest benefit of building a company in St. John’s?
I think we are subject to a lot less noise than your average Silicon Valley startup. What that forces us to do is focus on our customers, use that as the most important source of information for what we’re going to do, and to pay a little bit less attention to what everybody else is doing.
“I think we are subject to a lot less noise than your average Silicon Valley startup.”
Obviously we need to understand what’s changing, but our customers are often fairly removed from that, and there’s an enormous amount of noise and distraction if you spend too much time concerning yourself with the startup ecosystem.
We have an amazing team based here that intends to be a part of CoLab the whole way. They have an emotional connection to CoLab and they want to see it through. From what I understand, that’s unusual in other parts of the world where people are focused on growing a career more than they’re focused on growing a company.
I was going to ask about challenges with talent retention, but it sounds like you have a loyal core.
That’s a huge Newfoundland advantage. I’m sure it’s not specific to this province, but it’s an advantage that we’ve found. I think the connections are so rich between people that people want to be here and they want to come back. Obviously, some people are dying to get to Toronto or New York or Montréal, but by and large, we see that going away is a short-term decision. They’re going to go work in the Bay Area, and then they’re going to figure out how to get back.
Feature image courtesy techNL. Image by Ritche Perez.
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