Know your now – the value of valuation analysis

“Business valuation has historically been static or event driven ⁠— but with the volume of data that a business creates, it has the ability to be interactive and ongoing and can provide a closer look for business owners. Business owners can make better decisions for their business when they constantly have their finger on its pulse, understanding its overall health and how it’s trending, so they can focus on building value in meaningful ways.” – Colin Szemenyei, Co-Founder & CFO, interVal 

interVal is a Canadian-made fintech company created to empower and improve other Canadian businesses’ everyday work. The company’s core belief is that every business owner should have access to the tools and knowledge needed to know what their business is worth, and to use that information effectively to make decisions and continue to succeed.   

Co-Founded by Trevor Greenway and Colin Szemenyei, interVal was born from what initially started as a consulting service, advising business owners through mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and has since grown into a successful SaaS (software as a service) that is impacting how businesses make data-driven decisions and track their business health through their ownership journey. 

Through their M&A consulting work, the pair identified a significantly underserved part of the market that did not have access to the information they needed to understand the health of their business. Owners of small and medium-sized businesses were planning for an exit and only then discovering what the business was worth – at a time when it was much too late to impact significant change. Recognizing an opportunity to provide better data and information to a large segment of business owners, the co-founders embarked on the creation of interVal, a full-scale valuation analysis platform, in 2019. The MVP (Minimum Viable Product) was in-market and first licensed in 2020, with exponential growth across Canada ever since. 

Anticipating expansion into the United States in 2023, this customer-driven platform for valuation analysis has seen successful in helping business owners collect and understand the key financial metrics about the business so they have constant visibility into their health and financial trends and can easily identify where to focus their time and energy. Co-Founder and CFO, Colin Szemenyei, summarizes on the motives behind interVal’s creation: “We want to empower businesses, their advisors and their supporters with knowledge that they can utilize to make decisions and drive success.”  

interVal is a recent i.d.e.a Fund recipient. Supported by a $10-million Government of Canada investment through the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario), the i.d.e.a. Fund is led by Innovation Guelph in partnership with five Regional Innovation Centres (RICs): WETechAlliance, Haltech, Innovate Niagara, Innovation Factory and TechAlliance of Southwestern Ontario. The program helps high-potential ventures access the tools they need to succeed by providing financial and business advisory supports to develop or redesign products, services, processes, and technologies that reduce impacts on the environment and create made-in-Canada solutions.  

Focusing its funding on creating a top-tier digital experience for its customers, interVal spent 2022 automating the collection and analysis of financial data that was previously done manually. The interVal platform is dual-sided, where advisors who subscribe to interVal can also have insight into the data and reports to better support their clients with advice for their business growth and prosperity. From a green economy lens, the redesign of these internal processes of old-stock institutions will reduce their carbon footprint by adopting software and digitizing what once was hundreds of pieces of paper per client. “As someone who supports businesses and startups in my own job, it has been an incredible opportunity to work with a team that is driven by the same goals,” says Andrew Leest, Manager of Startup Advisory and Venture Growth at TechAlliance. “interval’s SaaS is such a valuable tool for this industry, and the value the company adds by understanding the world of business ownership is what will continue to drive this success.”  

Promoting the digital experience by integrating client data and access within the interVal platform, the i.d.e.a Fund supported product development, feature development, lead generation and promotional marketing for new capabilities within the platform.  

interVal recently launched a brand-new segment of its platform, making the company’s impactful valuation analysis platform more accessible to more business owners by integrating a B2C function. This will allow business owners to start the journey on their own without needing to first connect with an advisor. With this new integration, business owners can take control of their future by accessing key financial metrics about their business and looping in their advisory network when they need additional support.  

To learn more about interVal or get started with your business valuation analysis, go to interval.ai
To learn more about the i.d.e.a Fund go to techalliance.ca/idea-fund
To learn more about FedDev Ontario, go to https://feddev-ontario.canada.ca/en