Quick Takes: Atomicjar opens a $25m USD round and reinforces the new trend of partially building in Canada

What is the news?

On Wednesday, Atomicjar announced they had raised a $25m USD round led by Insight Partners with participation from Boldstart Ventures, Tribe Capital, and others. The company is behind the open-source software, Test containers, that helps companies test software. While the company is technically based in the US, one of the co-founders is long-time community member Eli Aleyenar.

When they announced the round, Atomicjar mentioned that they would be staffing up their engineering and go-to-market teams in Canada. This reinforces a new trend we noticed over the last 12 months of early startups having founders in both countries but building their teams up in Canada.

To discuss all of this in more detail, Eli Aleyner of Atomicjar joined us live for an in-depth Q&A on yesterday's Quick Takes.

Check out the full conversation with Atomicjar's Co-Founder here

What are the takeaways for the community?

We don't talk about open-source projects very often but they are a powerful way to acquire users - nothing beats free - and the customers help you build the main product.

The difficult thing is to find a way to monetize the platform you built.

Historically many companies have started service arms which are interesting businesses but need to grow in a controlled manner. It may also be hard to build a moat as the "basic" product is available for free. While many larger companies are encouraging employees to return to the office we believe the trend of distributed founder teams will stick around and a subset of them will have teams north and south of the border. Usually, these start-ups will be US incorporated and raise funding from US investors but build their team in Canada.

Is this good for the ecosystem? I believe so, but many politicians are upset when large US companies open Canadian "branches". The Canadian co-founders have to make sure the team north of the border is considered part of the core team.

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