Why we raised $17M CAD, and what we're building with it

A letter from Félix Bélisle-Dockrill, CEO and cofounder of Axya

To our team, our customers, and everyone who buys parts for a living,

Today we’re announcing Axya’s $17M CAD Series A, led by McRock Capital, with Yamaha Motor Ventures. Our existing shareholders, BDC’s Industrial Innovation Venture Fund and Real Ventures, backed us again in this round, and we’ve started a new banking relationship with CIBC to support what comes next.

The funding is the news. The reason behind it matters more, so I want to use this letter to explain what we believe, what we’ve learned, and what changes now.

Where this started

Ten years ago, I worked in supplier quality on aircraft already in service. My tools were a pen, a notepad, and an ERP my manager told me to stay out of. The information I needed existed somewhere. It just wasn’t available to me.

Since then, I’ve looked closely at more than a hundred different supply chains. The details change from plant to plant. The pattern doesn’t.

The problem hasn’t moved

Most plants still buy parts the same way. Confirmations arrive by email. Revisions arrive as PDFs. Someone re-keys all of it into an ERP that sits a day behind reality. Nobody finds out a date slipped until the line stops.

This isn’t a people problem. Updating the ERP is slow, the payoff is never immediate, and the mistakes land on someone else two weeks later. Wrong currency. Pounds instead of units. An exchange rate that shifted mid-year. The data drifts, and the first time someone makes a bad call on a bad number, they stop trusting the system. An ERP nobody trusts can’t help you make a single decision.

Your ERP shows today. We show the whole story.

An ERP is a photo. The data in it is as good as what people put. It shows you the price of a part today and you have limited visibility on what you paid for it last time. A buyer with 30 years in the role knows that part should cost $15. A new buyer makes the best possible decision with the available data.

What we’re building at Axya is the full recording: every confirmation, every change, every supplier response, captured as it happens. Giving a plant that memory changes two things.

First, you catch problems as early as possible so you can fix them while it’s still cheap. An order that’s unconfirmed two weeks before production is a phone call. The same order discovered on assembly day is an expedite fee, a paused setup, and a welding robot sitting idle.

Second, you find money nobody knew was on the table. For one customer, we took 100,000 order lines from the past year, enriched them with our own data to roughly 4 million data points, flagged 1,800 parts worth a second look, and ranked the 50 most likely to hold savings. One part had gone up 160% in twelve months while the rest of their parts rose about 3.8%. No buyer has the time to find that by hand, and they shouldn’t have to.

We also capture what suppliers actually do, not only what they quote. When an order comes back 20% higher than expected, that should be a decision someone makes in the moment, with the full context, not a mystery finance spends three hours untangling at invoice time.

Time saved is the smallest part of it

Procurement software is usually sold on time saved. Saving a buyer ten minutes is worth about $28. Knowing which 50 parts to send back to market can be worth half a million dollars. We want to be measured by the second number.

It’s also why AI hasn’t delivered for most manufacturers yet. The appetite is there. The data foundation isn’t. You can’t predict anything from a photo.

What this round is for

Today, Axya is a procurement execution platform that uses AI to help manufacturers automate supplier follow-ups, keep ERP data up to date, and gain real-time visibility into their orders, with 100% supplier adoption. Suppliers don’t need a new portal; they work with us in the formats and channels they already use. That network is what makes the recording possible, and it means every customer benefits from patterns we see across all of them.

This round lets us go further, faster. We’re putting it into four things. Deeper AI for risk detection, optimization, and automated workflows, always with the buyer in control. A bigger sales, customer success, and engineering team, so deployments go faster and results show up sooner. A stronger presence across North America, and our first steps internationally. And broader ERP partnerships and partner programs, so enterprise manufacturers can adopt Axya inside the systems they already run.

We chose our partners carefully. Udit Bhatnagar at McRock put it this way: “Manufacturing procurement is a prime example, where critical decisions still depend on scattered information. We led Axya’s Series A because the team understands both the technology and the industrial problem it needs to solve.” Having Yamaha Motor Ventures alongside them means backing from people who build products at scale and know exactly what a late part costs.

That same conviction is reflected in the support behind this round from BDC’s Industrial Innovation Venture Fund and CIBC Innovation Banking.

“As manufacturers face mounting pressure to do more with less, smarter supply chains have become a competitive advantage. Axya is transforming procurement with AI that helps teams move faster, reduce risk, and drive better outcomes. Its strong market traction highlights the growing demand for industrial AI that delivers tangible business results. By supporting companies like Axya, BDC is helping scale Canadian innovation that strengthens productivity and competitiveness.”

— Alexandre Préfontaine, Principal, BDC’s Industrial Innovation Venture Fund

“Axya has built an exceptional team that combines deep expertise in engineering-to-order and procurement operations with a clear understanding of the challenges facing complex manufacturers. The traction the company has demonstrated with its customers speaks to the team’s ability to deliver tangible, measurable solutions that directly address their needs. We are proud to support Axya as it enters this next stage of growth.”

— Eric Laflamme, Managing Director, CIBC Innovation Banking

Thank you

To our customers, including MDA Space and GE Aerospace, and to the manufacturers who let us into their plants before we had anything worth showing: you shaped this product more than anyone.

To McRock Capital and Yamaha Motor Ventures for leading and joining this round, to BDC and Real Ventures for believing in us again, and to CIBC for supporting our next phase.

To the Axya team: this is yours. We’ve built a company of people who’ve lived this problem, former buyers and ERP implementers among them, and we run it the way we ask our customers to run their supply chains. Set the goal. Measure it. Find the real root cause. Try something and check whether it worked. That doesn’t change with a bigger bank account.

What’s next

The job is the same as it was yesterday: help buyers see problems while fixing them is still a phone call, and find the money hiding in their own data. We just get to do more of it now.

We’re just getting started.

Read the full announcement.

Félix Bélisle-Dockrill,
CEO & Cofounder of Axya