The Control Story.

In 2014, Kathryn Loewen joined Invoke Labs, a startup accelerator program in Vancouver, BC, with an idea that seemed impossible a decade before: empowering businesses to access aggregated transaction analytics in real-time without coding and a whole team of developers and data scientists to monitor and analyze the information.

Kathryn noticed two shifts that were happening. One was the rise in mobile apps being used for more than chat and gaming. Apps were being used for day-to-day business operations.

The second shift was simplified payments acceptance. It used to take years of financial histories and months of onerous application processes for an entrepreneur to get approved to start accepting credit card payments, but with the inception of payment processing companies like Stripe and Square, a merchant can sign up, process charges, and open their business in a day, if not a few hours. While it’s easy to get up and running, acquiring the necessary business intelligence is still a huge challenge. Enterprise software were simply out of the price range for these businesses — here is where Kathryn saw an opportunity.

In less than a year from launching Control, Kathryn acquired her top competitor, PayPad, an iOS application that enables Stripe users to see key metrics. With plenty of momentum, Control raised $1.5 million in seed funding in 2015 from Vanedge Capital and BDC Capital Inc.

Leaving the solo desk in the attic of Invoke’s Gastown co-working space behind, Kathryn quadrupled her workforce twice and launched a Web App to compliment the mobile products on iOS and Android. In 2016 Control integrated with PayPal, adding one of the biggest online payment processor to their platform, followed by integrating the biggest mobile payment company, Square in 2017.