Control in the Press
About
Brand
Releases
About Control.
Control is a leading transaction analytics and alerts platform for SaaS, subscription, and commerce businesses, enabling instant intelligence anywhere via its Android, iOS, and web-based products. Control combines data from multiple sources such as PayPal, Stripe and Square to provide key metrics without the need for manual calculation or spreadsheets.
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.
Kathryn Loewen,
COO and Founder.
Kathryn has 15-years experience in banking technology and payments management, working with companies such as SAP and Citigroup. A thought expert in payments, Kathryn has been published in Fortune Magazine and completed her MBA project on “Launching Mobile Banking Applications in Emerging Markets”. Control was founded in 2014, and is backed by Vanedge Capital and BDC.
When Kathryn isn’t growing Control, she takes full advantage of living in beautiful Vancouver, where she can snowboard and golf in a single day.