In less than two years, local company Hey Orca has achieved $1 million (USD!) in Annually Recurring Revenue. Their Monthly Recurring Revenue has increased a whopping 170% since 2017 began. That’s as strong a year as a company can hope for.

Hey Orca launched in 2015, when two entrepreneurial minds noticed a niche they could fill in the marketing and communications biz. Their idea had the potential to be adopted by companies worldwide, and investors agreed about its potential.

This past May, Hey Orca secured a cool 2 million in funding from Killick Capital and Pelorus Venture Capital, to assist the company in expanding into the U.S. market. They’ve successfully crossed the Canada-US border and then some: they currently empower marketing teams in over 300 marketing agencies and brands, in 12 countries.

Hey Orca’s client list includes household names like Microsoft, Amazon, Scribd, and John Hopkins University, as well as plenty of local companies like DC Design House, Newfoundland Chocolate Company, and MUN Seahawks.

It all started in 2015, when “Sahand Seifi and I realized that marketing agencies were still using spreadsheets to communicate with their clients,” says co-founder Joe Teo. “So we set out to explore why that was the case.”

They were told it was the most client-friendly format marketing agencies could present to their clients. “That results in a lot of redundancies on the marketing agency’s part,” Teo explains. So Hey Orca set out to create a more efficient way for compnies to manage their content development and client approval workflow.

“Hey Orca simplifies the social media production workflow for marketing teams around the world. We replace the manual workarounds of spreadsheets, Dropbox, and social media publishing tools that is status quo in the production process, by using technology to involve the right people at the right time.”

In Teo’s words, “Hey Orca is interesting as it is an immigrant-founded company, of Memorial Alum, that is NL Venture Capital backed,” making them an outstanding example of the benefits of attracting immigrants to study at MUN, and working to retain such innovative minds here, as is government’s plan, to deal with our plummeting population and the lack of new blood in our workforce.

Teo and Seifi’s team now consists of 32 full-time employees, and the company recently opened a Toronto location. They were recently named a G2 Crowd High Performer for Summer 2017.