Office Management Startup GPhy Plans Expansion with $5 Million CAD Seed Round

Québec City-based GPHY has successfully raised a $5-million CAD seed round to expand its workplace management app and bring its innovative solutions to businesses outside of its home province. GPHY, which was founded in 2018, offers a unique combination of hardware and software that enables companies to track and optimize their office space utilization. The company’s flagship product, Elia, provides a real-time dashboard that gives managers insights into office occupancy, individual desk usage, and meeting room headcounts. This technology is particularly valuable as businesses navigate the challenges of hybrid work, where the physical office space is no longer used by employees on a consistent, full-time basis.

The seed round, which closed in early September, was led by Vincent Thibault, co-founder of Québec City-based QScale, and saw participation from several other prominent Québec entrepreneurs and investors. These included Martin Bouchard, a fellow QScale founder; Alex Wojcik and Ismael Meskin from Kimoby; Ugo Cloutier from CFO+CO; Jason Dacosta from MSP Corp; and Pierre-Olivier DeSerres and Guillaume Falardeau from Leviat Legal. Notably, all of these investors participated individually, separate from their respective companies. In addition to these investors, Québec-based firms such as Artopex, ACET Capital, and Quebecor’s venture capital arm asterX Capital also contributed to the funding, following their initial support of GPHY’s $2-million CAD pre-seed round in 2022. With this new investment, GPHY’s total funding now exceeds $7 million CAD, positioning the company for growth in both Canada and internationally.

GPHY’s co-founder and CFO, Myrik Hervieux-Gaudreau, emphasized that one of the platform’s key selling points is its simplicity and ability to provide real, actionable data on office occupancy. This has become particularly relevant in the post-pandemic era, where many companies have adopted hybrid work models, allowing employees to work remotely part of the time. According to Statistics Canada, while the share of Canadians working fully remotely has declined since 2022, the number of hybrid workers more than tripled in 2023. Among these, roughly 30 percent of parents with children under five have adopted remote or hybrid work arrangements, making it even more critical for businesses to have accurate, real-time data on office space utilization.

Elia is designed to help companies optimize their office space by providing a comprehensive dashboard that tracks key metrics on workspace usage. For example, it tracks desk occupancy, meeting room utilization, and even provides managers with insights into how much square footage a business truly needs, especially in hybrid work scenarios. This capability allows managers to make informed decisions about whether they can reduce their office space, reallocate resources, or make other strategic adjustments based on the actual usage patterns of their workforce.

The platform’s hardware components include individual desk sensors, meeting room sensors, and interactive screens that display room booking schedules. One of the key aspects of GPHY’s technology is its focus on privacy. The sensors used in Elia are designed to operate in “ghost mode,” meaning they collect data on office occupancy without identifying individual employees. This approach ensures that businesses can track office usage without compromising employee privacy. Hervieux-Gaudreau clarified, “We measure the occupancy of the desks and the meeting rooms, and that’s it. We cannot use the data to decide how many hours a person must be paid.”

GPHY’s revenue model is based on an annual subscription fee for access to the Elia platform, along with recurring charges for the hardware products, which include the desk and meeting room sensors. This subscription-based model provides businesses with ongoing access to real-time insights into office space usage, helping them make data-driven decisions that align with the evolving needs of the modern workforce.

Since its founding, GPHY has primarily focused on serving clients in Québec, including notable investors such as Quebecor and Artopex. Other clients include public agencies, law firms like Fasken, and accounting firms like Groupe RDL. However, with the new funding, GPHY has ambitious plans to scale its business and expand its reach beyond Québec. Hervieux-Gaudreau indicated that the company plans to hire between three and five new sales and marketing professionals in the next few months as part of a strategy to expand GPHY’s presence across Canada and into the United States.

GPHY’s ultimate vision is to become a comprehensive workplace management solution that addresses all aspects of office management, from access control to asset management. Hervieux-Gaudreau believes that as hybrid and remote work models continue to gain traction across industries, GPHY’s services will only become more essential. Despite some recent moves by large tech companies like Amazon and Tesla to mandate full-time office returns, GPHY is confident that hybrid work arrangements will remain the norm for many businesses in the future, and that Elia will continue to play a critical role in helping organizations optimize their office space and improve employee productivity.

As companies continue to refine their hybrid work policies and office space strategies, GPHY’s real-time data and insights will provide them with the tools they need to adapt and thrive in this new era of work. By offering a simple, effective solution that combines hardware and software, GPHY is well-positioned to lead the charge in the growing market for workplace optimization solutions.