In an outside-the-box solution to business development beyond its home territory, New Brunswick financial intelligence startup Profitual has begun sending its staff members to work in Toronto on a rotating basis.

Profitual, founded in 2021 by former New Brunswick Innovation Foundation investment officers Raymond Fitzpatrick and Daniel Hoyles, now rents a co-working space at the non-profit MaRS Discovery District innovation hub. Instead of hiring a dedicated business development specialist in Ontario, the desk will be manned by members of the existing staff, which includes 12 people according to LinkedIn data, up from seven in December.

And because Profitual’s services are meant primarily for startups, MaRS’s more than 120 other tenants also represent potential customers or collaborators.

“In an effort to reach as many start-ups as possible to assist them with financial intelligence that revolves around forecasting, benchmarking, and reporting we knew it made sense to have a physical presence in the city with the highest cluster of start-ups in all of Canada,” said Fitzpatrick in a social media post.

He and Hoyles incorporated Profitual in 2021, inspired by the sophisticated accounting processes that Fitzpatrick came to admire when he was a financial analyst for Irving Oil earlier in his career. By February of last year, they had used a $25,000 loan from startup hub Ignite Fredericton to hire a coder from Nova Scotia Community College to help them develop the platform and were running at break-even. And in December, they raised a $1.2 million funding round.

The duo’s software uses artificial intelligence to probe small and medium-sized enterprises’ financial records and generate models, revenue projections and other calculations, automating tasks that would normally have to be performed by teams of accountants.