A Charlottetown startup is raising $1.25 million to help OEMs understand and control their businesses.
Prince Edward Island isn't exactly a tech hub, but Charlottetown-based Tracktile has a secret weapon: people.
“From day one, we focused on messy and complex production.”
Jordan Rose, Tracktile
Tracktile develops a manufacturing operations software platform for small and complex manufacturers such as the food and beverage industry. After fine-tuning the process to move away from founder-led sales, 2025 was a “tipping point” for the startup, CEO and co-founder Jordan Rose told BetaKit in a phone interview Wednesday.
Word of mouth increased interest in Tracktile's product and its revenue performance was stronger than ever, leading to a seed round of C$1.25 million to expand its global presence and team.
While Tracktile is primarily focused on remote work, Rose acknowledged that the company has some hometown hiring bias, with 10 of its 16 employees based on the island. PEI isn't necessarily where Tracktile's clients are, and it's not the easiest environment to raise money, but it's a “great base” for hiring certain employees as the business grows, he said.
“I would say Prince Edward Island has some of the best customer service representatives in all of Canada,” Rose said. “Our island mentality and our friendliness truly shine, which is why we are building our customer success team in Prince Edward Island.”
Rose started working in his parents' fish processing plant when he was 12 years old, so he is familiar with manual labor. But not only the fishing lines were handmade. Much of operational management relies on filling out paperwork, entering data into Excel, and marking up boards the old fashioned way.
When Rose became a software developer, he discovered that most specialized enterprise resource planning (ERP) software was “incredibly expensive” and “incredibly complex.” Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) like his parents will either settle for substandard technology or pay exorbitant fees. Rose wanted to change that.
“What we want to do is not just find a world-class solution and undermine everyone, it’s to give [SMBs] exactly the tools they need as they scale and grow their company: incredibly intuitive, easy-to-use and operations-focused software,” Rose said.
According to Rose, Tracktile doesn't touch the financial side of the business, QuickBooks and Xero have found that out, but Tracktile does help complex manufacturers automatically track their operations using artificial intelligence, providing insight into production planning, forecasting, quality control checks and regulatory compliance tools. SMBs use Tracktile to measure whether they're making money and delivering on time, with far less data entry, Rose said.
Rose argues that most other options in this field are formulaic, which is not good when other forms of production are not differentiated. Tracktile customers do not produce a single box of parts; Seafood or poultry processors need to keep track of constantly changing product weights and yields.
“We've been focused on messy, complex production from day one,” Rose said. “We've abstracted what it means to run a food and beverage production facility and built our system to be customizable enough to handle all of those weird nuances and weird behaviors that come with complex manufacturing.”
Tracktile currently operates 60 plants in North America, Canada and 13 U.S. states, Rose said. The company has grown more than 800 percent since raising C$575,000. pre-seed round in July 2024, multiplying its customer base 10x and increasing annual recurring revenue from $24,000 to $300,000.
Rose expects to take advantage of this momentum and grow Tracktile's revenue fivefold by the end of 2026. New seed funding, raised entirely on convertible notes, will help with this. The round was co-led by returning investors BDC Seed Venture Fund and Island Capital Partners, with participation from Graphite Ventures.
The funding will support expanded go-to-market efforts and research and development of new features. This includes a video detection offering that would connect artificial intelligence to CCTV cameras to monitor and record events such as trucks entering loading bays, pallet movements, production failures and quality control.
“Everything in the manufacturing world tends to be a reactive approach,” Rose said. “The future will be [an] Intelligent, proactive approach to data collection [and] runs a manufacturing plant.”
Rose envisions Tracktile eventually opening an office in a traditional manufacturing hub like Ontario or the West Coast, but for now it's focused on the island. The province has a smaller population than most Canadian cities, but for now it provides Rose and Tracktail with a strong support network; When he presents investors with his sales figures and vision for the future of complex manufacturing, geography doesn't matter much.
“Investors want to back the underdog, right?” – said Rose. “In a way, it’s kind of the PEI way of thinking: We’re small but mighty, and we’re willing to put in the work.”
Image courtesy of Tracktile.
