Community spotlight: Avato

The Victoria Tech Community Awards showcase the community of 1,000 companies and 17,000 workers who push innovation forward, and drive the city’s $4 billion tech economy. Our spotlight series highlights award finalists and winners so you can get to know them a little bit better. Read about other community members here.

Today, we’re featuring Darren Stevens, CEO of Avato.

Describe your company:

Avato empowers organizations in highly regulated industries to manage complex enterprise integration challenges in a simpler way, saving time, money, and resources. The Avato hybrid integration platform securely integrates previously fragmented and incompatible systems and data. It changes the game by allowing each piece of software to interact with the others without requiring costly vendor customizations or built-in support for the other systems in the ecosystem.

What problem is your company solving and how is it solving it?

Software integration is a fact of life for most enterprises today and for the foreseeable future. Organizations are grappling with an ever-increasing number of enterprise software applications, all requiring a way to interact with and understand data from each other. The challenge is that they don’t all speak the same language, can’t easily share information, and are often accessed by dated user or system interfaces. The connections between them are complex and heavily dependent on the status quo. If one thing changes, the entire system may need to be updated to accommodate.

As a highly regulated industry operating in a rapidly changing environment, banks and financial services organizations need a rock-solid, simple, secure integration solution. Too often, we see organizations discarding older software because it doesn’t connect easily to newer applications. Wheels are reinvented, wasting precious time and resources. Integration challenges are solved by starting over instead of leveraging the assets that are right in front of us.

At Avato, our core belief is that all things technical should just work - that digital systems should speak to each other regardless of standard, age, platform or language. Unlike other integration products, Avato leverages world-wide-web-standard XSLT-3 stylesheets to declaratively orchestrate communications with even the most incapable legacy systems, without the need to write code in 99% of cases. This means that Avato can basically be used to connect anything to anything – and can even provide modern, standards-based interfaces for legacy applications so they resemble today’s web services in the cloud.

What’s a recent milestone or breakthrough your company is proud of?

Avato reached product market fit with our third deployment and second schedule-1 bank over covid, we have since scaled our team 14x and increased revenues 133% this year. Avato set out and built a great inclusive culture, we have attracted a diverse team and are proud to be nearly gender balanced with 60% women.

What makes Victoria a great place to build a technology business?

Victoria is one of the nicest places to live in the world. It is often lost on us until we go anywhere else and then come home. For this reason alone it's a great place to build a business. But it also quietly boasts a five billion dollar technology industry, with one of the most cohesive technology communities in the world.

What is Victoria tech’s biggest hidden secret?

Aside from Avato? Though we won't be a secret for much longer! Best secret tech meeting spot: Bodega. You won’t find a day there isn't at least one tech leader in there after work. Another is the ground floor of Fort Tectoria; most people outside of tech don’t realize you can have a coffee and work there anytime.

What is your number one Victoria tech prediction for 2023?

The Victoria Tech Community will gain significant traction as a primary innovation center for Canada.

What local tech company or product excites you the most right now?

theFinanceStack – this is a great business model for fractional resources, which has brought in a team of experts to handle all aspects of finance. Under Brad Williams’ leadership, we’ve benefitted from a great and growing team that has been indispensable in our growth.