Late last year, Faire announced a major employee tender offer at a $5.2B valuation. It’s a milestone for the company, which was founded with offices in the Waterloo area and San Francisco.
If you’re wondering what that is, you’re not alone. An employee tender offer allows a company’s employees to sell some of their shares to outside investors. It is a clear sign of investor confidence.
Led by WCM Investment Management with participation from Baillie Gifford and True North Fund, this investment signals Faire’s strong, stable growth and strong momentum.
Faire, a wholesale marketplace company, is a behemoth that was built, in large part, in the Waterloo region tech ecosystem. Over the last eight years, Faire has skyrocketed from a small tech startup housed at Velocity to a global name in the online retail industry. For the duration of its success, Faire’s engineering and software teams have been based out of Waterloo and led by Marcelo Cortes, Faire’s Co-Founder and Chief Architect.
Marcelo Cortes, Co-founder of Faire
Here is a timeline of Faire’s incredible growth as a global and local company:
2016
Faire was incubated at Velocity, the University of Waterloo’s globally acclaimed startup incubator. Velocity is Canada’s most productive early-stage incubator, with 500+ companies incubated and $40B in enterprise value. Faire accounts for a substantial portion of that value.
2017
Faire was officially founded with headquarters in both San Francisco and Waterloo, distributing its team across the United States and Canada. The split is unique, but Cortes said that Faire’s Waterloo office has made a significant difference to the company’s growth. Cortes said to his co-founders: “You see the talent we have in Canada. We know we can make this successful [here]” (Betakit).
Cortes is a graduate of the University of Waterloo’s world-renowned computer science program. The local talent pipeline from UWaterloo is one of the main reasons Faire chose to set up part of its shop here. The University of Waterloo graduates more engineers than MIT and Stanford combined—every single year. The availability, quality and cost of talent in Waterloo region is unlike anywhere else in North America.
2019
Faire earned unicorn status ($1B valuation) with a $150M Series D funding round. ApplyBoard, Arctic Wolf and eSentire also joined the Waterloo unicorn club right around the same time, too. Waterloo’s tech ecosystem was on a roll, gathering momentum and speed, thanks to these growth-oriented companies and the institutions supporting them: Communitech, Velocity and the University of Waterloo.
2020
Faire announced a $170M Series E, which brought its valuation to $2.5B, and celebrated the grand opening of its office in downtown Kitchener (part of the Waterloo tech ecosystem). The pandemic hit this year, but Faire kept its pedal to the metal. During the lockdowns, the Faire platform actually saw a spike in use as small businesses tried to keep up with demand. And because they were located in Waterloo, they could “always find the talent [they] needed and the quality was just as good as [in San Francisco],” said Cortes (Betakit).
2021
With a whopping valuation of $12.4B, Faire announced a $400M Series G raise. At the same time, Waterloo was named the #1 small tech talent market for the first time, and we’ve kept that title every year since. From the cost of office space to the concentration of talent, the Waterloo region remained the perfect place for Faire’s engineering team to continue making steadfast progress.
2022
Faire earned an extension to its Series G round with $416M and was named Fast Company’s Most Innovative Retail Company. Around this time, the company also opened a new office in downtown Toronto, helping them tap into talent at the other end of the Toronto-Waterloo Corridor.
2025
Faire announces its employee tender offer. As the company continues to grow globally, Faire demonstrates steady and stable growth backed by investor confidence.
“When we started Faire, we set out to build a company that makes life better for small businesses and their local communities. Nine years in, it’s clear this vision is becoming a reality,” said Max Rhodes, CEO and Co-founder of Faire. “All of this growth ultimately means that we’re delivering on our promise to make wholesale easier and more affordable for retailers and brands.”
As Faire looks to reach its next big milestone in 2026, Waterloo’s tech community will be there to support and celebrate yet another incredible homegrown success story.
Key Takeaways
- In late 2025, Faire announced its employee tender offer at $5.2B
- Faire successfully scaled from a Velocity startup to a global retail giant, supported by Waterloo’s innovation ecosystem
- Waterloo region’s tech workforce provides Faire with access to the high-quality, cost-effective talent needed to scale globally
- Global companies choose to build and scale in the Waterloo area because our region consistently delivers the talent and infrastructure needed to succeed