Convictional to Shut Down Following Failed AI Pivot
AI-generated image · Bay Street Wire
The B2B commerce startup will return remaining venture capital to investors after failing to find product-market fit for its corporate collaboration platform.
Kitchener-Waterloo-based Convictional will permanently shut down on Aug. 27, as BetaKit first reported. The decision comes after the startup failed to gain traction with a corporate collaboration platform designed as an AI-era alternative to Slack.
Co-founder and CEO Roger Kirkness told BetaKit that while the company received "polite encouragement," it lacked sufficient paying customers to build a viable business. Kirkness noted that larger firms were developing similar solutions internally, while smaller companies presented an unsolved "sustainable distribution" problem.
The collapse follows a significant shift in strategy. Originally founded in 2017 by Kirkness and former president Chris Grouchy to connect retailers with suppliers, the company later focused on a dropship tool branded as Modern Dropship. That business reached 3,000 customers and $2 million USD in net annualized revenue before Convictional divested from it in early 2025. The asset was acquired by California-based competitor Carro, though Kirkness acknowledged the company lost a significant amount of the capital spent to build the platform.
Convictional had raised nearly $49 million USD ($68 million CAD) in venture capital from investors including Garage Capital and Y Combinator (YC)’s growth fund. Because the company still has several years of runway, Kirkness plans to return slightly less than half of the remaining cash to those investors.
Kirkness, who intends to take a break from the tech industry, stated he hopes to open source the company's intellectual property and research regarding the shift from task-based work to judgment-based work in the AI era.