Built by someone who's been in your world
Eight years of technology. One platform.
The technology behind Avantly didn't start in a startup incubator. It started in Canadian restaurants — real operations, real problems, real operators who needed a way to manage the community side of their business without adding another full-time job to their GMs' plates. Over eight years, the system evolved. What started as a tool for managing donation requests grew into a full community operations platform — because operators kept coming back with the same three problems: donations they couldn't track, guests they couldn't recover, and reviews they found out about too late. Avantly is the formalization of what was already working.
Our 20+ years in CRM, customer success, and analytics
Avantly was built by a team with over 20 years of experience working inside some of Canada’s most recognized brands — Bell Canada, Sirius XM Canada, Points.com, and Sears Canada. That work spanned the complete customer lifecycle: acquisition, retention, recovery, and loyalty. Marketing and analytics infrastructures built from scratch. Teams of up to 32 professionals led. Measurable results delivered in industries that don’t forgive guesswork. The same analytical rigour applied to national CRM programs has now been applied to something smaller — and more important to the people running it.
"Generosity is an operation, not a gesture."
Most restaurants are genuinely generous. They support their communities, they donate to local causes, they comp meals when things go wrong. What they don’t have is a system for any of it. Avantly exists to change that — not to make restaurants less generous, but to make generosity measurable, consistent, and sustainable. When you can track what your community giving costs and what it returns, you make better decisions. When you can recover guests systematically instead of sporadically, you build a more resilient business. When you can intercept complaints before they become public, you protect the reputation you worked years to build.
Built for how Canadians operate
Canadian restaurant operators face a specific set of realities: a community-minded customer base that expects local engagement, a tight labour market that means your GMs are doing more with less, and a review ecosystem that is unforgiving and highly visible. Avantly is built with those realities in mind. Canadian English. Canadian data privacy standards. Built by a team that has spent decades working inside Canadian consumer brands. We’re not adapting a US-built product for the Canadian market. This is Canadian-built, from the ground up.
Our Values.
Fairness to the community and to the business.
Simplicity and speed
Measurement and accountability.
Some clients feedback
“We’re looking for people who share our vision! most of our time used to be taken up by most of alternate administrative work whereas now we can focus on building out to help our employees.”
Mark Zellers
CEO, Co-Founder.“This powerfull tool eliminates the need to leave Salesforce to get things done as I can create a custom proposal with dynamic pricing tables, and get approval from my boss all within 36 minutes.”
Natalia Larsson
Director of Sales“We are based in Europe and the latest Data Protection Regulation forces us to look for service suppliers than comply with this regulation and as we look to create our website and this builder just outstanding!”
Sarah Edrissi
Lead MarketingHow we got here
2024
The beginning and idea of Avantly 🙂
Today
On the road to deliver great software for customers near and far.
Our Executive Team
Mark Zellers
Founder & Managing Partner
John Zellers
Co-Founder
Kim Yun Son
Engineering Manager
André Garcia
Product ManagerWe’re looking for people who share our vision!
Have what it takes to be one of us.