District M has landed a nice runway of cash from the Fonds de solidarité FTQ as it seeks to expand into the United States.

The digital media company offers programmatic solutions to advertisers and publishers. It offers a proprietary monetization platform for publishers and a data targeting and reporting platform for advertisers.

While a first funding round of $8 million isn’t unheard of for a tech play, it’s not every day we see this. But as District M’s marketing director Simon Regniault explained to MTLinTECH, the company has serious plans to aggressively grow.

Regniault also mentioned the funding would go towards “ongoing investments in technology” to help the company become an industry leader in Canada. Founded in early 2013, and led by CEO Jean-François Côté, District M plans to double its employees to about 85 within two years.

“We’re always evolving our product through a lot of R&D in-house, so we’re trying to stay ahead of the market,” he said. “We want to bring in more tech talent and more brains, and we’re really looking forward to get ahead of the competition.”

District M was selected as Jury’s Favourite at the 2015 edition of Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 and by the Canadian Technology Accelerator (CTA) as one of the six most promising Canadian digital technology companies.

Competitors in District M’s space include New York’s Index Exchange, Pasadena, California’s Open X and Kitchener, Ontario’s Sortable and Google AdExchange. District M has stacked up nicely with these companies for some time now.

The Fonds de solidarité FTQ is a development capital fund that channels the savings of Quebecers into investments. As at May 31, 2016, the organization had $11.7 billion in net assets. The Fonds is partner in more than 2,600 companies and has 618,551 shareholder-savers.

From the Fonds FTQ’s point of view, District M is “well placed to capitalize on the growth in digital advertising.”

“Although it was created just three years ago, the company has managed to acquire many prominent clients, showing that it is able to meet the needs of a rapidly emerging market,” said executive VP Alain Denis.

Not to leave anything unclear, Côté emphasized that District M isn’t content just yet.

While we’re very proud of what we’ve accomplished in the past three years, we know we can take District M even further,” he said.