Bennie facilitated an initial seed investment of $1.5 million CAD to finance a new start-up company, "Delrina", to develop this idea.
Both would later meet with Bennie, who was then the co-founder and CEO of Ingram Micro Canada before becoming CEO of Carolian Systems International, a firm that made business software for Hewlett-Packard. A year before the firm was incorporated, Amato and Skapinker had quit their jobs to start work on an electronic forms product which would eventually become PerForm.
Delrinas business strategy was to "establish technical and market leadership in niche markets", which it accomplished with its electronic form and PC-based fax software. Delrina was Bennies third major entrepreneurial start up after co-founding Mission Electronics, a high-end home entertainment equipment producer, and Aviva Software, which became Ingram Micro Canada. After the company was acquired by Symantec, various divisions were sold off and several of Delrinas former executives went on to found venture capital firms.ĭelrina was founded in Toronto in 1988 by Zimbabwean expatriate Bert Amato, South African expatriates Mark Skapinker and Dennis Bennie and American Lou Ryan.
It also sold online communications software with its WinComm product and produced a Web browser called Cyberjack. The case set a precedent in American law whereby satiric commercial software products are not subject to the same First Amendment exemptions as parodic cartoons or literature. The company sold electronic form products, including PerForm and FormFlow, but was best known for its WinFax software package, which enabled computers equipped with fax modems to transmit copies of documents to standalone fax machines or other similarly equipped computers.ĭelrina also produced a set of screensavers, including one that resulted in a well-publicized lawsuit for copyright and trademark infringement Berkeley Systems Inc. Delrina was a Canadian software company, which was founded in 1988 and was subsequently acquired by the American software firm Symantec in 1995.