Three great articles to read before looking at funding: 1) Incubators, accelerators, and ignition in Toronto 2) The Farm Team Problem 3) Copying Y Combinator: Why and How
JLA Ventures: JLA Ventures invests in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), digital media, and mobile applications and services. Portfolio candidates typically possess superior technology, a sustainable competitive advantage, and exceptional growth prospects.
Blackberry Partners Fund: Focused on investing in mobile commerce applications (payments, advertising, retailing, and banking), vertical and horizontal enterprise applications, location-based and location-aware applications and services (navigation and mapping), communications, social networking, media and entertainment, and lifestyle and personal productivity applications for the BlackBerry and other mobile platforms.
Bootup Labs: Bootup Labs is a startup accelerator in Vancouver, BC that helps founders and companies go “from zero to fundable.” Bootup Labs recruits promising entrepreneurs and provides mentorship, ongoing support, investment and office space to help define their business and secure venture financing.
EdgeStone Capital Partners is one of Canada’s leading private equity firms with in excess of $2.5 billion of funds committed to date from institutional and high-net-worth clients. EdgeStone provides capital, strategic direction and business and financial advice to help promising mid-market and early-stage companies achieve their full potential. EdgeStone leverages the resources of its broad business network and ensures an alignment of interests to achieve superior returns for all stakeholders.
Waterloo Tech Capital: looks for market focused companies – founders who have interacted with potential customers or partners to assess the market’s reaction to the technology. While you don’t have to have actual customers or revenues for them to invest, they do look for some market validation of the technology.
GrowthWorks: GrowthWorks is one of Canada’s leading venture capital management companies managing funds that rigorously follow core principles: structure strategic investments in growth-oriented companies, value portfolio assets conservatively, build vital industry connections and minimize risk through diversification.
Extreme Venture Partners: Extreme Venture Partners (EVP) focuses on providing early stage venture capital and management expertise to startup businesses to help propel them into the big leagues. We work with smart people who have great ideas and the energy and abilities to deliver on them.
iNovia Capital: iNovia Capital manages seed and early stage venture capital funds, with a focus in the sectors of information technology, life sciences and cleantech.
Canadian Youth Business Foundation: The Canadian Youth Business Foundation (CYBF) is a national charity dedicated to championing tomorrow’s entrepreneurial nation builders. Why? Because our future depends on creating new businesses: to fill the economic gap that is being felt as many small business owners retire, drive innovation, create jobs and support Canada’s overall economic prosperity. This is particularly important as 71% of small business owners will retire within 10 years, with 41% retiring within the next 5 years.
BDC: Our mission: Help create and develop Canadian businesses through financing, venture capital and consulting services, with a focus on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Our vision: Accelerate entrepreneurs’ success. In fact, we’re solely dedicated to Canadian entrepreneurs. We have a nationwide team helping more than 29,000 businesses reach their full potential.
Indiegogo: Anyone can start raising money right now on IndieGoGo! You can create a funding pitch, offer unique perks or tax deductions to your contributors in lieu of offering profit (you always keep 100% ownership), and get the word out! Each campaign has the opportunity to be featured on the homepage, placed in the press, or exposed via social media.
MaRS: Our advisors work with MaRS clients to help determine their capital requirements. Prepare their presentation. And get them in front of the right potential investors. US based startup programs (seed fund incubators): LaunchBox Digital, Y Combinator, Seedcamp, TechStars, Capital Factory, DreamIt Ventures, Bootphase UofT also had a short-lived Excelerator program out of the Innovations Foundation (which saw a couple of semi-exits and plenty of genuine innovation, but no big news or enduring successes).
Contributors: Ted Lee