brad meikle
BDC Venture Capital and the National Angel Capital Organization (NACO) have renewed their partnership for a third year, promising to further strengthen Canada's community of angel investors by identifying, standardizing, and sharing best practices. BDC's Dominique Belanger noted that the initiative supports the continuing rise in the number of angel investors, and their increasing role as drivers of Canadian innovation and competitiveness. The announcement was made at this week's 2013 National Angel Summit, hosted by NACO in Banff, Alberta. The winner of the Summit's pitch competition, peHUB Canada has learned, was Farm At Hand, a cloud-based farm management platform that allows producers to manage production and agribusinesses to exchange real-time information. The company is backed by Vancouver-based start-up accelerator GrowLab.
GrowthWorks Canadian Fund has been provided legal authorization to begin a sale investor solicitation process. The authorization, which was provided by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act, faciliates contact with prospective strategic and financial partners about a potential merger, asset sale, or investment in the fund. The venture capital fund has in past been affiliated with Vancouver-based GrowthWorks.
Blueline Bioscience, a Toronto-based biotech incubator launched earlier this year by U.S. venture capital firm Versant Ventures, has entered into a new partnership with Celgene Corp, a manufacturer of drug therapies for cancer and inflammatory disorders with headquarters in Summit, New Jersey. Under the terms of the collaboration, Celegene will have certain option rights with respect to early-stage life sciences companies launched by the incubator in such fields as oncology and inflammation. Versant Ventures recently established an office in Vancouver. Blueline Bioscience is located in the MaRS Discovery District.
Toronto-based financial advisory firm GreenSky Capital has launched GreenSky President’s Club (GPC), a group of high net worth investors interested in investing in early-stage technology companies. Under the GPC model, opportunities are first pre-screened by GreenSky. ”We will often work with companies for a couple of months before we bring them to the GPC, and will have completed and organized our own due diligence for the group to review even before they see the presentations," said GreekSky president Geoff Simonett. GPC's first meeting was this month held at MaRS Discovery District. Twenty GPC members were introduced to Cyclica, a platform for accurately testing drug candidates and designing new drugs, and OTI Lumionics, a company focused on reducing the manufacturing costs of organic light emitting diodes.
Canadian venture capital firm McRock Capital has formed a strategic relationship with GE Canada to help introduce a higher degree of connectivity and analytics of the digital world to Canadian energy and mining sectors. Based in Toronto, McRock invests exclusively in Intelligent infrastructure companies across Canada and the United States.
Therma-Flite said Friday that it has raised $7.5 million in financing from Toronto-based XPV Capital. Headquartered in Benicia, Calif., Therma-Flite is a provider of waste water treatment and resource recovery solutions. Update: Investment proceeds will be used to introduce new products within core markets and expand the company's plants in Benicia and El Dorado, Arkansas. XPV is a private equity and venture capital firm specializing in investments in the global water industry.
TouchBistro said Thursday that it has closed $4.5 million in seed funding. Relay Ventures was the lead investor. In conjunction with the funding, John Albright, co-founder and managing partner of Relay Ventures, will join Touchbistro's board of directors. Based in Toronto and New York City, TouchBistro is a food and beverage app.
Deloitte has announced the winners of its 2013 Technology Fast 50™ program, welcoming 17 companies that made the list for the first time. These include all three companies in the top spots: Vancouver-based QuickMobile, a developer of secure mobile event apps, which showed a growth rate of 10,444%; Kitchener, Ont.-based Miovision, a creator of intelligent solutions to address challenges in global transportation networks, and; Ottawa-based Shopify, a provider of e-commerce website solutions. According to the Canadian database of Thomson Reuters (publisher of peHUB Canada), over 60% of the companies on the 2013 list are currently backed, or were previously backed, by venture capital investors.
British Columbia Discovery Fund (VCC), a retail venture capital fund managed by Discovery Capital Management Corp, announced it will make its second shares redemption this year. The fund plans to redeem $5.5 million in shares, a decision that is made possible by the "spectacular success" of its portfolio company, Avigilon Corp (TSX:AVO), a provider of high-definition and megapixel surveillance solutions. Avigilon in May 2013 acquired Sterling, Va.-based RedCloud Security Inc for $17 million.
The Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX) has announced its list of the top 20 communications, digital media and IT companies to be showcased at the CIX 2013 forum on November 21 at Toronto's MaRS Discovery District. They are: 360incentives, Atomic Reach, Axonify, Bionym, Breather, Busbud, CogniVue, eSentire, Fabric Software, Hubba, Launchpad, OpenCare, Plotly, Procurify, Rithm, Seamless Health, Smart Skin, SqueezeCMM, TruCentric and Upverter. Companies were chosen by a panel of innovation leaders, and judged according to such factors as product offering, management, market opportunity and business model. Close to half of the companies on the list are currently backed by Canadian or U.S. venture capital firms.