Mobile investigation and field documentation platform for
public safety and law enforcement agencies.
World's first high frequency micro-ultrasound that provides
unmatched resolution to visualize, detect and treat prostate cancer.
Breakthrough electronic eyewear that enable the legally blind to actually see.
Big-data company for science and IP that uses machine intelligence to solve core research information challenges for academics and industries.
Search engine for numerical data that offers access
to millions of financial, economic, and social datasets.
Handheld optical imaging device that enables the visualization
of bacteria in real-time at the point of care.
June 14, 2017 – “Not so long ago, Canadian tech entrepreneurs had a long list of grievances: a dearth of early and late-stage funding, long visa wait times for foreign hires, local corporations that wouldn’t buy their products, the best and brightest decamping for Silicon Valley. Fast forward to today, and those problems have largely evaporated. Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, eager to brand itself as innovative, has given tech leaders pretty much everything they asked for, including special fast-track visas for tech workers and hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital money and support for artificial intelligence research.” Read more at Bloomberg
June 8, 2017 – “Canada’s tech sector will have reason to cheer on June 12 when the federal government releases its long-awaited Global Skills Strategy, which promises to break open the bureaucratic logjam that currently impedes the ability of high-growth firms to hire skilled foreign talent. The boldest promise being made is that Canadian high-growth companies will be able to enjoy a 10-day turnaround time for processing work permit applications needed to hire highly skilled foreign talent. That will be a welcome change from the current system this new strategy is designed to replace, which is painful for too many of the companies that participated because the processing time of a single application was uncertain and there was no guarantee of success in the end.” Read more at TechVibes
June 2, 2017 – “As the U.S. seems to be hell-bent on making itself less attractive to immigrants and visitors, its neighbors to the north are sensing an opening and going the other way in an effort to attract the smartest tech entrepreneurs. The country launched its startup visa program a few years ago and even though growth was slow (maybe too slow) in the early years, it’s now ramping up. To apply for a startup visa, entrepreneurs had to first secure a minimum investment of at least $200,000 from a Canadian venture capital fund or $75,000 for a Canadian angel investor.” Read more at TechCrunch
May 25, 2017 – “Toronto’s technology ecosystem is a breeding ground for the latest startups and innovative technology. Companies like Uber, Google and Twitter have flocked to Toronto to establish Canadian headquarters because it’s seen as the place to foster the next wave of technology to move society forward. And it’s not on a whim. There are more than 400,000 people employed in the tech sector in the city and it is still growing. Because of that, the City of Toronto is putting more emphasis on nurturing its tech talent. According to Scarborough Southwest councillor Michelle Holland, the city’s first appointed official as advocate for the innovation economy, it starts by tackling the sector’s branding issue. “Toronto really punches above its weight when it comes to being a tech city. It’s the number 1 city for startups and a great place for people to start and grow a business,” Holland said.” Read more at InsideToronto
May 25, 2017 – “In honour of Canada’s upcoming 150th birthday, Shopfiy one of Canada’s leading tech companies, which was once a startup, is looking to celebrate and encourage entrepreneurs in Canada. According to Statistics Canada, 97.9 per cent of Canada’s economy is made up of small business and the trend is expected to continue. The dream of owning your own business, according to a new survey conducted by Shopfiy, is alive and well. Sixty-eight per cent of those surveyed dream of being their own boss. Currently three in 10 Canadians have started their own business and more than half (53 per cent) believe that entrepreneurship is a possibility in the future.” Read more at BNN
May 24, 2017 – “Last month, Roy Pereira, CEO of Toronto startup zoom.ai, received so many applications for a software engineering position from U.S.-based job seekers that he thought they were fake. “I thought it was maybe bots spamming us,” he remembered, noting only about one per cent of the company’s past applications had come from the States. The applicants he interviewed, many of whom were living in Silicon Valley, praised Toronto’s tech scene and expressed doubts about how they’d fare under the mercurial immigration policies of U.S. President Donald Trump.” Read more at CBC
May 17, 2017 – “Let’s say you randomly selected 1,000 seed-stage startups based in the United States. How many of those would go on to raise a Series A? Of companies that go on to raise a Series A, how many would go on to raise a Series B? You could keep this process going until only a few companies remain. But it’s not enough to just ask what the survival rate of companies is from round to round. The bigger question is what happens to those that don’t make it through the fundraising gauntlet? Sure, mortality is a fact of startup life. But there are also happier reasons for not making it to the next round, like when companies exit the funding rat race by way of acquisition or IPO. So what share of those companies find an exit?” Read more at TechCrunch
May 17, 2017 – “Creative Destruction Lab is blowing up. The acclaimed tech startup program based at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management will reveal Thursday that it is expanding to Calgary, Montreal and Halifax, after its first external foray this year when it partnered with University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business to open a Vancouver lab. CDL is also planning a U of T-based offshoot focused on creating firms that specialize in artificial intelligence “machine learning,” using powerful quantum computers from D-Wave Systems, one of Canada’s emerging technology stars.” Read more at The Globe & Mail
May 15, 2017 – “The search is finally over; Toronto has found its Chief Transformation Officer (CTO). Michael Kolm will be Toronto’s first-ever CTO and will report directly to city manager Peter Wallace. Kolm is set to begin on May 29th, 2017. Kolm will be responsible for setting “the overall strategic direction for the Transformation Office by establishing the vision, goals, objectives, and priorities of transformation initiatives that align with the City’s strategic directions, Council priorities, and the Long-Term Financial Plan.”” Read more at Betakit
May 11, 2017 – “Today OneEleven, a “scale-up innovation hub,” celebrated the grand opening of their space in downtown Toronto. The occasion featured a Tech Town Hall with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and an evening reception with Toronto Mayor John Tory. The grand opening event introduced the first phase of OneEleven’s 250,000 square-foot-expansion at Front St. and Blue Jays Way in Toronto. It is the first building in the planned Oxford Properties Union Park innovation hub project. “[Our] mission is to create the conditions for Canada’s next billion-dollar tech company,” said Bilal Khan, a founder of OneEleven.” Read more at Techvibes
May 10, 2017 – “Silicon Valley is, and is likely to remain, the epicentre of the global tech industry. But with anti-immigration sentiment spreading across the United States – as President Donald Trump seeks to impose travel bans on citizens of other countries and to restrict the use of the H1B visas that allow foreigners to work in the United States – international talent has reason to feel unwanted. That provides an opportunity for other countries, and especially Canada, to attract the best and brightest minds. That was the sentiment at last week’s Collision conference, an annual gathering of startups and veterans in various fields within the technology industry. A number of talks at the New Orleans event focused on how the Trump administration might impact the U.S. technology industry, with titles like “The importance of immigration to Silicon Valley,” “The first 100 days: How has Trump affected tech?” and “Regulation and the new administration.”” Read more at The Globe and Mail
May 9, 2017 – “Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has applied to develop a strip of land in downtown Toronto in order to create a brand new high-tech city “from the Internet up.” The application is the latest initiative from Sidewalk Labs LLC, the company’s urban innovation unit, and is part of a vision to create a large-scale urban district modeled after a tech company. “I’m sure many of you are thinking this is a crazy idea. We don’t think it’s crazy at all. People thought it was crazy when Google decided to connect all the world’s information. People thought it was crazy to think about the concept of a self-driving car,” said Sidewalk CEO Dan Doctoroff in remarks reported by State Scoop. Prior to filing the Toronto application, Sidewalk Labs had considered Denver and Detroit as candidates for the high-tech city and has long pondered the idea of building “from the Internet up,” according to Bloomberg.” Read more at Fortune
May 9, 2017 – “Private equity suitors are giving strategics a run for their money in the hunt for SaaS targets. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) and the cloud computing infrastructure underpinning it are attracting healthy levels of private equity interest, showing how those technologies have gone mainstream. The PE firms are drawn to “anything with SaaS that shows sustainable, recurring revenue streams — that’s just a very attractive space for private equity,” says Bill Stoffel, US Private Equity Leader at EY. Buyout shops are lured by the steady cash flows of SaaS business models, as well as their versatility. A SaaS platform can be applied across sectors, from ecommerce to energy, explain other advisors. Interest from PE – in addition to strategic buyers — is expected to continue into 2018, they note.” Read more at Forbes
May 19, 2017 – “Despite talk of a business-friendly administration, the U.S. tech sector may face some pretty serious employment challenges under President Donald Trump. First, there was the immigration ban that threatened to stop immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, then the uncertainty about H-1B visas for skilled workers, and finally questions over how the Trump’s administration’s “Buy American, Hire American” strategy would affect sectors that rely on outsourced or imported talent. For foreign countries looking to build their own urban tech scenes, the situation poses a welcomed opportunity: With some of the best tech talent in the world anxious about losing their work visas in the U.S., tech hubs around the world are making a push to get skilled labor to their shores instead.” Read more at The Atlantic
May 9, 2017 – “Amir Moravej, an Iranian computer engineer in Montreal, quietly worked last year on building software to help people navigate the Canadian immigration system. He saw it as a way for others to avoid the same immigration travails he suffered a few years earlier. Then came the American presidential election. “Trump accelerated everything,” said Mr. Moravej, 33, the chief executive of a software start-up named Botler AI. With immigration taking center stage in American politics and elsewhere, Botler AI began putting more resources into building a chatbot tailored to one of Canada’s immigration programs. On Wednesday, the start-up plans to announce that Yoshua Bengio, a research pioneer in artificial intelligence and director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, is joining the fledgling company as a strategy adviser. Mr. Bengio is adding his intellectual firepower to ease the way for what could become a migration of high-tech talent. Canada stands to benefit from the American political climate and the Trump administration’s efforts — stalled in court so far — to sharply restrict travel into the United States from six predominantly Muslim nations. After Mr. Trump’s election, applications to Canada for student and temporary visas surged.” Read more at The New York Times
Canadian Business Journal – June 20, 2017 – (Read more)
National Post – June 14, 2017 – (Read more)
CTV – June 13, 2017 – (Read more)
Charity Digital News – June 5, 2017 – (Read more)
Time Magazine – May 31, 2017 – (Read more)
NACO – May 29, 2017 – (Read more)
iGan Partners – May 26, 2017 – (Read more)
Smith & Nephew – May 3, 2017 – (Read more)
GlobalNewswire – May 2, 2017 – (Read more)
BetaKit – Apr 22, 2017 – (Read more)
Huffington Post – Apr 5, 2017 – (Read more)
Toronto Star – Mar 30, 2017 – (Read more)
Yahoo Finance – Mar 23, 2017 – (Read more)
MarketWired – Mar 13, 2017 – (Read more)
BetaKit – Mar 12, 2017 – (Read more)
iGan Partners is a venture capital firm investing in emerging tech companies.
With a focus on Digital Health and B2B SaaS, we invest in dynamic management teams, empowering them to build impactful businesses. We have built large successful companies and understand the challenges facing growing businesses, having faced them ourselves. We provide early stage companies with smart capital, a unique active management approach and exclusive access to a network of industry partners and sector specific co-investors to help them succeed.
We build lasting partnerships with founders and managers of great businesses. These partnerships are formed after the company has raised some seed capital, developed proof of concept or obtained market validation. We typically invest in Pre-Series A or Series A rounds and reserve capital for follow-on investments.
We take a unique active management approach with all our portfolio companies. With a strong network of industry partners and co-investors, we ensure our portfolio companies have the sufficient funds and network that will support their growth to a successful exit. We provide ongoing advice, help build management teams, and secure key customers when needed.
Data-driven SaaS and B2B platforms.
Healthcare IT and Medical devices
Powerful web technology that helps businesses identify devices, and consumers across devices.
Breakthrough electronic eyewear that enable the legally blind to actually see.
World's first high frequency micro-ultrasound that provides unmatched resolution to visualize, detect and treat prostate cancer.
Sports fundraising and marketing platform that allows sports teams to raise funds and brands to acquire customers.
Live marketing and automation platform, enabling data collection, microsites, email campaigns and more.
Big-data company that uses machine intelligence to solve core research information challenges for academics and industries.
Handheld optical imaging device that enables the visualization of bacteria in real-time at the point of care.
Search engine for numerical data that offers access to millions of financial, economic, and social datasets.
Online clinic providing timely, technology-enabled, private healthcare.
Mobile investigation and field documentation platform for public safety and law enforcement agencies.
Knowledge-based platform offering tools and leading clinical content for clinicians to provide the best evidence-based care.
Intelligent video exchange and recommendation platform for digital publishers, content creators and brands.
The best way to connect with us is through people who we know and trust – either fellow entrepreneurs, investors that have invested with us or industry professionals that know us well.
You can also reach us directly via email at [email protected]