News

Welcome 2019 Class of Techstars Toronto Accelerator

(Techstars.com)

While the last year’s inaugural Techstars Toronto cohort seemed to have quite a few under-the radar companies primarily in the product-market fit or early scale-up stage, the just-announced 2019 cohort features a number of established teams. Toronto entertainment app MadLipz has over 35M downloads across 100+ countries (either you’ve made a voiceover parody yourself using their app or you’ve probably seen your 12-year-old nephew make a meme using it!).

For proptech, govtech, crypto, to traveltech, finance and open loyalty networks – the 2019 cohort certainly seems promising:

This class builds upon the success of our inaugural class in 2018 from which 10 fast-growing technology companies were launched across several verticals including AI, food technology, virtual reality, financial services, construction tech, enterprise SaaS, and more. These companies were successful in raising well over $10M of follow-on capital collectively immediately upon graduation and, of greater significance, growing their businesses into viable disruptive tech companies.

February 4, 2019 — Preet Singh — permalink →

News

Startup Founders Dan Debow and Farhan Thawar join Shopify

(Medium.com)

If you follow the startup scene you probably remember Rypple, which Dan Debow co-founded and later sold to Salesforce, or the recent start-ups Helpful and Dialogue that he co-founded with former Pivotal Labs VP Engineering Farhan Thawar.

We’re proud of everything we accomplished here at Helpful, and we wanted to say thank you to all of our customers. We learned so much working with you and we are indebted to you for your support and partnership. But all good things must end, and over the next two weeks we’ll be shutting down Helpful Video and we’ll reach out to help you transition to new software. Stay tuned for more updates on the future of Dialog.

Every ending is also a new beginning. That’s why we’re excited to announce that we will now be joining the amazing team at Shopify to help them make commerce better for everyone.

Congrats to the team – the deal looks like and acqui-hire with Debow and Helpful co-founder David Pardy taking corporate development roles at Shopify, while Thawar will take an executive role in the Engineering department. The rest of the Helpful and Dialogue team will also be hired into various roles within Shopify.

January 31, 2019 — Richard Switzer — permalink →

Artificial Intelligence

Zymergen lands $400 million more for its genetically altered microbes, led by SoftBank Vision Fund

(Techcrunch.com)

If you thought that the development of new manufacturing materials, adhesives, pharmaceuticals and stuff was done by white-coat scientists mixing different chemicals in a laboratory, Zymergen is taking a very different path. The 600-person Bay Area biotechnology company is leading the field in the development of new compounds, from yeasts to plastics to drugs, using genetically engineered microbes, or ‘bugs’ as their CEO calls them.

In fact, Zymgergen cofounder and CEO Joshua Hoffman says one of the biggest opportunities before his now 600-person company is to produce entirely new products that are untethered to traditional petroleum-based manufacturing, which currently underpins nearly everything we use and own, from gas to golf bags, from dishwasher parts to dresses.

As it relates to OLEDs, for example, Hoffman notes that “current petrochemical-derived films don’t work as well as they should. They’re too blue, or they scratch, or they de-laminate and the screen comes apart. The problems are rooted in their core chemistry. But biology gives you whole palette with which to create films, adhesives, and coatings.”

This is game-changing stuff. With Softbank’s very large investment and Zymergen starting to see ‘meaningful revenue’, it’s hard to disagree with early investor Rohit Sharma. “This is easily one of the most promising companies I’ve worked with,” he said. “This isn’t engineering eyeballs or daily active users or manipulating business models. This is innovation on the scale of the way the chemical industry came into existence and grew to $3 trillion plus industry.”

Zymergen also is pushing innovation on the business model front, charging an ongoing a subscription fee for use of the products it develops as well and retains a ‘share of value’ for the products it creates.

Last month we brought former Director of Data Science at Zymergen Shiva Amiri up to Toronto for a panel discussion on AI in healthcare space. Watch the video below for more about how Zymergen uses machine learning to develop new compounds, and the impact of AI on the healthcare space in general.

December 13, 2018 — Richard Switzer — permalink →

Fintech

BlockEQ acquired by Coinsquare

(Medium.com)

Congrats to our friends and former TWG coworkers Megha and Satraj, who’s 9-month-old startup has just been acquired by Coinsquare for $12M.

“We have enormous respect for what the BlockEQ team brings to Coinsquare.” said Cole Diamond, CEO of Coinsquare. “They are one of Canada’s best tech teams, and the product they’ve built is immensely valuable. That combination in partnership with Coinsquare’s technology means that we have the opportunity to build amazing things for the cryptocurrency community in Canada and far beyond."

The TWG connections on this one run deep. Megha and Satraj became TWG employees in 2016 when TWG acquired their mobile dev shop B House, and TWG invested in (and provided office space to) BlockEQ when they decided to launch the Stellar exchange startup earlier this year. As it happens, Coinsquare is also a company TWG made an early investment in, as well as rebuilding their web trading platform and their original iOS and Android apps in 2017. We couldn’t be happier for Megha, Satraj and Jon!

December 7, 2018 — Richard Switzer — permalink →

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