Top 100 Tech Companies to Watch for in 2022

Jon Christensen is the CEO of Bidmii.

We are beyond excited to announce the top 100 Tech Companies to Watch for in 2022. This is our largest coverage of startups and tech companies. Last year, we covered 20 tech companies to watch for in 2021 and this year we are going big. There are 100+ incredible companies in this list that are disrupting new markets and making waves. Behind these companies are the incredible founders and team that work to bring these new ideas forward. Check out each company as there are some incredible opportunities to partner, get hired, and more.

Thank you note to Headway our Official Sponsor: Headway.io. This coverage would have not been possible without their support. 

106. Shomigo
105. MangoVisa
104. Javelin
103. YourTable
102. Optimyzed Brain
101. Crewbite
100. Beeznests
99. Ora-3D
98. Fundmore
97. Look-see
96. Brightly
95. Sprint CPA
94. SingleKey
93. Content Bloom
92. Cansulta
91. Super Pawbox
90. Mom Inc
89. Corl
88. Intribe
87. Simply Eloped
86. uCast
85. LittleYou
84. Dwellcome
83. QuantigoAI
82. MoxyPatch
81. Litespace
80. HiredHippo
79. Deeded
78. The Leansuite
77. Prelo
76. TAMVOES
75. nugget.ai
74. 1Mentor
73. Contractor Compliance
72. ZipLunch
71. Blsh Delivery
70. LabsCubed
69. Justo
68. ProjectionHub
67. Huex Labs
66. Equivesto
65. Paqt
64. Tidal commerce
63. Halo AI
62. WFHomie
61. Perfect Recall
60. ISARA
59. IntelliCulture
58. Erdos Ventures
57. SoulRooms
56. Wingmate
55. Hardly
54. MinuteBox
53. Calixa
52. Goodlawyer
51. PathMatch
50. Payd
49. Wize
48. Paytm Labs
47. Blanka
46. Node
45. Part3
44. Surex
43. Moves
42. VanHack
41. Boast.AI
40. Unwrapit
39. ContentBot
38. Pocketed
37. Forecastr
36. Pronavigator
35. Local Logic
34. Aterlo Networks
33. Biiibo
32. Perch
31. Jeeves
30. ForwardAI
29. Edgecom energy
28. Local Line
27. Kalendar AI
26. Adaptive Pulse
25. Vetster
24. Shinydocs
23. Agilicus
22. Goose Chase
21. Pronti
20. Frugl
19. Mappedin
18. Wagepoint
17. Auvik
16. Carbon Neutral Club
15. Flywheel
14. ChocolateSoup
13. Crux OCM
12. Railz
11. TriplePlay
10. Bidmii
9. MedMe Health
8. DirtMarket
7. Uvaro
6. Truly Financial
5. BioBox
4. Synctera
3. Commit
2. Able Innovations
1. EnrouteAI

106. Shomigo 

Founded: 2020
Founder: Alykhan Kara
Website: https://shomigo.com/

Elevator Pitch: Shomigo is a Toronto-based start-up that leverages machine learning to facilitate local shopping. It provides users with personalized recommendations for items based on their previous purchases and interests while incorporating social features. Shomigo seamlessly integrates with any Shopify store and provides thorough analytics to its vendor partners.

How it got started: Shomigo began as a way to enable people to shop locally more easily. Their focus on using machine learning to recommend items to people is how they hope to make it as easy as possible.

Growth to date: Growing team of 10 people working 80+ local brands.

What’s next: Shomigo hopes to add in new features to improve the eCommerce experience, while expanding to include more local stores across Canada.

Ask from the community: We’re looking to grow our userbase and connect with more local stores.

105. MangoVisa

Founded: 2020
Founder: Kushi Kaur
Website: https://mangovisa.com/

Elevator pitch: MangoVisa is building an online community for international students to connect, learn, and explore resources. It empowers international students to connect with with reliable immigration lawyers, advisors and consultants.

How it got started: The idea came got started when a family member started facing immigration challenges and was not able to find verified and vetted immigration consultants and lawyers in a timely manner.

Growth to date: There are over 1,000+ members so far and the community continues to grow.

What’s next: We are about to launch a lawyer and consultant portal for Canadian users.

Ask from the community: We’re looking to connect with partners and also developers.

104. Javelin

Founded: 2021
Founders: Justin Ford and Coleman Chan
Website: https://www.javelinsportsinc.com

Elevator Pitch: Javelin is a mobile app whose goal is to make it easier to play sports. Within Javelin, you can manage a team of players, find new players in your area to play with, or find a team or league to join.

How it got started: Growing up, Justin and Coleman were both passionate sports players. Unfortunately, they found that after they left high school, they weren’t playing as much as they did when they were kids. After meeting in University, Justin and Coleman decided they wanted to work together to help make it easier to play sports.

Growth to date: Javelin Sports has grown to a team of 11 and is currently helping over 30,000 players across North America play sports.

What’s next: Javelin Sports has been iterating their product and services to help North America return to sports. They are currently offering all of their services free to help get everyone playing again.

Ask from the community: We’d love to hear some feedback on what we’ve built. Within the Javelin app, you can send us a message telling us what you think or request new features!

103. YourTable

Founded: 2018
Founders: Peter Chien and Yvonne Ru
Website: https://www.yourtable.co/

Elevator Pitch: We are solving the problem of loneliness and depression that are often linked to those who frequently eat alone. YourTable app focuses on building professional relationships and friendships through eating & business networking, the Linkedin for food. We want to help prevent loneliness, depression, and contribute to overall happiness and work productivity.

How it got started: It was a personal problem for Peter after graduating from UofT and working for a few years. He often ate alone because he was so busy with work, family obligations, and life in general. This caused him to be depressed, and work productivity dropped. He realized he can’t be the only one with this problem, and found out as much as 67% of Canadians eat alone. Believing that prevention is the best cure, YourTable was co-founded with Yvonne to deliver happiness, one table at a time.

Growth to date: We are incubated at UofT Entrepreneurship ICUBE and Sheridan Entrepreneurship EDGE, winner of UofT x Lo Family Social Venture Fund $30k Grant. During the height of the pandemic last year, we started a Give-Back Initiative. Formed in partnership with Tim Hortons Canada, we wanted to give back to our front-line heroes at hospitals. Thanks to their generosity, they provided complimentary meals while we did the deliveries. We have delivered over 2000+ free meals to 7 hospitals. We are a community of 500+ food lovers. Join us on our app today!

What’s next: We will be introducing new features to our app, random introductions to those who match your networking topics, as well as group chats based on business industries!

Ask from the community: We are looking to raise our first round of funding and would love to connect with investors. Additionally, we would love to connect with restaurant partners who would like to be promoted for free on our app!

102. Optimyzed Brain

Founded: 2020
Founder: Portia Asli
Website: optimyzedbrain.com

Elevator Pitch: We optimize the brain of executives and entrepreneurs for high performance. Our proprietary science-based brain optimization system creates a tangible change in eight key areas in less than five weeks: improvement in sleep quality & energy levels, increase in targetted focus and sustained concentration, enhanced mental clarity & creativity, and more feelings of calm & relaxation. All key areas that enable ambitious entrepreneurs and executives to achieve their business targets faster while having more time for family, sleep, exercise, and things they love.

How it got started: During my masters at the University of Cambridge, I was around the world’s best leaders – Olympians, Best Selling Authors, Billionaires. I realized that they highly prioritized their brain health and brainpower. With the help of experts, they optimized their most important asset – the brain – so that they could continue achieving best-in-class results. It was their competitive advantage. A form of practice that wasn’t readily accessible for many ambitious leaders who often had to overwork, sacrifice their overall wellbeing, and even miss out on family moments just to achieve their goals. When I saw how much the pandemic impacted the brain health of entrepreneurs who are the root of our economy, I had to do something about it. In July 2020, Optimyzed Brain got launched to a group of CEOs.

Growth to date: We realized our product is going to be very transformative in the lives of ambitious business leaders as we successfully secured paying customers before launching. This was a big market validation and a boost of confidence. To date, we have customers across the United States, Canada, and select countries in Europe. Beyond customer growth, at Optimyzed Brain, we prioritize our customer’s transformative impact. We thrive to see our customers becoming the best version of themselves. Our customers reported results such as: from 4-hour sleep to finally having consistent 8 hours of sleep; from being highly distracted and scattered to becoming highly focused and concentrated that enabled them to reduce their work hours; from not having time for exercise to become efficient in their work and gain time to workout consistently every day. When one of our customers feared not meeting future targets, optimizing the brain enabled them to 3 X ARR in 7 months. An optimized brain has become the biggest competitive advantage in business and personal wellbeing.

What’s next: With a proven track record and stellar customer stories and cases, we are more motivated than ever to help as many business leaders to optimize their brain for high performance and high-quality health. We started with being focused on CEOs of high-growth companies. Then our customers asked us, “I want the rest of my leadership to optimize their brain.” Based on demand and our customer requests, we will be opening the doors to business leaders in other functional roles and continue our global expansion.

101. Crewbite

Founded: 2012
Founder: Wanzheng Jasmin Lyu
Website: https://www.crewbite.com/

Elevator pitch: Crewbite is an online platform that uses technology to find the best match for productions, allowing producers and production managers to hire and recruit crew in the entertainment industry 10 times faster.

How it got started: When Jasmin was a producing student at Vancouver Film School, she came up with the concept for Crewbite as she noticed how challenging it was to break into the industry. At first, Jasmin simply wanted to figure out a way to help her friends and classmates find jobs that they liked and to help them break into the industry. Then she noticed how inefficient the industry’s workflow was when she was producing her final projects and working closely with independent industry professionals – so much time was wasted on looking for the right resources and the right person to work with when they could be working on the creative side of storytelling.

Growth to date: Reached out to 200+ people & production companies and gained pre-signup for the launch.

What’s next: Preparing for the platform launch in 20222.

Ask from the community: We’re looking for raising funds and find a developer who is interested as potential tech co-founder.

100. Beeznests

Founded: 2020
Founder: Jin Liu
Website: www.beeznests.com

Elevator Pitch: The first student exclusive freelance platform. You can outsource all your remote projects to students.

How I got started: The idea of the Beeznests started from an experience I had over a year ago. I was struggling to land my first internship and it took me 6 months of applications until I got my first job. Soon after, the pandemic hit and I realized that I wasn’t the only one facing the problem of job searching. With one year’s effort, we developed our own unique business model which helps companies get projects done by hiring students at low cost, at the same time helping students gain more working experience.

Growth to date: Since Beeznests was founded, we have been collaborating with multiple colleges in Vancouver. We have more than 100 professors/industry experts who’ve signed up as team leads to work with students for “academic team” projects.

What’s next: We are launching our Bootcamp program coming up which aims to give students and immigrants guidance and relevant training in work skills needed in a real world work setting.

Ask from the community: We want to keep growing our team and looking for more marketing and web/app development industry experts or professors who want to work with the students on some projects together.

99. Ora-3D

Founded: 2021
Founder: Shlesha Van
Website: www.ora-3d.com

Elevator pitch: At Ora-3D, we have designed a 3D brushing technology that allows users to have a simpler, faster and more effective brushing routine in an intuitive and fun way. Our product encapsulates the tooth surface in 3 dimensions and removes plaque from in between teeth and along the gumline with a simple bite and glide motion – while BASS brushing technique.

How it got started: This actually stemmed from a personal experience I had at the dentist and I realised none of the market products actually simulated dentist recommended brushing technique. All the toothbrushes we currently use are flat headed brushes and they require a habit change from the user. After 20-40 years, it’s impossible to do that. So instead of integrating complicated apps, pressure and Bluetooth sensors, we decided to simplify the user experience. We focused on a design change and over the last 1.5 year, we interviewed over 40 people and took active feedback from dental experts which today has led to the development of Ora-3D.

Growth to date: We have over 1000+ subscribers in our waiting list for our pre-launch! As our conversations continue to grow, we are starting to get pre-orders from dental clinics and really greata feedback from our user testers!

What’s next: Stay tuned for our launch! You can pre-order off our website @ www.ora-3d.com at 23% off the retail price. Use FOUNDERSBETA code for additional 15% off. But skyrocketing into the future, we don’t just want to limit ourselves with our 3D brushing technology. This is just the first step towards the evolution in oral health care. As we grow, we want to continue to integrate dentistry with technology to redesign consumer oral healthcare experience such that we bridge the gap between dental experts and consumers with intuitive and accessible innovation.

Ask from the community: With all the enthusiasm that comes in place, we are currently growing our team! If you have a background in branding, ecommerce, marketing or B2B partnerships email us at info@ora-3d.com! We want to hear your ideas!

98. Fundmore

Founded: 2018
Founders: Chris Grimes & Dinesh Kandanchatha
Website: https://fundmore.ai/

Elevator Pitch: FundMore is the leader in mortgage process automation and works with lenders to streamline their processes. We began our journey by providing brokers and lenders access to the most advanced and secure document management platform in Canada, completely automating the process in a mobile, web and app environment.

How it got started: Our story began in 2010 through 2016 as Dinesh and I were buying rental properties, flipping property and managing rent-to-own contracts and property managing. As we continued to grow the portfolio, it was clear that there were challenges in obtaining mortgages as net worth increased. In 2016, we stepped away from that business. In 2017, Dinesh, who had previously exited multiple technology companies, was preparing to buy another property. He contacted me to assist him with his next mortgage. I was back practicing as a mortgage broker. We ran into the same challenges as before, only this time, it was a lot more challenging to get him the financing he required. This was the founding thesis of Fundmore.

Growth to date: We have raised $3M in a safe and convertible debt. We started the year by launching our product and signed contracts with our ARR at $2M.

What’s next: We have several major initiatives underway including the process of finalizing commercial terms with another major bank and completing a major reseller partnership with the largest mortgage technology provider in Canada.

Ask from the community: We are in a growth phase and are looking for Sales, developers, and data scientists to join our growing team. We will also be looking to bring on a senior executive in the US as we plan to expand into that market in the second half of 2022.

97. Look-see

Founded: 2020
Founder: Brandon Kindred
Website: https://www.look-see.com

Elevator Pitch: Are you tired of spending days to weeks manually searching for UX issues on your website? Look-see is here to help with our automated UX audits. We do the UX audits so you can stay focused on delivering delightful experiences to your users.

How it got started: After working with over a dozen different software products, our founder noticed that there was a HUGE problem. Despite the amount of time and effort each team spent thinking about the user, websites and online software still had terrible user experiences. Whether it’s content that’s filled with spelling and grammar mistakes, inconsistent interactions, or just being downright inaccessible. But why was this a problem? As our founder set out to answer this question, he discovered that companies lacked the tools necessary to have real insight into user experiences, let alone being able to track the quality of user experiences over time. The few companies that were optimizing their UX needed millions of users to test various changes on. There must be a better way! After months of interviews with over a hundred UX experts, our founder distilled their needs into a tool that helps UX experts find user experience issues and communicate the value of various improvements with stakeholders in product, marketing, engineering, and even leadership through reports tailored to the recipient.

Growth to date: We raised $50k to fund market research and the development of a beta SaaS application.
We recently launched an MVP and we are now accepting new users.

What’s next: In a word…sales. We are currently looking for our first paying customers and refining our existing features to provide even more value to our users. To accomplish this, we are raising a pre-seed round of $500k

Ask from the community: I’m looking to raise a pre-seed round of $500k on a SAFE note. If you are an investor or know one who is, please email me at bkindred@look-see.com. You can view our current deck at https://docsend.com/view/p9ig9avj69rvksgz

96. Brightly

Founded : 2021
Founder: Sarah Brekelmans
Website: https://brightlysearch.com/ 

Elevator Pitch: Brightly is an executive search & recruitment platform founded on the belief that mindful, nurtured candidate relationships and assessments make for stronger long-term hires. The connections we make possible for our clients aren’t luck — they’re based on a deep understanding of people’s needs, and a compassionate, honest understanding of both the candidate and the company. We identify the candidates who can lead and support their teams towards greater collaboration, performance and resilience. Our results speak for themselves, with a 100% success rate on search mandates and 90% of our clients partnering with Brightly on a repeat basis.

How it got started: We recognized that growing startups needed a recruitment partner that could deliver more than just qualified resumes – they also needed a partner who could work more intimately with them and help navigate a hire from ideation of the actual role – straight to a signed offer. Brightly works closely with a set number of clients to articulate hiring needs into a cohesive job description, market their brand effectively to the right talent through content material and tools – and secure candidates equipped with the skillsets their business needs for the long term.

Growth to date: 16 client so far

What’s next: We will be continuing to enhance our service offerings to better help companies make the best hires, while also growing our own team.

Ask from the community: We are interested in connecting with growing startups who are looking for counsel and/or support on hiring mandates in the following areas: Growth marketing, Demand generation, Product management, Content marketing, Product marketing, Human Resources, Ecommerce, Public relations/influencer relations, SEO/SEM, and UX/UI Design.

95. Sprint CPA

Founded: 2021
Founder: Dhruti Sonani & Raj Sonani
Website: https://sprintcpa.ca/

Elevator Pitch: Sprint CPA is an online accounting firm which provides accounting, bookkeeping, corporate tax, and technology consulting services using a tech-savvy and automation-based approach. Sprint CPA works with eCommerce, startups, professional corporations, creative agencies, and many small to mid-size businesses.

How it got started: We wanted to liberate business owners from worrying about their books. So, we started Sprint CPA an online accounting firm which provides services with value-based fixed fee.

Growth to date: 0 to 20 business clients in 6 months.

What’s next: Working on to launch virtual CFO services.

Ask from the community: Book half an hour free consultation with us and get answers to any accounting/tax-related questions.

94. SingleKey

Founded: 2019
Founder: Viler Lika
Website: https://www.singlekey.com/

Elevator pitch: SingleKey is closing the trust gap between residential landlords and tenants by bringing transparency and accountability to the relationship. The #1 concern for Landlords are delinquent tenants who don’t pay rent and damage their property. We offer a solution to protect their investments for future generations.

How it got started: SingleKey started in 2019 when Viler Lika (Founder & CEO) left his job in banking to bring to market the first Rent Guarantee program in Canada. Soon after launch, we saw a lot of interest from the landlord community, and started the hard work of building the team and developing 2 additional products like our best-in-market Tenant Credit & Background report and the first FREE Online Rent Collection platform that reports rent payments to the credit bureau.

Growth to date: SingleKey has grown to service landlords across North America with its Tenant Reports, Rent Guarantee, and Rent Collection tools. The product-led approach has enabled efficient communication with our customer base, leading to our over 400 positive Google Reviews (4.9 star rating), 20% MoM growth, and partnerships with leading-edge financial partners such as Zumrails, insurance partners like Lloyds of London and dozens of landlord associations across the country.

What’s next: We have one of the best customer feedback loops out there and recently released our Rent Collection Tool. With new user settings available and a referral program landlords can’t miss, we’ll be one of the best rental risk management companies the do-it-yourself landlord ever signs up for. 2022 will bring with it a tenant-facing portal, open banking tools, and an end-to-end rental onboarding tools to help provide landlords with an operating system to manage their properties!

Ask from the community: We’re looking for exceptional talent in product, marketing, and sales roles who believe in helping us bridge the trust gap between tenants and landlords. Additionally, we’re building out a competitive marketplace for landlords and tenants, so great proptech companies with complimentary products would be exceptional partners. Feel free to reach out to info@singlekey.com if you believe you can help us achieve our goals!

93. Content Bloom

Founded: 2011
Founder: Nickoli Roussakov & John Winter
Website: www.contentbloom.com

Elevator pitch: Content Bloom is an enterprise content management consultancy that designs and builds websites and applications powered by industry leading content management systems but what sets us apart is that we are a team first and a company second.

How it got started: In February 2011, our co-founders set out to take on the large agencies of the world. We had worked at these large agencies before and we didn’t agree with their business model. The hours were long, there was no work life balance, or employee support. Everything was about revenue and billing clients while providing mediocre quality work. So, we set out to change that and started Content Bloom.

Growth to date: Size wise, the company has grown 1000% from when we started in 2011. We started from humble beginnings, with a staff of 6. 10 years later, we’ve grown into a staff of 65 across 7 countries, with plans to continue that expansion well into 2022. We’ve grown in all areas, especially when it comes to our robust roster of services. What started as a niche company working solely with Tridion CMS, has evolved into something much larger and greater.

What’s next: We’re expanding and diversifying our services and teams through storytelling, recruitment, and developing innovative technical solutions. Our objective for the next year is to take a people focused approach and build relationships revolving around core solutions that make a noticeable impact.

Ask from the community: We invite anyone interested in growing their career to explore the various opportunities we have available at contentbloom.com/careers. We’re especially searching for those interested in leading from any role, who are ready to take ownership of their work, life, and future.

92. Cansulta

Founded: 2021
Founder: Alexandra Kapelos-Peters
Website: https://www.cansulta.com/

The elevator pitch: Cansulta is a global platform that helps business leaders seize every opportunity and solve every challenge by providing easy and affordable access to world-class consultants. Better business awaits!

How it got started: It’s the typical story of solving one’s own problems! In fall 2020, small-business owner and co-founder Alex was audited. Scary! She needed clarity on some complicated cross-border tax rules. Without knowing much about this herself, she wasted hours Googling for answers, but could find one reliable “truth.” Then, off she went to LinkedIn (her virtual Rolodex) and calling trusted friends-of-friends within her network for referrals. There must be a better way!

Growth to date: We’ve just added our 35th consultant and will offer 50+ world-class experts in 2022. Our growing partner network and community provides discounts and collaboration with other top-tier providers and specialists, such as legal, payments, admin support, and grants/funding.

What’s next: Adding more and more talented, vetted consultants to our roster and continuing to enhance and improve our platform by adding more collaboration features.

Ask from the community: Take us for a spin! Our super-simple free registration gets you free Intro meetings with any consultant to discuss your business needs. We’re bootstrapped and will be looking for a select few angels to invest in early 2022.

91. Super Pawbox

Founded: 2020
Founder: Alize Bhatia
Website: www.superpawbox.com

Elevator Pitch: Super PawBox, a monthly Toronto-based Canadian dog box, was started by Alize Bhatia with the aim to help puppy parents through puppyhood. She bootstrapped Super PawBox to a $100k+ annual revenue business within 1 year and continues to actively work to expand the business. For the time being, she has pivoted the business model and focused more on creating content around the different stages of puppyhood and partnering with small businesses, and providing a platform to sell products. In addition to this, as part of their mission to help animals in need, Super Paw donates a portion of each sale to shelters worldwide.

How it got started: After I bought Kayo (our pup) home, I was really overwhelmed and stressed about training him, what are the right toys and treats to give him – there are so many choices, how do you pick the right one? This is when I came across subscription boxes and realized that though there were boxes for dogs, there wasn’t one specifically catered towards puppies. I saw this as a huge market gap and knew it was an opportunity worth digging into.

Growth to date: Within a year of being active, Super PawBox was able to reach profitability and grow the business to $100k+ in annual recurring revenue.

What’s next: Continue to grow the community in 2022.

Ask from the community:We’re looking to grow our community base on Instagram, please give us a follow @superpaw.box

90. Mom Inc

Founded: 2017
Founder: Anna Sinclair
Website: https://www.totalmom.ca/

Elevator Pitch: Total Mom Inc. is a social enterprise and media company that produces global transformative programs, products and services to take moms from overwhelmed to supported both personally and professionally to live a life rich in all areas of life.

How it got started: Founded in 2017, Anna became a new mom and noticed that there was a huge gap in what was being offered to moms like her needed support, empowerment and professional advancement and made it her mission to fuel a new generation of moms redefining the meaning of empowered motherhood. Today, Total Mom has grown into a powerful community providing thousands of access to transformative programs, event experiences, products and services to meet their needs personally & professionally. Anna is an award-winning entrepreneur, Forbes Contributor, Activator at SheEO™ & Early-stage Investor who is building transformational programs with her startup Total Mom Inc. She has been named Canada’s Top 100 most powerful women by the Women’s Executive Network.

Growth to date: Total Mom is known as Canada’s fastest-growing business community network for mom entrepreneurs after launching a robust nationwide initiative including a startup competition and business summit which garnered partners like ScotiaBank, Visa, UPS, Google, EDC, GoDaddy, WXN, Omers Ventures, VistaPrint +more. The programs provide access to funding and resources to thousands of founders growing 20k + communities in just under 2 years. The program garnered 17 million reach and almost 400k in media value including 5.4 thousand voters supporting the TOP 100 small business applicants.

What’s next: Total Mom is launching the anticipated Total Mom Network. It’s our way of finally bringing together all of the experts and brands that we love in one place and allowing busy moms to access support & community on the go and at their own pace. The platform will empower our members to access transformational programs personally & professionally through group coaching, masterclasses and community experiences. Our mission is to positively impact millions of moms through a global hub that will impact the generations to come.

Ask from the community: We are growing and always looking for passionate and talented people to join our team. We are currently looking for digital marketing and content talents and generally people who love growing communities.

89. Corl

Founded: 2016
Founder: Derek Manuge, Ben Ames
Website: https://corl.io/

Elevator Pitch: Corl provides growth capital to the digital economy.

How it got started: Corl raised $2M in a seed round and has a $15M line of credit to issue revenue based financing.

Growth to date: Continue investing in great businesses looking to keep their equity and fuel growth.

What’s next: Continue investing in great businesses looking to keep their equity and fuel growth.

Ask from the community: We’re looking for a head of marketing to drive more awareness and provide more capital to growing businesses!

88. Intribe

Founded: 2021
Founder: Sven Radavics
Website: https://www.intribe.co/

Elevator Pitch: Intribe is a platform that connects complementary brands with potential partners and collaborators. It’s like “Tinder for brand collaborations.” Setup your profile in minutes and access intribe’s curated network of popular brands immediately. Drive growth by reaching your partners’ customers with your unique message. Intribe enables complementary brands to create partnerships that drive meaningful customer growth. Find the right partners with our platform recommendations, let partners find you or if you already have a particular collaboration in mind create a project and specify exactly what you have in mind. Like-minded brands have the customers you want. Acquire them with intribe.

How it got started: I was literally solving my own problem whilst at Chicago startup AIWA, heading up global sales.We were looking to build out some marketing support for sales but we had very limited funds for marketing at that stage and brand partnerships were one of the lowest cost options to build a new audience so I decided to go with that. What I learnt from the following weeks was that although it was low cost, finding good partners could be very time consuming…so intribe was initially created to take something that took hours of research and follow up, to less than 30 minutes.

Growth to date: 75k committed in our Angel round so far, >1000 brands on our waitlist and new signups growing 40% month on month.

What’s next: Automation and partnership management tools. They key to intribe is to build meaningful relationships in a partnership community but many repeatable tasks will benefit greatly from Automation.

Ask from the community: We’re actively hiring developers and marketers and preparing for a seed round. Introductions to seed stage investors would be very much appreciated.

87. Simply Eloped

Founded: 2016
Founders: Janessa White and Matt Dalley
Website: https://simplyeloped.com/

Elevator Pitch: Planning a wedding is typically complicated, stressful, and can take months. We’re a marketplace that gives couples the exact opposite experience. A couple can come to us and in less than an hour, secure a venue and all the vendors they need for a beautiful wedding in 34 destinations throughout the US. So all they have to do is show up and say “I Do”, while our technology and systems take all of the planning and details off their plate. Our journey to radically simplifying the whole wedding industry began by first taking on small weddings, building the infrastructure to produce them at scale, and figuring out how to craft the perfect wedding experience.

How it got started: In the spring of 2015, Matt, a future co-founder of Simply Eloped, sat on a bench alongside the quaint and historic Ladies Pavilion in Central Park, New York City. A man sat across from him wearing a bowtie. Curious, Matt asked why the man was so dressed up to be in the park. The gentleman explained to Matt that he was an officiant, getting ready to preside over a ceremony in the park. The two started chatting and the officiant told Matt how difficult it can be for wedding vendors to find couples to work with. Matt subsequently had other conversations with more people in the wedding industry and heard similar feedback: wedding vendors have to spend so much of their time doing administrative business tasks and they wish they could spend that time doing what they love instead – working with happy couples! As Matt shared this insight with his friend Janessa, she recalled the wedding experiences of so many of her friends, who felt stressed planning their ceremonies and overwhelmed by the price tag. With that, Matt and Janessa decided to start a company that solved all of these problems, making wedding planning stress-free and affordable for couples while giving awesome wedding vendors a way of connecting with customers.

Growth to date: To date, we’ve only raised 750k, we’re on a 2021 run rate of 6M annualized bookings, we’ve booked over 10,000 couples and we’re in every meaningful elopement destination in the US.

What’s next: We’re on a sprint to become a household name for elopements as well as to pivot our technology for those planning their own large weddings. So much more to come!

Ask from the community: Tell your friends and family who are engaged about us. 😉

86. uCast

Founded: 2021
Founder: Rand Abou Ras, Daniel Martinovic
Website: https://ucast.xyz

Elevator Pitch: uCast is providing a solution for Podcaster and Advertisers to find each other and make CPM Ad management and deal flow easier and more efficient, our mission is very simple: “better the way Podcast Advertising works today”. Our product was intricately designed to inspire trust, communication, and a “podcast-advert” fit. We focus on matching campaigns with podcasts that will generate the highest ROIs based on numerous factors.

How it got started: uCast started with me and my Co-founder – Daniel Martinovic – in the spring of 2021 when we started talking about the struggles of being a creator and more specifically podcasting. In May we won the $25,000 New Venture Competition to turn our Figma mock-ups into a working product and uCast was born.

Growth to date: Won $25,000 in a pitch competition, launched Beta, reached 100 signups, and are running $4000 in deals.

What’s next: We are a product lead team and our focus is to continue improving the user experience of our product. We want to make it very intuitive and easy for creators and advertisers to pass deals. We are also adding product features like CPA and Hybrid Campaigns, a verification, and a review system.

Ask from the community: We are always looking for podcasters and advertisers who want to try our product!

85. Little You

Founded: 2020
Founder: Christina Guo
Website: https://www.littleyou.ca/

Elevator pitch: Little You provide a free online application for kids to design 3D avatars, which they can customize every aspect of their characters by change color, size and select outfits from our database. We will then bring the 3D model to life with 3D printing.

How it got started: Idealized and developed by Christina Guo as a unique option for kids to boost their eagerness to explore and create something exclusive, offering a customizable experience, with the development and design of their avatar, from modeling and coloring to physically accessorize the characters. The idea came up while she was studying at OCAD University. As an artist and a believer of the importance of creativity and seeing the world through the eyes of a child, the founder of Little You strives to provide countless opportunities for children to acquire social skills while bringing families closer together.

Growth to date: Since we launched in February 2021, our website has been experiencing a growing number of unique visitors daily. We have more than 300 playing customers with over 20,000 unique visitors upon launch. We are currently in discussion with 35 schools and have secured 3 businesses partnership up to date.

What’s next: We are looking to add more strategic partners in the upcoming months. Special promotion and limited edition will be introduced in the New Year.

Ask from the community: We are looking to connect with partners in the educational space and start fundraising in the New Year to expand our team.uca

84. Dwellcome

Founded: 2019
Founder: Tom Pischel
Website: www.dwellcome.ca

Elevator Pitch: Dwellcome is a SaaS hyperlocal onboarding marketplace, our focus is to provide you with the tools to create, manage, and welcome your clients, new residents, and short-term renters to their new community with curated neighbourhood guides tailored for their lifestyle needs. And giving a platform for brick & mortar stores to incentivize these users to become future consumers.

How it got started: Within the last 8 years I’ve been a landlord managing rental properties, and where I came across an issue my tenants faced. As a newcomer, many were new to the city but in some were completely new to the country. A common story was “I just moved here with my significant other and kids, I have no friends and family here who I can ask advice or recommendations from.“ This would be in relation to good schools in the area? Daycare? Doctors accepting new patients? Or a good grocery store where I can buy ingredients from back home?

Growth to date: I am confident to say that I have a working beta MVP now that I plan to launch for early 2022 for early adopters. We have a strong backing community showing interest in the potential of Dwellcome primarily in the Real Estate/Proptech space, as well as short-term vacation rental hosts.

What’s next: When the pandemic forced small businesses, stores, and restaurants to close, lose money, and in some cases file for bankruptcy I felt that I had to do something. In my opinion amazing brick & mortar businesses are what makes a traditional neighbourhood great. These are the amenities we are recommending to our newcomers after all. I wanted to build the tools that would help businesses get discovered, allow them to have a digital presence online, and most importantly give them the opportunity to sway a newcomer with an incentive in hopes for them to become a future consumer.

Ask from the community: I’ve been a proud solo founder, but I feel like I’ve crawled and I am ready to start running as I launch this MVP. And for that reason I am looking to form a founding team of co-founders, someone who is passionate about helping people, building communities, and someone who feels strong about supporting local businesses. I am also looking for funding opportunities, and networking with strategic partners who are either interested in becoming an early adopter or just looking to connect.

83. QuantigoAI

Founded: 2019
Founder: Nasib Ahmed
Website: www.quantigo.ai

Elevator Pitch: With the exponentially growing Artificial Intelligence (AI) industry, the demand for quality training data required to build robust models is now larger than ever. Quantigo AI is a Toronto-based start-up that provides end-to-end training data solutions to companies in the AI space. The company brings in the combination of people, technology, and experience to not only help clients minimize their cost of data acquisition, but also expedite the overall model training process. Areas of expertise include data collection, image and video annotation, validation of model-generated results, and much more.

How it got started: Originally launched as a Workforce-as-a-Service company called “InResource” in 2017, Quantigo AI has since streamlined its focus towards becoming an expert in generating high-quality training data, primarily for the Computer Vision space.

Growth to date: Over the last few years since inception, Quantigo AI has worked with clients from over 20 countries around the world.

What’s next: As the Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision industry continuously evolves, Quantigo AI aims to keep up with the latest industry trends including video-based annotations, AI-assisted labeling, and more.

Ask from the community: We are looking to connect with other trailblazers around the world, developing innovative AI products that are looking for a dependable, personal, and flexible data annotation partner that will grow together with them.

82. MoxyPatch

Founded: 2022
Founder: Remy Warren
Website: www.MoxyPatchUSA.com

Elevator Pitch: MoxyPatch is an over the counter device used to prevent the mild to moderate leaks due to stress urinary incontinence (SUI) in females. MoxyPatch aims to humanize leaks by getting the conversation started about SUI and to offer an eco-friendly and accessible solution for the 1/3 of all women who experience this frustrating and often embarrassing problem.

How it got started: Recognizing the need for an over-the-counter and accessible product that actually prevents leaks instead of just absorbing them (like many disposable products on the market today), MoxyPatch Founder, Remy Warren, set out to design and create a patent-pending and eco-friendly solution to this common problem faced by many women.
Growth to date: Initial user feedback has been received on MoxyPatch and has been ‘overwhelmingly positive’. MoxyPatch, (dba: Remy-Int’l Consumer Products.) is Registered with the FDA and is working to finalize the official launch date for the U.S. in the next couple of months.

What’s next: Setting the official launch date for MoxyPatch!

Ask from the community: Support MoxyPatch by following @MoxyPatch on social – Instagram, Facebook & LinkedIn and sign up to their newsletter at MoxyPatchUSA.com for exciting updates about their launch!

81. Litespace

Founded: 2021
Founder: Muhammad Jaffar (CPO)
Website: https://litespace.io/

Elevator Pitch: Litespace offers SaaS solutions to remote and hybrid workplace management. Our unique value proposition is partnerships with Co-working spaces and AI-assisted scheduling. Litespace’s main product includes Desk Booking, Office Scheduling, Health & COVID Survey, etc. Our mission is to bring teams together to maximize efficiency and engagement.

How it got started: The problem hit Jack last summer after he noticed his co-workers using Excel to track attendance and realized how inefficient this was. Later, when we interviewed various human resource managers, we narrowed our focus towards optimizing their desk booking schedule.

Growth to date: We won first place in TECDE’s startup validation competition. Not to mention, we have 50+ users on our waiting list signed up for the MVP launch this December.

What’s next: We are expected to launch our MVP by this December 2021.

Ask from the community: we are looking to raise funds to help our team and bring our vision to life. We are actively looking for a marketing co op student (paid internship) to join our team for 4 months, starting January 2022.

80. HiredHippo

Founded: 2020
Founder: Adam Gellert
Website: www.hiredhippo.ai

Elevator Pitch: HiredHippo makes the job application process more transparent for companies and job seekers. Like a dating app, HiredHippo allows companies and candidates to make a profile, and match with one another based on values, long-term goals, and other indicators of retention. If you’re a top-performer looking to find your work tribe, or a company tired of hiring wrong-fit candidates, get on HiredHippo. We’ve connected companies like TouchBistro, FundThrough, Empower, GrowthGenius, and Coinsquare with core members of their team, and look forward to helping you, too. Visit HiredHippo.ai to set up a profile and start swiping in under 10 minutes.

How it got started: After working in recruitment for 15+ years, CEO Adam Gellert recognized a gap in the industry he couldn’t ignore: today’s traditional hiring methods are outdated and ineffective. The job application process sucks for both job seekers and companies. He set out to design a new system that incorporates his extensive experience and proprietary tech built by his team at HiredHippo. It’s software built by recruiters for recruiters and talent to find each other.

Growth to date: With over 25,000+ and growing vetted Canadian-based startup and SMB talent, our customers can unlock a new way to hire.

What’s next: HiredHippo plans to build the go-to hiring marketplace for startups and SMBs, a full suite of services to gain access to talent, branding, hiring insights, and tracking. Candidates create one profile to get hired for the job they want most.

Ask from the community: We appreciate all support and interest in our mission to change hiring forever. Both companies and candidates can create a profile for free at www.hiredhippo.ai

79. Deeded 

Founded: 2020
Founders: Reuven Gorsht
Website: deeded.ca

Elevator Pitch: Deeded is removing the friction, frustration, and expense of closing a Real Estate or mortgage transaction. Think of it as the “check out button” when you’re buying or selling a home. You can seamlessly complete your closing online.

How it got started: Reuven’s (founder) recent home buying experience quickly turned from excitement to a disappointment that left him and his family spending a weekend at the local Holiday Inn because he was missing a document that delayed his closing. After spending weeks dealing with the aftermath, Reuven noticed how inefficient and unpredictable the closing process was and how most of the technology used to manage the process was from the 1990s. Deeded was born to bring the closing experience to the 21st century, making home buying the happy and exciting moment that it should be.

Growth to date: $1B+ in transactions closed, expanded in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta.

What’s next: We look to enable a friction-free future where you can buy a home on Monday and be ready to move in the next day, all with a single click. Deeded will become the Instant Home Ownership platform to make this into a reality.

Ask from the community: We’re hiring in sales, technology and operations.

78. The Leansuite

Founded: 2021
Founder: Stealth mode launching in 2022
Website: www.theleansuite.com

Elevator Pitch: We facilitate the implementation & digitization of the lean programs for our clients by connecting people, process and data. With squeezing margins, growing competition & an increased need to transition the workspaces online, companies today are struggling to keep up with all the paperwork involved to run the operations at the optimal levels, while keeping the costs at a minimum. Our software provides our customers with one single platform to perform all the necessary tasks involved in running a workplace on daily basis.

How it got started: Having worked in the industry for over a decade, the founders saw the need to bridge the gap between people, data & processes. It all started with the vision to manufacturing more agile where people are more engaged, the data is more readily available and connected and processes are digital & less paper dependant.

Growth to date: Launched our production ready MVP, the suggestion system in December and got amazing feedback from the pilot users. We are ready to onboard over 20K users in he first quarter of 2022 with a massive collaboration with a leading multi-national brand. Watch out for the big news in 2022.

What’s next: Year 2022 will be fundamental for TheLeanSuite’s growth and establishment and major focus will be on acquiring more clients and expanding the foot print around multiple nations. Our initial target would be grow across North & South American market.

Ask from the community: TheLeanSuite is looking to build a strong partner community and to collaborate with TPM, WCM, six sigma and lean consultants to enhance their relationship with their respective clients.

77. Prelo

Founded: 2021
Founder: Olu Adedeji
Website: https://prelo.io/

Elevator Pitch: We got tired of seeing 90% of Startups die due to lack of sales. So we created Prelo, a simple lead generation platform helping entrepreneurs and product makers “do marketing” themselves.

How it got started: We tried to build a tech startup to “disrupt” the recruitment industry in 2018 and we failed. We failed slowly, we failed over 3yrs and it hurt. We didn’t fail because of our tech(AI), in fact our tech was great, but our marketing sucked. We delegated marketing to “experts”, we basically allowed other people to tell our story while we paid them a lot of money for the pleasure. All the while, we were building a “data tool” to solve our problem and sharing our insights with our founder friends who were building SaaS tools. We received so much positive feedback from founders  that we had to close the curtain on “disrupting the recruitment “. We got to work in May 2021 and focused on building “Growth Data” as it was originally called. Within 2 weeks into the build, I decided that Growth Data sounded too geeky, so I renamed it “Prelo” a week before launch fromBrazilian jiu-jitsu.

Growth to date: Idea to revenue in 11 weeks with 400+ users

What’s next: We believe that we’ve got the blueprint for getting to revenue with minimal marketing and I’m actively looking to do webinars with incubators, accelerators and co-working spaces to help early stage founders get to revenue quicker by “doing marketing” themselves. I’m interested in affiliate partnerships with mentors, venture studios and industry leaders in the U.S. with a large network.

Ask from the community: We’re actively looking for Angel investors. Allso on the hunt for social media marketers who want to learn social media marketing for Startups. If there are SaaS founders building AI Copy writing platforms please connect with me. I’m looking for partnerships

76. TAMVOES Health

Founded: 2019
Founder: Madison McBay and Jessica Lunshof
Website: www.tamvoes.com

Elevator Pitch: Tamvoes is an online platform that empowers individuals to store and share their personal health infrmation with family, caregivers, and their professional team

How it got started: Jessica Lunshof and Madison McBay met through a networking event in 2019. Jessica was inspired by her own personal experiences, as a nurse and caregiver to create a patient-focused platform that was secure enough to upload and share health documents. Shortly after she collaborated with Madison McBay a Health informatics student who then facilitated the technical infrastructure of the TAMVOES platform. They began with senior focus groups in the Fall of 2019 to gain feedback on the initial vision and ensure that the software was user-friendly for individuals up to 90 years old. From there, they used the feedback to build the foundation of the platform that is used today.

Growth to date: The TAMVOES Health platform currently has over 2,000 users

What’s next: In January 2022, the TAMVOES health IOS app will be released. The Andriod app development is underway and will be available in late 2022. In the near future, TAMVOES is looking forward to implementing new data science and integration projects to provide better resources and health education to our users.

Ask from the community: TAMVOES is looking to connect with partners, foundations, and non-profit organizations that are passionate about patient-focused care.

75. nugget.ai

Founded: 2018
Founder: Ali El-Shayeb, Marian Pitel, Gilson Torii
Website: https://nugget.ai

Elevator Pitch: nugget.ai is an HR Tech startup that uses artificial intelligence and Industrial-Organizational Science to help companies better understand talent and unlock human potential. With proprietary algorithms, combined with proven scientific methods, nugget.ai combs through millions of data-points to understand people’s skills, providing unbiased data to help companies hire and develop talent. Having thousands of people from all over the world in nugget.ai’s platform, it’s now easier for companies to tap into a global pool of talent, whether it’s hiring or temporarily complementing their teams, as nugget.ai verifies skillsets key to high performers in the organizations.

How it got started: nugget.ai started with the understanding that people are more than just resumes and cover letters, and while these are important, they could easily exclude amazing candidates that have the skills but didn’t pass high level screening in recruiting processes. Furthermore, reduction of unconscious bias, the need for increased DEI talent pools, and the power of a standardized skills evaluation are proven to increase company performance and talent retention over time.

Growth to date: nugget.ai was acquired in beginning of 2021, and has since grown the team 5x. With more than 25,000 profiles in the platform, it is successfully servicing companies (from startups to enterprise) and candidates in Canada and US, and is expected to continue expanding its operation in the next year. Just in the last quarters, the company has also launched 2 new products, Nugget Scout and Nugget BOTs, helping companies source and screen talent globally, adding new skills to their existing teams using AI to fuel a dedicated talent acquisition team. Since launch, more than 20 companies across 50 roles have taken advantage of it, screening thousands of candidates.

What’s next: More integrations out-of-the box with multiple platforms in the HR Tech space, including ATS/HRIS solutions, and other solutions in the flow of work. Creation of new distribution channels for the products globally. Further expansion in talent pool available to clients, attracting more remote overseas workforce, and an even bigger breadth of talent available.

Ask from the community: We’re always looking to connect with amazing talent, whether to work with us in our mission or to work for one of our amazing clients. Please check our website for updates and/or connect with someone in our team!

74. 1Mentor

Founded: 2020
Founders: Esteban Veintimilla, Martin Serrano, Diego Robles
Website: https://www.1mentor.io/

Elevator Pitch: Technology is disrupting society, creating a fast-paced, ever-changing world. As a result, preparing students with the right skills, tools, and knowledge is even more challenging each year. 1Mentor is an AI-powered platform that enables higher education and students to understand how the labour market is evolving and to receive personalized recommendations to prepare for the future of work.

How it got started: 1Mentor is the solution to a problem that the founders faced as students: the disconnect between their skills and those employers looked for. Esteban then acquired three years of professional experience, placing students into their first work experience, hiring over 300 students and placing them in over 100 companies. There, he was able to see both sides: what skills employers looked for in candidates and what students offered the labour market. That’s where the idea of 1Mentor took shape. It started by manually analyzing the skills gaps and then preparing students with the lacking skills to perform at the workplace. Then, they integrated AI to make it scalable and personalized for each student. 1Mentor has spoken with dozens of colleges and universities and hundreds of students who have identified this problem and supported its vision.

Growth to date: 1Mentor has strong momentum. 1Mentor has closed a pre-seed round and assembled a fantastic team that can make this vision a reality; to guide anyone to be employable now and for the future. Their pre-seed round led by Matterscale Ventures, and including Reach Capital, Arizona State University Enterprise Partners, Buentrip Ventures, Velocity Incubator, Archangel Network, Corporación de Promoción Universitaria, and Martin Rodriguez Ponce. It is a massive achievement for 1Mentor to have support from international VCs, universities, and angels whose experience has already proven invaluable.

What’s next: The main highlight is the universities 1Mentor is working with. The people in these institutions are innovators and forward-thinking about evolving how students understand how the labour market is evolving and acquire the skills to prepare for the future of work. These universities are thrilled about 1Mentor’s vision and have contributed with vital recommendations so that their relationships become more of a partnership.

Ask from the community: 1Mentor is focused on developing its platform together with its university partners. They are building a game-changing technology that brings true value to every student and higher education institution. Therefore, they are looking for more institutions to work and collaborate with, both in Canada and the US. Consequently, they would love introductions to other thought leaders in higher Ed. Similarly, 1Mentor needs to keep growing its team with passionate people who share its vision. Lastly, they know there are a lot of opportunities for synergies with other professionals, entrepreneurs, investors, and companies, so they are exploring multiple alternatives for partnerships to grow and have a wider impact.

73. Contractor Compliance

Founded: 2015
Founders: Mark Bania (CEO) & Jeremy Brown (President)
Website: www.contractorcompliance.io

Elevator Pitch: Contractor Compliance is a SaaS solution that simplifies the process for enterprise organizations to collect, manage and requalify third party requirements. Through automation, Contractor Compliance is able to reduce the administrative burden of managing this process by up to 70% within 2 weeks of partnering.

How it got started: With both founders having spent time in GRC (Governance, Risk Management & Compliance) software organizations in the past, it was becoming very clear that large enterprise organizations were increasing their focus on third party compliance management and struggling to find SaaS solutions to enable their teams to be more efficient. As supply chains are becoming more integrated & contingent workforce trends on the rise, third party compliance management is quickly becoming more critical to day-to-day operations than ever before. EHS (Environmental Health & Safety), as well as Procurement & Supply Chain teams are seeking efficiency gains to keep up with this growing workload and ensure that all third parties remain in compliance for the jobs they are hired to complete.

Growth to date: Contractor Compliance is a fully bootstrapped organization to date. Since releasing their solution to the general public in 2018 (Q4), Contractor Compliance has grown by more than 150 global enterprise customers, and over 50K global users.

What’s next: Growth! Contractor Compliance has proven their product market fit, and are now looking to scale their model both domestically within North America & internationally.

Ask from the community: As Contractor Compliance scales, they’re looking to attract the best and brightest to their growing organization in all departments (Development, Customer Success, Customer Support, Marketing, Sales, etc.) as they prepare to pursue their first external capital raise in calendar 2022. Additionally, after receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from clients on new partnerships over the last 12 months, Contractor Compliance is looking to expand their partner network with other like-minded organizations to add incremental value to existing and future clients.

72. ZipLunch

Founded: 2019
Founder: Majdi Alnabih & Maj Qureshi
Website: https://ziplunch.com/

Elevator Pitch: Although the existing food delivery business is enormous ($300BN globally) and growing rapidly (16.6% annually), existing food delivery platforms have created problems for both sides of the market: they bombard restaurants with single orders at their busiest times, overwhelm customers with choices, and are very expensive for both parties. A new model is needed. Enter ZipLunch – we have built a new meal delivery service that solves the biggest problems facing our industry. We take a streamlined approach that simplifies the experience for both restaurants and consumers, while simultaneously improving restaurant margins and lowering consumer prices. We have found early product market fit in our home base of Toronto — Our customers love us! 15% of them order >15 times/month and super users order >50 times/month (see testimonials here), and we have a waiting list of 10,000 users.

How it got started: Over lunch 🙂

Growth to date: We recently got accepted into Techstars and have been growing organically with a CMGR of almost 15%, and we have a growing waiting list of 10,000 users and featured on Bloomberg here.

What’s next: We are expanding throughout Toronto.

Ask from the community: We are looking to connect with corporate partners (i.e companies that order lunch for their teams), and we are also raising an Angel round or hoping to close it before the end of the year.

71. Blsh Delivery

Founded: 2021
Founder: Sarah Brown, Jay Singh, Kate Brown
Website: www.BLSH.online

Elevator Pitch: BLSH brings a better delivery experience than Amazon to small businesses and consumers. The BLSH delivery marketplace connects anyone with e-commerce delivery needs to a network of vetted independent couriers through our platform. BLSH is able to fulfill requests for almost anything, anywhere by using a dynamic market-based approach to pricing that can handle a variety of requests.

How it got started: We wanted delivery for everything else to be as easy as the on-demand apps have made ordering lunch, but in a way that was accessible to independent couriers, small businesses and customers. It seemed crazy that restaurants were being charged commissions as high as 30% and we thought instead of trying to build ‘Uber for Retail’ we could do better.

Growth to date: Following the Lean Startup approach, we used a basic MVP to grow to $10K+ a month in sales and realized at that point we had hit a bottleneck for what we could take on without further product development. We raised a small friends and family round of $150K in the fall and started work on building out our product.

What’s next: BLSH is raising a seed round in the new year to expand on our technical and marketing efforts. We expect the launch of our app in early 2022 to 5x our growth within the current geographic footprint.

Ask from the community: We believe that people are always at the heart of any great business and even more so for an early startup. We’re looking to hire driven and creative people for our tech team to help us execute on an enormous vision. We’re in the early stages of creating our advisory team and would love to connect with other founders that have scaled marketplace business models. Lastly, with our pending seed raise we’ll be casting a big net to find the right investors to support us in the near and long term vision.

70. LabsCubed

Founded: 2016
Founders: Khaled Boqaileh (CEO), Ammar Jafar (CTO), Jeffrey Petracca (COO)
Website: www.labscubed.com

Elevator Pitch: At LabsCubed we enable material innovators to create better polymers faster with advanced automation, software, and AI tools.

How it got started: The concept of LabsCubed began while the founders worked in industry developing new innovative materials. Frustrated with the slow-pace and tediousness of development, the idea of a new method of material development was spawned. Materials play a crucial role in the advancement of innovations, but development of novel materials, such as environmentally friendly sustainable plastics, can easily run over a decade. The founder’s of LabsCubed experienced this problem firsthand and began a journey to learn from hundreds of industry experts about the challenges they face and determine the reasons behind long development cycles. By the end of the discovery process it had become clear that the material development process was highly iterative and bottlenecked by its manual nature. Nearly every step in the development cycle was manual including figuring out what ingredients to mix, mixing the ingredients, testing each iteration of the material, analyzing data, and determining the next steps. 5 years ago LabsCubed started with a goal of building a tech stack of automated hardware, sophisticated vision systems, modular designs,secure industrial IoT connectivity , intuitive software, and AI tools. Combining all these together LabsCubed is set on reducing development times from decades to months.

Growth to date: LabsCubed raised funds in a pre-seed from Greensky, MARS IAF as well as many great angels. This round fueled the growth and despite supply chain uncertainties and sales interruptions since the start of the pandemic, they have seen growth in revenue increase by 150% year over year.

What’s next: Continue to grow throughout 2022.

Ask from the community: We are looking for partners in the polymer space including experts/companies in plastics and rubbers. In addition to this we are looking to raise our Series A in the second half of 2022 as we continue to ramp up our sales and expand our product lines and services.

69. Justo

Founded: 2018
Founder: Daphne de Groot
Website: Justo.ca

Elevator Pitch: Justo is a fast-growing, tech-enabled real estate challenger brokerage committed to changing the real estate game by bringing fairness, transparency and affordability to the Canadian real estate market.

How it got started: Justo was founded by Daphne de Groot when she experienced the home buying process first-hand. She quickly realized that the historical way real estate agents help people buy or sell homes is inefficient and with limited accountability. In hopes of providing homebuyers and sellers with a fairer and more transparent alternative, Justo was established.

Growth to date: To date, Justo has raised $1.8M to develop and grow the business. This has allowed Justo to consistently achieve growth of 3x year over year with a volume of more than $400M so far.

What’s next: Recognizing the growing housing affordability crisis, Justo is striving to further grow and help service more individuals. This growth plan includes geographic expansion within Canada and investing in new technology tools for real estate to address the emerging needs in the market.

Ask from the community: To support this tremendous growth and increasing demand, Justo is seeking to expand their team. Currently, there are career opportunities for agents, marketing and product as well as operations professionals to join Justo on their mission. Additionally, Justo is searching for strategic partners to create more value for our clients. Those partners should have similar values in terms of wanting to provide excellent service for a fair price and a bold vision of change.

68. ProjectionHub

Founded: 2012
Founder: Adam Hoeksema and Brandon Hoeksema
Website: https://projectionhub.com

Elevator Pitch: ProjectionHub helps entrepreneurs create financial projections through our software, financial projection spreadsheet templates, and custom financial modeling services. Startups and small businesses us ProjectionHub to create projections for investors, lenders and internal business planning.

How it got started: In 2012, I was working on my personal taxes using TurboTax and had a light bulb moment that there should be a TurboTax like solution for creating financial projections. I called my brother, Brandon, who is a software engineer and asked if he wanted to team up and try to build this tool. He agreed and ProjectionHub was born.

Growth to date: For the first five years, we fought the long and hard battle to bootstrap ProjectionHub as a side hustle and build a SaaS business without taking on any investment from outside investors. What we learned over that time was that entrepreneurs wanted help with financial projections, but they needed projections at a certain point in time, not on an ongoing basis. Since entrepreneurs need projections when trying to raise investment or secure a loan, they didn’t want to pay for a projection tool on a monthly basis. They were much more interested in a one-time fee.

This led us to start providing custom financial modeling where we helped clients build custom financial projections in Excel. As we grew this consulting business, we started building out Excel based financial projection templates as well. Fast forward to 2022 and our consulting and templates business is about 4x larger than our software business and the template business grew 160% in 2021. Once we started listening to our customers and realized that they didn’t want a monthly SaaS product, our revenue took off. Below you can see a screenshot of our sales growth over the last couple of years.

What’s next: So what is next for ProjectionHub? We are looking to rapidly grow our financial projection template business in 2022 with a focus on adding new templates to our library, improving our current templates, educating entrepreneurs on how to create financial projections, and developing more unique partnerships with others in the industry.



Ask from the community: We are looking for ways to partner with other companies and consultants that serve the entrepreneur community. Specifically, we love to partner with companies that help entrepreneurs raise capital from investors because our clients often need financial projections when they are raising capital.

67. HUEX Labs

Founded: 2018
Founder: Anik Seth, Kiran Kadekoppa
Website: http://www.huex.ai/

Elevator Pitch: Voice is the invisible interface and has seen the most traction as demand for contactless services increased. Brick and Mortar and Retail locations are facing severe labor crises. We are bringing voice automation and providing a digital employee to augment their ground staff.

How it got started: We are ourselves Quick Service Restaurant operators and have seen the challenges first hand – how it affects the bottomline, customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. We firmly believed that “Technology” is the only way to bring a significant change to address the ongoing challenges. We are automating the whole interaction process customers have with the SMEs, Retail businesses. We see our service to provide both Voice Automation in the customer facing side as well as more real time analytics for the employees managing the restaurants and retail locations.

Growth to date: We have a huge interest from both VCs, device manufacturers, and some notable names in the Toronto area. We are already running paid pilots programs across several locations. We are planning to launch a pilot with another US-based Food chain.

What’s next: We want to deploy our solution rapidly and expand across Food / Restaurant chains, followed by expansion into Retail, Healthcare and other industries.

Ask from the community: We are looking for anyone interested in our mission to democratize Voice-AI based automation. We want to explore and conduct “Discovery” workshops with potential clients who may be interested to understand what is possible through “Voice Automation” and how their businesses could benefit from them and bring more digital services to their respective customers. We are also in the midst of fundraising so if you are an interested investor in our mission, please connect with us!

66. Equivesto

Founded: 2017
Founder: Alexander Morsink & Ryan Correia
Website: Equivesto.com

Elevator Pitch: Equivesto is a Canadian investment portal that connects early-stage companies and small businesses to the capital they need to grow through the crowd’s contributions. With Equivesto, private companies of all industries can raise up to 1.5MM, and turn their communities into investors with a minimum investment of $100 CAD.

How it got started: Founded out of personal necessity, Alex and Ryan recognized that there was limited funding resources for early stage companies in Canada. The capital environment disproportionally favoured those who were privileged and often left out underrepresented populations. At the time of Equivesto’s founding, equity crowdfunding was growing rapidly around the globe with the UK and US taking major leaps forward in their regulation to allow for more consumer access to the private markets. The precedence in the US and UK showed that diverse investor representation equated to more diverse companies getting funded. By empowering the public to invest in local businesses we are democratizing what businesses have a chance to succeed. Understanding Canada was a few years behind in regulation, we decided to set up our Equity Crowdfunding Portal, getting registered as a licensed Exempt Market Dealer in Ontario, and eventually expanding to BC, Alberta, and Nova Scotia.

Growth to date: 9 successful campaigns, 1.75M+ raised for our clients, 2500+ users, 1 company has gone on to IPO.

What’s next: Looking to grow our reach and help more companies get funded, expand our team, enhance our technology, educate more Canadians about private company investing.

Ask from the community: Looking to grow our community! Tell everyone you know that Equivesto & Equity Crowdfunding is a valid option for many companies and investors in Canada.

65. Paqt

Founded: 2021
Founder: Anatolii Shkliaruk, William Muir
Website: https://paqt.chat/

Elevator pitch: Paqt is building the Agreement Platform to help SMBs manage their business relationships, contracts, agreements, deals. It is a trusted 3rd party platform where all sides own the relationship environment and have the right tools for dealmaking in one place.

How it got started: Will and Anatolii met in June 2017 at a legal hackathon at Dentons LLP in Toronto and since we’ve been excited to change the world of agreements. It’s been an exciting journey since the first meeting and the moment Paqt was officially incorporated in 2019.

Growth to date: Won multiple pitch events, including 1st place at Hatch Pitch at the finale of the Houston Cyber Security Summit and has 300+ waitlist users along with multiple LOIs signed.

What’s next: Commercial-grade MVP Launch early 2022

Ask from the community: Get in touch to discuss how Paqt might simplify your contract / dealmaking needs that arise on a daily basis. Contract creation, e-signatures, approvals, contract negotiation & redlining, etc. Always interested in chatting with new developers, partners and potential investors.

64. Tidal commerce

Founded: 2019
Founder: Dennis Gorya (Co-founder, Partner, Head of business development & partnerships), Vicky Bagwalla (Co-founder, Partner, CTO), Aziz Memon (Partner, CMO), Dave Frankland (Partner, COO)
Website: tidalcommerce.ca

Elevator Pitch: Tidal Commerce is a digital commerce consulting and engineering partner. Tidal leverages best-in-class e-commerce and cloud infrastructure to automate and integrate processes across the entire enterprise. Services include e-commerce consulting, development, integration, and management services. Tidal empowers your team with the technology they need to provide a seamless omnichannel experience through the customer journey at scale. Powered by Shopify Plus, Tidal deploys technology integrations that enable your team with the information they need in real-time to serve customers with greater accuracy, timeliness and automate routine tasks for greater efficiency. Tidal Commerce is part of Umbrella Inc. The collective services of Umbrella’s specialized business units enable Tidal to take a holistic, cross-functional view of our client’s business and seamlessly provide end-to-end solutions, along with benefits of scale and synergies.

How it got started: I started Tidal in university and had a goal of never having to work for anyone ever again. It started small and I had the support of my close mentor Vicky Bagwalla who guided me with a lot of my decision making. A few years later, I am blessed to have partners like Aziz Memon and Dave Frankland who equally bring a lot to the table. This is an exciting beginning!

Growth to date: We have so far experienced fantastic organic growth (well over 100% growth YOY) – we have been very lucky with incredible clients such as October’s Very Own, Mastermind Toys, Desert Steel, and many others.

What’s next: Our focus is on helping enterprise businesses realize the potential impact that innovative e-commerce technologies can have to their top and bottom line revenues.

Ask from the community: We’re always looking for likeminded professionals to join our team! I’d encourage reaching out to us if you’re curious to learn more about what we’re working on.

63. Halo Ai

Founded: 2021
Founder: Dina Ghobrial (CEO), Nagy Ghobrial (CTO), and Koyuki Nakamori (Head of AI/ML)
Website: https://www.gohalo.ai/

Elevator Pitch: The No. 2 reason VC-backed FinTech companies fail is due to compliance issues. Existing tools are single-risk-focused and leave FinTech companies struggling to navigate the compliance maze and connect the dots alone. Halo Ai is a SaaS platform helping FinTech companies manage risk and meet compliance in a holistic, innovative, and cost-effective way. Think of it as TurboTax for Compliance. We take on the compliance burden holistically, freeing up FinTech companies to focus on growth while we deliver simplicity, speed, and tons of savings to a market that’s growing at 24% YoY, and expected to spend $100Bn+ on compliance by 2025.

How it got started: I was sitting in my employers’ New York agency, across the table from representatives of one regulator, The Federal Reserve Bank of New York after having worked around the clock for weeks in order to prepare for this very meeting. We were discussing the sufficiency and operationalization of certain risk management and compliance activities. Were our efforts sufficient? How do we evidence operationalization? At least 30 individuals had been working on this project for months and we had been bleeding cash to consultants and company employees at all levels who’ve been pulled out of their day jobs to focus on this one project. Yet, here we were, still discussing sufficiency and operationalization! It dawned on me then, as it nagged at me through the many months that followed, that there’s got to be a simpler, faster, less expensive way to manage risk and get compliant. A few years later, having moved on to work at a Silicon Valley tech company in San Francisco, California, I found myself in a very similar situation, despite the vast chasm in geography, time, and industry. Once again, I was across the table from company executives discussing the sufficiency and operationalization of the company’s risk management and compliance program. And once again, massive investments of people’s time and efforts had gone into the program, yet here we were, still discussing sufficiency and operationalization. This time, I knew it was time to act. This time, Halo Ai was born.

Growth to date: Despite investing zero $$ in advertising, we’ve gained the trust of a few FinTech customers whom we’re working with to launch Halo Ai soon. We’ve also amassed a healthy pipeline of other FinTech companies on our wait list.

What’s next: Launching V1 early next year and continuing to build out product features in response to customer and regulatory demands. We look forward to having our Head of AI & ML, Koyuki, deploy the full might of ML to enhancing our risk quantification and predictive algorithms and to continue to apply other forms of AI to enhance our guided workflows and risk assessments.

Ask from the community: We’ve bootstrapped the company to date but now we’re ready for scale and are considering raising a seed round sometime in the new year. Hiring more engineers, data scientists, and other professionals will naturally follow..

62. WFHomie

Founded: 2020
Founders: Pavla Bobosikova (Co-founder and CEO), Reza Farahani (Co-founder)
Website: wfhomie.com

Elevator Pitch: WFHomie is the employee engagement analytics and culture-building platform for hybrid and distributed teams. The WFHomie platform identifies gaps in employee experience, and provides the toolset to automate the execution of virtual team-building experiences, activities and workshops, as well as onboarding, peer-to-peer appreciation, employee gifting and recognition. WFHomie enables companies to operate more effectively with data and the tools they need to attract and retain top talent. WFHomie is on a mission to redefine employer-employee relationships, and empower people to lead and organizations to support better work-lives.

How it got started: After the pandemic started, we both felt like something was missing in the workplace. It got way harder to build real human connections and find joy in the work. Simultaneously, it became very challenging for companies to get visibility into how engaged different teams are, and understand and be able to prevent burnout and top talent attrition. The rate of adoption of remote and hybrid work accelerated and is here to stay. At the same time, the great resignation and shortage of top tech talent proves that companies struggle with understanding employee experience and improving company culture. We’re here to fix that and help companies attract, engage, understand and retain top talent.

Growth to date: Raised $1.9M CAD, grew over 10x (1100%) YoY, improved work-lives of over 5,000 employees globally, working with teams at companies like Wealthsimple, Lane, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, TD, BMO and dozens of others.

What’s next: We’ve recently launched Kudos by WFHomie, which is a peer-to-peer appreciation Slack bot that lets you recognize your team mates directly in Slack. It’s free and a great way to boost team morale – give it a go! Next up, we’re focusing on People Analytics and empowering companies to operate more effectively with data. That means giving visibility into DEI and insights that will help prevent burnout and undesirable employee churn.

Ask from the community: We’re looking to hire developers, and connect with potential partners in the HR, People Ops and People Analytics space.

61. Perfect Recall

Founded year: 2020
Founders: Amanda Zhu and David Gu
Website: https://www.perfectrecall.app

Elevator Pitch: Perfect Recall lets you share the voice of the customer from Zoom calls as video clips with the rest of your team. It’s faster and more effective than written notes.

How it got started: We were initially working on a developer tools product and were conducting many user interviews. We needed a tool to communicate our learnings to each other that was better than messy written notes or long recordings, so we made Perfect Recall.

Growth to date: We have 1000+ customers, including companies like PandaDoc and Quora.

What’s next: We plan to support more video calling platforms such as Google Meet and Microsoft Teams.

Ask from the community: Would love it if you gave Perfect Recall a try! Sign up at https://www.perfectrecall.app

60. ISARA

Founded: 2015
Founder: Quantum Valley Investments
Website: https://www.isara.com/

Elevator Pitch: ISARA is a Canadian company founded in 2015 that started with a mission to help customers on their journey to transition to quantum-safe security. Over the past 6 years, ISARA has become a trusted partner to companies in the automotive, aerospace, government, security solutions and OEM verticals. Working together, ISARA has made it possible to implement post quantum cryptography and enable cryptographic agility.

How it got started: HQVI asked us to do a research report on the threat to encryption posed by large-scale quantum computing. We determined that this was a real threat and that it would take considerable time to ready infrastructure and products to ensure they were protected before a large-scale quantum computer threatened today’s widely used encryption. Once this determination was made, we worked with QVI to seed fund ISARA and get started in the business of preparation for the changes coming to cryptography.

Growth to date: ISARA initial investment was $11.5M US from Quantum Valley investments, followed by $10.5M from Shasta Ventures and then $5.5M from the Canadian Government’s Strategic Innovation Funds. We have used this funding to grow our research and development team and bring a new cryptographic management platform to market.

What’s next: We continue to expand our customer-base on the Radiate™ Quantum-safe Toolkit and to complete development of our Advance™ Crypto Agility Suite. Advance will help customers to automate the process of discovering where all of their crypto assets and crypto information resides within their organizations. Right now our focus in on additional toolkit proof of concept and research engagements and to maximize the number of organizations for trial of Advance.

Ask from the community: We’re always on the lookout for potential partnerships and look to the community for opportunities to collaborate.

59. IntelliCulture

Founded: 2018
Founder: Cole Powers, Wenhao Michael Wu, Ramin Shaikhi
Website: https://www.intelliculture.com/

Elevator Pitch: IntelliCulture provides equipment management software for farms. We install our plug and play device into farm machinery to then provide insights into spray coverage, equipment health and labor management.

How it got started: The entire team has extensive experience in the automotive sector and all co-founders are very familiar with telematics and data analytics. We loved working together at companies like General Motors and Tesla, but beyond that, we share a deep passion for agriculture. This ultimately led to us seeking to apply our technical backgrounds to an industry we are on fire for.

Growth to date: We are proud to share that we are supporting growers across N.A., including some of the world’s most well known wineries.

What’s next: We are in the midst of raising our Seed round and will be doubling down on our beachhead market of vineyards & specialties crops. We are expecting to double the size of our team over the next year to keep up with the customer demand!

Ask from the community: We are actively hiring full stack developers and to connect with potential channel partners.

58. Erdos Ventures

Founded: 2021
Founder: Michael Liu, Muriel Chen
Website: https://www.erdosventures.com/

Elevator Pitch: Erdos Ventures is a Techstars backed company that leverages technology to appraise, acquire, and activate portfolios of high potential niche e-commerce brands at scale.

How it got started: Michael, CEO and Co-Founder of Erdos had an Asia based procurement business helping to connect mom and pop ecommerce microbrands with suppliers. When COVID hit, he witnessed many of the microbrands he worked with disappear when the original founder tried and failed to exit from their ecommerce businesses. He realized that by leveraging technology to appraise, acquire, and operate these businesses, there was not only an opportunity to help ensure the continuation of these valuable microbrands, but also an opportunity to allow these microbrands to reach their full potential.

Growth to date: We recently graduated from the Techstars LA accelerator program, secured financing, and are growing fast: over the last two months we’ve closed our 2nd and 3rd company, multiplied our revenue run rate by 5X to $2M annually, and have another 12 companies in late stage discussions (reflecting an additional $2M annual run rate in signed LOIs).

What’s next: We’re close to acquiring our 4th and 5th companies, on track to double our revenue run rate to $4M by the end of next quarter, and aim to reach a projected $20M run rate by this time next year.

Ask from the community: We’re growing fast and looking for scrappy, startup minded candidates who have expertise at the intersection of ecommerce, marketing, and tech. If that’s you or someone you know, we would be excited to connect!

57. SoulRooms

Founded: 2019
Founder: Arnab Dastidar, Gaurav Madani, Zain Nathoo
Website: Soulrooms.com

Elevator Pitch: SoulRooms enables multifamily and student housing landlords to rent/manage properties efficiently, and create a better appeal for modern, digital native renters. We apply deep learning to simplify the regular tasks of online application review, acceptance and automate information flow for tenant requests. Our platform also provides a proprietary renting by the room feature that enables landlords to improve cashflows by over 30%, and reduce vacancies across the portfolio.

How it got started: It started from the personal experiences of the founders on both sides of the table, being asset manager trying to streamline property management processes for a large landlord, while hunting for a rental place and having to go through scams ridden and inefficient renting process as an immigrant.

Growth to date: Over 40% month on month growth since May 2021 and recently on-boarded landlord with 250+ building across Ontario on the platform.

What’s next: Continue expansion in 2022.

Ask from the community: We are looking to connect with partners who can support and accelerate our growth.

56. Wingmate

Founded: 2018
Founders: Matt Leuschner & Louis Anagnostakos
Website: wingmateapp.com

Elevator Pitch: In most service companies, there is often a huge disconnect between Operations & Sales that keep companies from realizing their full potential. Ultimately, we allow companies to unite their troops to save time, sell more & communicate better.

How it got started: Matthew Leuschner, working in tandem with his business partner Louis Anagnostakos, took over a 2016 start-up company two years ago that was a zero to investors. Leuschner rebranded and rebuilt with a new moniker while doubling sales year over year, now boasting hundreds of clients, including the likes of Purolator. Anagnostakos had experience using driver leads to build a recycling business – Turtle Island. This intuitive, on-the-ground practicality helped Leuschner turn Wingmate around and grow it by leaps and bounds. In the competitive business technology market, Wingmate is a brilliant app with great development potential. Wingmate originally started with the idea of military intelligence with homing pigeons bringing back information from the field. Considering the evocative of air force tactical operations where your wingmate or wingman has your back covered and is there to ensure that a pilot has an extra set of eyes to improve safety and efficacy. Wingmate is taking an old-school and organic approach to growing businesses with a solid foundation and making sure their offering is bulletproof. Along with Leuschner’s entrepreneurial drive and Anagnostakos’ experience in the Waste Industry, the company is where it is today.

Growth to date: Our staff has tripled in size over the past year with even more new hires currently taking place. Wingmate was boot-strapped in 2018, and ever since been cash flow positive. We have yet to raise real capital from third parties, all of Wingmate’s growth has been organic so far.

What’s next: We hope to grow from 25-35 employees to over 100 by 2023 and continue our organic revenue growth rate.

Ask from the community: We’re currently looking to hire on our sales team. We have two open Account executive positions that we’re looking to fill before 2022. In the next 6-months, we’ll be expanding our Pipeline Management team (inside sales), and potentially expanding our marketing, customer success, and software development teams. We are always open to connecting with Strategic partners.

55. Hardly

Founded year: 2020
Founders: Allison Braund-Harris (CEO) and Roger Harris (COO)
Website: https://hardly-work.com/

Elevator Pitch: The current “attract-select” model was built for the Industrial Age. Now, in the Information Age, there are more factors than skills that lead to job satisfaction and retention. Hardly matches candidates to companies through skills, experience, management styles, and team dynamics. Hardly’s algorithm combines proprietary research and 35 years of organizational psychology studies from across the globe. Hardly shifts hiring to a “define-sort” model, and because of this, we are able to integrate complex human factors into job matching while encouraging empathy, collaboration, and reducing hiring bias.

How it got started: The two founders, Allison Braund-Harris (CEO) and Roger Harris (COO), both were getting their MBAs from Carnegie Mellon University— one of the most quantitatively-focused MBA programs in the world. They both found themselves taking plenty of organizational behavior courses simply because they were passionate about it. At the same time, Allison was recruiting for and moderating focus groups for her job. There were tons of similarities between the quantified team dynamics of CMU’s OB classes and the teams that were being formed in her research. While Allison was president of the student government, she and her board set up a mentorship matching system, which completely shifted the culture within the program. The next year, Roger was vice-president. There was such high engagement in the mentorship program (around 75% participation) that the system needed to scale. After solving for that, Roger and Allison began an entrepreneurial journey. After a few bumps along the way, hundreds of survey answers, and dozens of interviews, Hardly was born.

Growth to date: We have ~100 users on the alpha app right now. We also have 5 businesses in our 2nd pilot program, which will be launching in Q1 of 2022. We’ve also raised a small amount of funds from Carnegie Mellon and are about to raise an official pre-seed round to skyrocket our growth.

What’s next: We are about to launch our beta, so check it out! It should be up in the first week of January. It has a ton of new career development features, an elegant UX, and plenty of sharable tidbits. It’s free for professionals, and you can get a lot out of joining even if you aren’t looking to change jobs. Learn about yourself, others, and the type of organization that you naturally gravitate to.

Ask from the community: Sign up for a free account at https://hardly-work.com/. If you have 2 minutes, let us know what you think! Feedback is super valuable to us. Email your feedback to allison@hardly-work.com. If you are a business that wants to join our pilot, please reach out. If you are an angel that wants to invest, we’d love to hear from you!

54. MinuteBox

Founded: 2017
Founders: Daniel Levine, Steven Pulver, and Sean Bernstein
Website: https://www.minutebox.com/

Elevator Pitch: MinuteBox offers a cloud-based entity management and minute book solution built for law firms, accounting firms, and corporate counsels to help streamline workflows, promote collaboration, and reduce inefficiencies inherent in corporate records management.

How it got started: Three former lawyers saw an opportunity to dramatically change the entity management space, which in many cases sees firms still relying on physical books or outdated, on-premise technology. Two of those founders had a history together with Fireside Conference – an annual off-the-grid retreat for tech founders, investors, and leaders – and they joined forces with the third to dream up the idea of bringing modern cloud technology to an industry that has traditionally been slow to adapt to change.

Growth to date: MinuteBox works with 3 of the top 7 law firms in Canada and more than a hundred customers worldwide. Revenue has grown more than 500% each of the last two years.

What’s next: With an announcement coming in the new year regarding a significant round of funding from some prominent Toronto investors, MinuteBox is looking to continue its 500% growth trajectory through 2022, with significant hiring being done across all departments. The leadership team has been bolstered by industry veterans and the team is expected to triple in the coming months.

Ask from the community: We are looking to hire top talent across multiple departments and get our name out to as many law firms, accounting firms, and corporate counsels as possible. Introductions and referrals are greatly appreciated from the community, even if just exploratory.

53. Calixa

Founded: 2019
Founder: Sokmean Nou
Website: https://calixa.co

Elevator Pitch: Calixa is a fashion discovery engine powered by visual AI, helping consumers shop effortlessly from small brands they love but may not even know existed, and empowering small brands owners to be more efficient with their marketing and advertising dollars.

How it got started: Calixa was born out of our frustration shopping for new clothes (hello pandemic weight gains!). We didn’t want to buy from fast fashion or luxury brands, and realized how hard it was to find small brands and local emerging designers without spending hours reading through blogs and researching the related information. We built a discovery engine that connects mindful shoppers with curated small brands through personalized recommendations, visual search, smart rankings, and deep attribute search.

Growth to date: We’re on-track to open 2022 with more than 500 Canadian emerging brands profiled and discoverable. We’re currently raising an angel round, get in touch!

What’s next: Scaling our brand partners from coast to coast, and growing our mindful consumption community!

Ask from the community: We’re always looking to connect with full stack developers, AI engineers, angels / retail tech investors, consumer marketers and content producers (especially short video content!)

52. Goodlawyer

Founded: 2018
Founders: Brett Colvin (CEO), Parker Smith (CTO) & Tom Alvarez (CPO)
Website: www.goodlawyer.ca

Elevator Pitch: It is hard to find a sector more ripe for disruption than legal services. According to IBISWorld, approximately 8% of legal services in the United States were conducted online in 2020, compared to approximately 70% of financial services. Goodlawyer is bringing legal services into the 21st century by leveraging technology that improves usability, accessibility, and affordability. At present, entrepreneurs are forced to choose from several flawed options. Those with the financial means can procure legal advice the conventional way, engaging a professional lawyer at expensive billable rates. Many Canadian business owners, however, are unable or unwilling to pay these high, opaque prices for legal advice. The complicated legal world can also be intimidating and difficult to navigate. For these reasons, SMEs and startups too often end up without any legal help at all. This leaves them liable to risks that, left unaddressed, can damage their business and their futures.

How it got started: Goodlawyer founder Brett Colvin was in law school at the University of Alberta when he noticed something did not add up. There was a shortage of job opportunities for law school graduates, yet the majority of legal issues were not receiving any professional support (later research would show that 77% of legal needs are going unmet [Clio Legal Trends Report, 2019]). How could law students have trouble finding work, when so many people had unserved legal needs? That is when the idea for Goodlawyer started percolating. After graduating, Brett practiced law at Canada’s biggest law firm, where he experienced the problem firsthand. He knew that he would never be able to afford his hourly rate if he were to start his own business. This insight led to an obsession with transforming the traditional law firm model in a way that allowed lawyers to work more efficiently and therefore help more people at reduced costs. After four years practicing law, Brett devised a long-term strategy to start a company to serve this unmet need. In 2019, he left his job, teamed up with his co-founders, Parker Smith (a developer) and Tom Alvarez (a designer), and got to work on building something better. Goodlawyer was launched shortly after to disrupt the market and make legal services more accessible.

Growth to date: Goodlawyer has achieved significant traction in 2021 as more Canadians learn about our platform. We have helped more than 2000 entrepreneurs from every province and territory get the legal help they need. Our team has grown from 3 to 25 people, and our lawyer network now includes nearly 100 boutique lawyers across the country. On November 3rd & 4th, 2021, we hosted our first ever Goodlawyer Summit, which was our biggest ever community-building event, with over 3000 registrants from across the startup ecosystem and legal sector.

What’s next: In order for Goodlawyer to continue making legal services more accessible, we will continue developing innovative technology systems to enable the efficient delivery of our services. We’re proud to be working with the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute on integrating machine learning into the Goodlawyer platform. And we are building many other innovative tools and products that will further remove friction in delivering legal services.

Ask from the community: Goodlawyer is making it easier to be an entrepreneur or small business owner in Canada. No longer do you need to trawl online forums for answers on how to convert your sole proprietorship into a corporation. No longer do you need to ask your ‘lawyer friend’ to review your contract as a favor. And no longer do you need to pay thousands of dollars to law firms to get mediocre service in an intimidating atmosphere. Get affordable peace of mind at www.goodlawyer.ca.

51. PathMatch

Founded: 2019
Founder: Nancy Soni
Website: https://www.pathmatch.com/

Elevator Pitch: PathMatch is an AI-powered early-career talent development and recruiting marketplace that matches GenZ to modern careers, skills, and employers. Our software assigns each student a “hireability” score and helps them proactively build hireability throughout college. From selecting the right major and classes to learning skills not taught in the classroom, to networking and applying to the right internships to build experience, our platform leverages personalization and recommendation algorithms to personalize each student’s journey to landing their first job and beyond. Their video-enabled profiles are searchable via our Employer Search Product that allows employers to hire matched and pre-skilled talent all from one easy-to-use platform.

How it got started: After spending 20 years building teams for Snap, Warby Parker, Amazon, and hundreds of startups, Nancy noticed the growing volume of college graduates struggling to land jobs. After investigating and working with hundreds of college students, she realized that it stemmed from a mismatch between what universities teach, the limited careers students know about, and what employers now look for. The workforce is evolving so rapidly that millions are being left behind. pNancy and her co-founder, Ryan (former Google Software Engineer) build a career matching algorithm and pre-skilling platform to help students learn skills and connected hundreds of students to internships that built “hireability”. By landing that first internship, students were able to land additional internships/jobs far more easily. More importantly, they understood what it took to become “hireable”.

Growth to date: Since launching the free student experience in August 2021, 6700+ students have created their profiles on the platform to get matched to careers, learn relevant skills, and improve their chances of landing career-building internships. PathMatch launched its Employer products in October and has onboarded 114 paying companies.

What’s next: We’re focused on scaling our student user base to 50K by May 2022 and Employer base to 300 by May 2022. We also have plans to launch our mobile app in Q2 2022.

Ask from the community: We’re raising our pre-seed and kick off our fundraise in January.

50. Payd

Founded: 2020
Founder: Jonathan Hillis
Website: www.paydapp.ca

Elevator Pitch: The scenario today: Global student debt is at its highest, with over 3 Trillion US Dollars. With pandemic job cuts and increasing number of debtors and defaulters, it has turned into a crisis. We created payd, an all-in-one self-serve solution that will allow students to pay off their loans effortlessly, while they attend school and when they graduate. Leveraging its first true card-linked technology, payd layers banking, savings, investing, cash-back, crowdsourcing and more into the on-campus student card experience. With every tap, students will be able to grow their savings and eventually, pay off their loans.

How it got started: It all started when Jonathan Hillis began assisting student unions with their insurance needs and creating mental health programs and solutions. In the process he realized that despite debt repayment being one of the top three stressors amongst students, the issue was completely overlooked by the authorities. Fast forward to 2020, payd was found by Jon. The core of this one-of-a-kind financial technology is that it puts savings on autopilot.

Growth to date: payd has successfully raised capital on a substantial valuation and continues to raise funds to rapidly scale and grow.

What’s next: The next phase will be establishing partnerships with 3-5 pilot schools, developing the all-in-one integrated student cards and soon after, venture into the global markets. These partnerships will see payd reach 150,000-200,000 users in our first year.

Ask from the community: Since payd’s valuation is rapidly increasing with each new client and user on our platform, we’re currently looking to grow our investors who have the ability to help payd reach new heights. Please email jon@paydapp.ca for more information on investment opportunities.

49. Wize

Founded: 2017
Founders: Cyrus Moradian & Michael Maloon
Key People: Lindy Ledohowski
Website: https://www.wizeprep.com

Elevator Pitch: Rather than study or suffer alone, Wize puts customized lessons and exam prep in the hands of students. We believe that all students, no matter where they’re born or whom they’re born to, deserve the best education at the lowest possible price. We distill course content at the high school and university level down to its most important components and help students achieve success through on-demand tutorials available 24/7 and the experience students have is as if they are being walked through the materials step by step by an expert tutor.

How it got started: Wize began with a vision that all students deserve cost effective tutoring. If education is the great equalizer that can open doors to students’ futures, then they need to be able to do well to walk through those doors into the future beyond. But if students fail out of key courses in the early years of university, their entire education can be derailed. Wize started with custom exam preparation sessions at universities across Canada in courses with high-stakes, high-stress exams. Over 9 years, we built up our content and relationships with students with this in-person exam preparation model, and with Covid, we began a project of digitizing thousands of hours of specific, course-tailored lessons and resources to be able to launch our Wize Study Pass, which is essentially the Netflix of Education!

Growth to date: USD $3M in SEED funding and over 150k Wize students have been helped so far.

What’s next: We’ll be doing our next fundraise soon, so keep your eyes on the opportunity to be part of our Series A.

Ask from the community: We’re on the hunt for an amazing digital marketer. We’ve got email drip campaigns, social channels, a lively discord community, and a number of other digital marketing strategies that work really well and are poised for growth. We’re looking for someone who wants to be part of that growth and to support us in amplifying it.

48. Paytm Labs

Founded: 2014
Key People: Harinder Takhar
Website: https://paytmlabs.com/

Elevator Pitch: Paytm Labs began as a research and development division of Paytm. Since 2014, we’ve applied big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to Paytm’s data assets, providing optimal financial products to over 300 million consumers and over 20 million merchants in India.

Growth to date: We’ve been mostly R&D until now, so our numbers are tied to Paytm

What’s next: We recently softly launched, https://cloud.paytm.com/. It is a full end-to-end fraud management system that is able to make real-time decisions. It works as a dynamic rule engine to make day-to-day analyses and procedures easier by supporting a deep integration of an organization’s data in any industry.

Ask from the community:
We’re hiring and looking to expand our team!
We’re always open to connecting with potential partners

47. Blanka

Founded: 2020
Founder: Kaylee Astle, Adam Chuntz, Douglas Long
Website: www.blankabrand.com

Elevator Pitch: Blanka is an app that helps anyone start a makeup or skincare line by automating the process of private labelling, manufacturing cruelty-free products from Canada, and offering no MOQ – all through an app that works with any e-commerce store!

How it got started: One of our family member’s launched a successful Instagram account for her art. We started thinking up ways to monetize her business, and thought selling branded art supplies would be a great idea. This was a lightbulb moment for us, because we realized there are other people that likely want to start a branded product line and there were no solutions in the market that offered this service. That’s how Blanka was born! Ultimately we identified that the cosmetics industry was much larger than the art supply industry.

Growth to date: At the end of November, nine months after the app had been published, Blanka had received over 2,000 app installs and surpassed $20,000 in MRR.

What’s next: Blanka is expected to acquire over 1,000 paying users and generate $1,000,000 in revenue by the end of 2022. At this time, the team has no plans to pursue additional funding.

Ask from the community: We are always looking to connect with potential partners and other founders that are looking to collaborate!

46. Node

Founded: 2019
Founder: Armin Faraji (CEO), Mackenzie Derival (CPO)
Website: https://node-app.com

Elevator Pitch: Node connects brands with vetted influencers in 3 clicks— for free!

How it got started: Armin had built two 7-figure e-commerce businesses and operated a social media agency for 4 years, during which he experienced the challenges of executing influencer campaigns first-hand. Node was built to democratize influencer marketing and make it more accessible to brands while providing an outlet for micro-influencers and emerging creators to get compensated for their content.

Growth to date: There are over 500 brands use Node on a monthly basis (20x growth in the past 6 months) to generate content for Instagram and TikTok. Node also has Raised over 450K from senior execs and csuite and Shopify, Udemy, Shutterstock, Hershey’s and Bain & Co.

What’s next: Gearing up for massive growth in 2022.

Ask from the community: We’re actively partnering with agencies, accelerators and venture funds to offer Node as a perk for their companies.

45. Part3

Founded: 2020
Founder: Jack Sadler, Corey Stanford, Jess Luczycki
Website: https://www.part3.ca/

Elevator Pitch: Part3 is a collaborative, data-driven app for Architects and Engineers to digitize time-consuming workflows, providing a view of Project Performance never seen before

How it got started: Jess spent 10+ years working in construction, and, as a General Contractor, saw the explosion of ConstructionTech first hand before moving to an Architecture firm about 5 years ago. In this role Jess felt the tech industry had totally neglected Architects, and there was an opportunity to put that right. Working with Jack and Corey, who both have backgrounds in Tech consulting building custom solutions to new problems and industries, the team designed the first version of Part3 and found a local firm willing to test it out (thank you MJMA.ca!). After a few months refining (and rebuilding!) the team quit their day jobs and went live in Canada and the US in 2021! Part3 now exists to do their part on removing waste from the construction industry, and helping design a built world that’s good for people and the planet.

Growth to date: We’ve bootstrapped without any outside investment and built a strong user base of small and mid-sized architecture firms across Canada and the US, those customer success stories have funded our growth and set the foundation for what’s next!

What’s next: We’re closing our pre-seed round and using that capital to build our team. This is going to be the rocket fuel we need to serve the community of architects, engineers, and owners – so stay tuned, because we’ll be hiring again soon!

Ask from the community: We’re on the look out to meet great people! Send investors our way, and if you know great entrepreneurial folks looking to join as very early employees in Sales or Software Development, send them our way!!

44. Surex

Founded: 2011
Founder: Lance Miller CEO/Matt Alston COO
Website: www.surex.com

Elevator Pitch: Surex is Canada’s Fastest-Growing Insurance Marketplace™ We aim to be the most trusted, transparent, and convenient way for Canadians to shop, compare and buy insurance products across Canada.

How it got started: Our CEO Lance Miller, bought a brick-and-mortar insurance company in a small town, around the same time the banks were starting to sell insurance. So with some innovative thinking along with a need to survive, he partnered with our COO Matt Alston, and came up with the idea to sell insurance online. They bootstrapped the business and have grown from selling in 1 province to over 10!

Growth to date: We have been in growth mode for a few years now and we are not slowing down. We have recently hired over 20 new insurance brokers across Canada, we are going to be doubling our tech team by the end of the year and as well as adding to our management team and CCS team. We also just recently announced our partnership with IA Financial Corporation, which will be a huge opportunity for us to reach our bigger growth goals aligned with a great partner.

What’s next: We want to ensure our process is easy, and seamless for the customer so we are doing everything we can to make our process just that. We are advancing our technology, security processes, adding innovative ideas, all to help us become a brand every Canadian household knows, uses, and trust with their insurance needs.

Ask from the community: We are looking to double our tech department this year including: Full Stack Developers, Web Application Developers, Business Analysts and Scrum Masters. We are consistently looking to grow our Distribution Teams across Canada including Licensed Sales and Service brokers, as well as multiple support positions as we scale. Leadership opportunities will be available as each of the departments continue to grow.

43. Moves

Founded: 2020
Founder: Matthew Spoke
Website: https://movesfinancial.com/

Elevator Pitch: The Moves mission is “to improve the financial health of gig workers.” One of the major challenges is that millions of Americans earn their primary income through gig work, but they’re on their own to tackle financial challenges. No one is effectively supporting these essential workers in achieving their financial goals or educating them, and no one has built a community to help them get ahead together. Gig workers are often marginalized as these companies have worked primarily to create value for their customers, while overlooking the workers. Our focus is on generating prosperity and creating a renewed sense of pride for a demographic that should celebrate their hustle, and frankly, be rewarded for it.

How it got started: In late 2019, Matt was reading about the ongoing legal debates about protections for gig workers and their lack of employment classification. These issues provoked an internal dialogue about the gig economy and how we could make an impact. This is how Moves Financial was born – from the desire to be the leading fintech for this massive and growing workforce demographic. Building Moves has been challenging but very rewarding. Moves launched its first product – a low-interest loan – during the pandemic. From testing in our Canadian backyard to expanding into the US and meeting financial regulatory requirements, our biggest challenges are balancing core features with product vision and differentiation.

Growth to date: Moves has raised a total of $9.1M in funding over 2 rounds and we are funded by Blockchange Ventures. You can view more about our financials on our CrunchBase profile.

What’s next: Our long term vision is to unlock unprecedented value for the workers of the gig economy. We call it the Moves Collective. We define our members, “gig workers,” as people who earn their income from independent work derived from “gig platforms” such as Uber, Postmates, Amazon Flex, and many others. Gig workers are often marginalized as these companies have worked primarily to create value for their customers, while overlooking the workers. Our focus is on generating prosperity and creating a renewed sense of pride for a demographic that should celebrate their hustle, and frankly, be rewarded for it. The Moves Collective is our vision to accomplish this. Products and services we build and deliver to our members are part of our strategy to bootstrap a community that we will eventually convert into a movement.

Ask from the community: We’re a 34-person, diverse and passionate team. We strive to be a top-choice employer for those who want to be at a mission-driven company focused on helping a large and growing, but massively underserved community, without ever taking advantage of them. We are always on the lookout for great people to be part of our journey; If you work in the field of software development, product operation, design, product management, brand design and customer support and you are interested in our mission, visit our careers page to get in touch.

42. VanHack

Founded: 2015
Founder: Ilya Brotzky
Website: www.vanhack.com

Elevator Pitch: VanHack brings the world’s top tech talent to you. Over 600 companies in Canada, USA and Europe trust us. Companies such as Thinkific,Vendesta, SkipTheDishes, Enpowered, Rogers, Bench, rely on VanHack to fill their senior/intermediate developer’s positions from our community of over 250,000+ tech professionals who are ready to relocate.Our platform quickly sources, screens and matches the right talent to your job in minutes. And after a hire is made, our team is there to support with the remote starts, relocation services.

How it got started: Ilya was living in Brazil and learned that many software engineers that he met were interested in moving abroad. Vanhack started as an ed-tech company helping candidates get hired in North America. The community grew and when Ilya moved back to Canada many companies were asking him if he had access to talent. We became a recruiting company overnight.

Growth to date: It took the team at VanHack almost 5 year to get to 1000 hires. This year alone, we have placed 400 candidates, and the trajecting is to hit 500 hires.

What’s next: To be the largest international tech talent recruiting company in the world.

Ask from the community: If you are looking to hire developers and are looking outside the local labour market, consider VanHack. Quote “Founders Beta” and be eligable for 25% off placment fees.

41. Boast.AI 

Founded: Launched in 2012
Founders: Alex Popa (Founder) and Lloyed Lobo (Co-founder)
Website: Boast.ai

Elevator Pitch: Boast.ai is a fintech platform that is democratizing access to billions of dollars in R&D tax credits and innovation funding so companies can fuel their growth while preserving equity and avoiding red tape. With operations across the U.S. and Canada, more than 1,000 innovative companies have leveraged Boast.ai to get more money faster for less time and risk.

How it got started: Boast grew from the desire to upend a broken process that had existed for years—the tax credit process. Boast developed methodologies and technologies that sped up the process, and as a result, has experienced fast and steady growth and nearly 100 percent client retention rate.

Growth to date:
Boast is profitable and our revenue has grown exponentially each year
Raised $23M USD in December 2020; the company was bootstrapped until then
1,000+ customers in North America
Announced $100M USD credit facility in January 2021 to help innovative companies with their cash flow

What’s next: Boast is creating technology and partnerships to provide faster innovation through tax incentives and R&D intelligence. Innovative companies grow 260 percent faster than average companies. Boast will help companies access the billions of dollars available in R&D tax credits and funding to improve insights and grow faster. Boast software integrates financial, engineering, and project data to increase the speed, accuracy, and size of eligible tax incentives. Boast improves claim quality, compliance, and audit readiness with our experienced technical staff, and we remove the mystery, complexity, and difficulty from the process to become your R&D source of truth. The faster companies differentiate and compete through innovation, the more they win.

Ask from the community:
Let us help you recoup your product development cost
We are hiring! Visit Boast.ai career page for open positions.
Become a Boast partner and fast-track your revenue growth.
Learn from community of innovators and founders how to scale up.

40. Unwrapit

Founded: 2017
Founder: Linsay Moran, Peter Deitz, Taylan Pince
Website: www.unwrapit.com

Elevator Pitch: Unwrapit is a digital platform for companies to give gifts digitally with an unparalleled recipient & gift giver experience. We enable businesses and event professionals to give low/no waste, sustainably-minded gifts to gift recipients who then digitally unwrap and claim their gift of choice. In using Unwrapit, businesses can minimize their eco-footprint by sending a non-physical gift, and create a meaningful connection through a fully brandable and personalized unwrapping experience.

How it got started: Peter (Deitz) initially conceived of the idea of a virtual gifting platform several years ago. After working on a more B2C version for several years, he came together with Linsay and Taylan in 2020 to bring the current B2B version to life. We believe that giving gifts and making a positive impact can be one and the same.

Growth to date: Since MVP launch in Spring 2021, our platform has delivered over 2,500 low/no waste gifts, keeping what would have been physical gifting items out of landfill. The companies giving the gifts minimized their eco-footprint by committing to gifting through Unwrapit. Through the ‘pay it forward’ gift option, often featured in our gifting campaigns, over $10K has been donated to charity so far this year. Unwrapit has been entirely self-funded, bootstrapped to date.

What’s next: Onboarding our first team member! We are also thrilled to be supporting businesses during a busy corporate gifting season (end-of-year and events into 2022) and further expanding our gift supply. We’ve proven that people love innovative, interesting gifts and continue to find options that will resonate and support fellow entrepreneurs.

Ask from the community: We’re looking ahead to a possible raise in 2022 and want to connect with anyone who is a true social impact funder, specifically interested in the circular economy and low waste solutions. We also hope that FoundersBeta affiliated companies thinking about sending gifts this year or next will think of Unwrapit to support their relationship-building efforts!

39. ContentBot

Founded: 2021
Founder: Nick Duncan
Website: https://contentbot.ai

Elevator Pitch: Write content 10x faster with the help of AI.

How it got started: ContentBot exists to help founders and content marketers create more meaningful content easier and faster. AI has come a long way since I first got excited about the concept 20+ years ago. With the advancement of OpenAI’s GPT-3, I was finally able to make a product that could add considerable amount of value to time-strapped founders and content marketers. As a founder, I know how hard it is to swap those “hats” as we move from marketing to product dev to support and back again. Having an AI take on the bulk of creating content for my startup is an amazing way for me to free up more time to do other essential items that will help my startup succeed. This is the reason ContentBot exists today.

Growth to date: 27k users with $6300 MRR

What’s next: Grow, grow and grow some more. We are heavily focused on our customers at this stage and we are committed to fully understanding what levers to pull next.

Ask from the community: We’re looking for investors at this stage to help fuel our growth.

38. Pocketed

Founded: 2020
Founders: Brianna Blaney (CEO & Co-Founder) & Aria Hahn (CTO & Co-Founder)
Key people: Kasey Bayne
Website: https://hellopocketed.io/

Elevator Pitch: Pocketed helps businesses easily access billions of dollars in untapped non-dilutive funding through their intelligent matching platform and marketplace for non-dilutive funding. Based on a business’s profile, Pocketed automatically generates a curated list of grants, tax credits, and competitions eligible to a user. Then, these same users can connect with the right service providers (grant writers, legal experts, and more) to increase their success rate and get faster access to cash. Pocketed makes it free, easy, and fast for businesses to get matched, supported, and funded with non-dilutive funding – all in one place!

How it got started: Pocketed was born in a pandemic, out of the ashes of the economic hardship that forced them to close the doors of their last venture. The idea for a centralized grant funding platform came from the team’s own frustrations when trying to navigate the non-dilutive funding ecosystem in their previous businesses. The process of seeking out funds, deciphering confusing eligibility criteria, and applying was time-consuming, often unclear, and channels of support weren’t readily available. When they started to dive into the problem on a broader scale, they quickly learnt that they were not alone in experiencing these pains. “It’s not a secret that funding and access to capital is one of the leading barriers to entrepreneurship and innovation,” – Brianna Blaney, CEO & Co-Founder
This was the foundation for Pocketed, and they are well on their mission of helping all founders access non-dilutive funds.

Growth to date: Pocketed’s platform was built and validated in 14 weeks, and the team has seen impressive traction in 2021. Mid-February saw their Alpha-launch oversubscribed by more than 500%. They then achieved 10x user growth from Alpha to Beta, and currently host over 3,000 users on their platform. The Pocketed team closed their seed round this fall, raising $1.1M from more than a dozen investors including Hustle Fund, Women’s Equity Lab, and New Avenue Capital. The round was led by WUTIF Capital.

What’s next: After concluding their seed round in 2021, Pocketed has big plans for the new year. Specifically, this successful raise will help them hit 3 milestones by the end of 2022: 60,000 users, $4.3M revenue, and a successful USA pilot. They have already rapidly expanded their team to meet market demands, and the team will continue to grow with three strategic business development and growth hires to come. Pocketed will continue to explore new market opportunities with global market expansion on the radar in the next 24 months.

Ask from the community: Pocketed welcomes all founders, entrepreneurs, and business owners to join Pocketed today and to explore the non-dilutive funding that is available to them! With the referral code FOUNDERSBETA, you will be able to access exclusive incentives on their grant consulting services and can upgrade your account to Pocketed+ at a discounted rate. Beyond this ask, Pocketed is open to and actively seeking strategic growth partners that are looking to collaborate through 2022 to bring easy access to non-dilutive funding to a wider market. This includes investors, advisors, and strategic alliance partners across Canada and the USA. The team is also open to introductions.

37. Forecastr

Founded: 2018
Founder: Steven Plappert (CEO), Logan Burchett (COO), Jonathan Frazier (CTO), Steven Ambs (CDO)
Website: https://www.forecastr.co/

Elevator Pitch: Forecastr is online software that helps founders build great financial models so they can understand their numbers, make better decisions, and get funded.

How it got started: Co-Founders Logan Burchett & Steven Plappert were working together at a fractional CFO firm in Louisville Ky called Venture First. They spent most of their time building & updating financial models for their clients, and began to notice patters in behavior. They noticed that clients were not using models after they were constructed, and often had to retain Steven and Logan to continue to keep these models up to date. Furthermore, because these models were built manually in Excel, they took a lot of time to build. Because of this, Logan & Steven decided that they wanted to create a software that would keep all of the flexibility of excel, but in a structured online format with better, easier to understand UI. And thus, Forecastr was born!

Growth to date: Forecastr launched its beta in January of 2021. Since then (as of Oct 28th, 2021), it has grown to 230+ annual subscribers, with over $25k in MRR & $40k in bookings. Forecastr has also raised $3.5M in capital to date, and it is one of the few Kentucky based companies that has gone through Techstars.

What’s next: Foreastrs goal is to achieve $100k+ in MRR within the next 12 months in order to properly position itself for a Series A. From a product standpoint, it will be releasing some of its marquee features, such as accounting integrations, investor reporting, and company grouping features. Ultimately, Forecastr wants to become the default financial financial forecasting system for the Venture back ecosystem.

Ask from the community: We would love to connect with accelerators, entrepreneurial support organizations, incubators, and CFO/Accounting firms. Also, always looking to connect with companies that are interested in using forecastr. Feel free to apply to our beta by clicking here: https://forecastrbeta.typeform.com/to/Ls2659os

36. ProNavigator

Founded: 2016
Founder: Joseph D’Souza
Website: https://pronavigator.ai/

Elevator Pitch: Sage by ProNavigator is the only SaaS knowledge management platform purpose-built for insurance. It combines AI-powered search and discovery specifically trained on insurance terminology with an all-in-one library for insurance information across products, regions, and documents. More than 125 insurance businesses including leading insurers and agents in North America trust Sage to save time, provide superior service, and seize revenue opportunities. The award-winning platform leverages the latest advancements in artificial intelligence and natural language understanding to instantly, automatically, and accurately retrieve answers to employees’ questions. A single system of record for frequently changing insurance information, it helps front-line insurance workers to find what they need when they need it.

How it got started: ProNavigator was born in 97 minutes. That’s how long Joseph D’Souza was on the line with his insurance carrier to answer what he thought was a routine question on his policy. It was the end of his relationship with this insurer and the beginning of ProNavigator. Joseph founded ProNavigator to make insurance better for everyone.

Growth to date: Since its inception in 2016, ProNavigator has grown rapidly. More than 25,000 insurance professionals across 125 customers rely on ProNavigator for streamlined information discovery and access, including some of the largest insurance carriers in North America. A team of 50+ based in Canada and the U.S., the company is backed by leading investors with funding to date to $7.8 million

What’s next: In 2022, ProNavigator is set to double its revenue, with growth focused on expanding markets in the U.S. and increasing hiring in sales, marketing, and engineering.


Ask from the community: ProNavigator is always on the lookout for great to talent to help thousands of insurance professionals become more productive. Take a look at job openings: https://pronavigator-talent.freshteam.com/jobs

35. Local Logic

Founded: 2015
Founders: Vincent-Charles Hodder, Gabriel Damant-Sirois, Colin Stewart
Website: https://locallogic.co/

Elevator Pitch: Local Logic, is digitizing the built world to make it universally understandable and actionable for consumers, investors, developers, and governments with the ambition of helping build cities that are more sustainable and equitable for the people that live in them. To achieve that dream, we’ve built proprietary insights on over 30Bn data points, that quantify the built world using data and AI. Our insights are used across the real estate vertical to inform decisions that impact the $217T real estate market throughout the US and Canada.

How it got started: It all started in 2014 at McGill University, where Vincent-Charles Hodder and Gabriel Damant-Sirois, two students enrolled in the master’s program in urban planning, created a tool for finding housing using criteria such as the distance from public transportation, the presence of local parks and even the amount of noise pollution. These two young men, plus Colin Stewart, another master’s student, were convinced that data had significant underexploited potential, so they decided to get into the field of urban data. “When we finished our master’s, we could have found a job as planners with the City of Montreal, but we said to ourselves we could have an impact on cities around the world, not just on a single city,” explains Vincent-Charles.

Growth to date: Total $10M in funding Series A for 8M
Over the last 3 years we have expanded from the Canadian to the US market, the US revenue now accounts for 48% of our revenue. We also have a 140% Net Revenue Retention – meaning not only our clients stay with us, their account size increases as we deliver more and more value.

What’s next: We’re in business to help build more sustainable cities, and we’re laser focused on bringing data and insights to more decision makers that impact the sustainability and livability of our cities. From developers to investors and financial institutions, we believe there is a huge opportunity to use data to measure and optimize decisions being taken by a number of stakeholders in the real estate industry.

Ask from the community: We are growing and looking for top talent, see open roles here: https://locallogic.co/careers/#openroles

34. Aterlo

Founded: 2014
Founders: Gerrit Nagelhout (CEO), Dan Siemon (CPO), and Scot Loach (CTO)
Website: https://aterlo.com

Elevator Pitch: Created by Aterlo Networks, Preseem is an Edge Network Quality of Experience (QoE) Solution for internet service providers (ISPs) that enables proactive management of networks to achieve higher subscriber satisfaction while lowering costs and increasing revenue. We enable local and regional ISPs to thrive by solving network problems with products that people love.

How it got started: Aterlo was founded in 2014 when three experienced network professionals (our founders!) teamed up to create a solution that allowed users to stream video online without any lag or buffering, regardless of the quality of their internet connection. In 2017, we pivoted to create Preseem, a product that empowers ISPs to proactively identify and solve network issues, while lowering support costs and improving QoE for their subscribers. Preseem consists of both cloud-based data, analysis and visualization, as well as hardware appliances that collect subscriber metrics and optimize the subscriber experience.

Growth to date: Since deciding to focus on Preseem exclusively in 2017, Aterlo has grown to include over 400 fixed wireless deployments around the world, with the majority of our customers located in the US. Aterlo now has over 25 employees in Waterloo and the US, and we are actively hiring as we continue to expand.

What’s next: In early 2022, Aterlo will be adding exciting new features and product tiers to Preseem to provide even more value for ISPs. New enhancements that our customers can look forward to include the launch of simple, easy-to-understand scoring and metrics throughout Preseem that provide expert insights on the health of a given network. Giving our customers the ability to access accurate, at-a-glance metrics on equipment capacity and subscriber conditions will help them find and fix issues quickly before they turn into problems and support calls, leading to happier customers, lower support costs, and higher revenues.

Ask from the community: The team is growing and we’re looking to hire talented developers who are ready for an exciting challenge and rewarding role at a fast-growing company with a collaborative culture and great benefits!

33. Biiibo

Founded: 2020
Founders: Roger Sabat, Alex Sabat, Amanda Sabat
Website: www.biiibo.com

Elevator Pitch: Biiibo is an on-demand digital marketplace and platform for construction supplies that is streamlining the purchase and delivery of materials in the construction industry. Through the Biiibo app and website, homeowners and professional contractors can better manage their renovation projects, find the supplies they need, and order their materials ahead of time or on-demand within two hours. Its subscription service, Biiibo Pro, gives customers unlimited, free same day deliveries. In addition to the material marketplace, Biiibo offers builders and contractors tools to better manage their projects and their teams, enabling builders to build more efficiently.

How it got started: Biiibo was started as a spin-off of our family business wholesaling building supplies. Our team noticed that the building supply market was fractured, inefficient, and opaque. We also noticed that service levels were poor across the industry, forcing contractors to spend a lot of time procuring supplies. This led to a sub-par customer experience creating confusion and costing contractors’ tens of thousands of dollars in yearly lost productivity. Biiibo addresses this by digitizing the shopping experience and offering customers a true one-stop shop solution with flexible and on-demand delivery options. Altogether, Biiibo saves the average contractor thousands of dollars every year.

Growth to date: Since our founding in March 2020, our team has grown to more than 100 people. We’ve been fully self-funded and have expanded our operations from Toronto to Vancouver, serving thousands of customers.

What’s next: After growing rapidly in Canada, our team is preparing to expand into the US market. We’re also actively hiring for several senior positions across different departments including engineering, finance, sales and marketing.

Ask from the community: Our team is looking to hire more developers and is also interested in connecting with venture partners as we seek to raise our first round of institutional capital.

32. Perch

Founded: 2018
Founder: Alex Leduc
Website: https://myperch.io/

Elevator Pitch: Perch gives personalized financial insights that help optimize a buyer’s path to homeownership. Once a homeowner, we enable them to build wealth by putting their home equity to work. All of this is made possible through highly skilled professionals and our proprietary analytics platform.

How it got started: Working in the financial sector for over 7 years, Perch founder Alex Leduc saw first-hand how broken the system was. Amongst other things, stakeholders didn’t have access to equal levels of information, clients were getting advice from the wrong “experts”, a pessimistic outlook for future home buyers where home ownership is viewed as an unachievable goal and an overreliance on home equity for retiring Canadians that have insufficient liquid assets to fund their retirement. After validating that nobody was addressing these issues holistically, Leduc set out to do it himself.

Growth to date: In 2021, Perch closed a $1M seed round and was selected to join the 2022 REACH Canada accelerator. This global scale-up program is operated by Second Century Ventures, the strategic investment arm of the National Association of Realtors®. Perch has grown from a team of three in 2020, to 15 employees in 2021. Perch was recently featured in the Toronto Star, BetaKit, TechTO and Realtor Magazine.

What’s next: With thousands of happy users to date, as well as a 174% referral rate, Perch is now focused on scaling operations and building new tools to help Canadian home buyers and homeowners.

Ask from the community: Know anyone thinking about buying a property or looking to get a mortgage pre-approval? Tell a friend to sign up for a free Perch account to start their home buying plan or share some of our online tools with them.
For homeowners, our monthly property valuation feature makes it easy to track your returns just like you might track your stock portfolio. Sign up to get started.
Just curious about Perch’s mortgage rates? You can take a peek without having to create an account (but if you would like to access more in-depth insights, we highly recommend doing so!)

31. Jeeves

Founders: Dileep Thazhmon (Co-founder/CEO) & Sherwin Gandhi (Co-founder/President)
Founded: 2019
Website: https://tryjeeves.com/

Elevator Pitch: Jeeves is revolutionizing business finance with borderless business banking for Startups and SMEs – globally. The Jeeves corporate credit card and expense management platform were built to empower founders, businesses, and teams of all sizes. Not only is Jeeves free to use, but the platform also offers the ability to pay back in multiple currencies while completely eliminating FX, monthly, and annual fees. With the flexibility to use both physical and virtual credit cards for your team members, you can better manage expenses on the platform that also provides significant ROI with 1-3% cashback on all spend.

How it got started: Dileep Thazhmon and Sherwin Gandhi founded Jeeves in 2019 under the premise that startups have traditionally had to rely on local and country-specific financial infrastructure. To ease this pain point, Jeeves was created as the first cross-country, cross-currency expense management platform that allows any company to spin up their finance function in minutes and get access to 30 days of credit on a true corporate card, non-card payment rails, and cross-border payments. Thousands of global companies trust Jeeves with their financial payment stack.

Growth to date: In September 2021, Jeeves raised a $57 million Series B at a $500 million valuation led by CRV, including participation from Tencent, SVB Capital, Alkeon Capital Management, Soros Fund Management, and a high-profile group of angel investors. Founders of a dozen unicorn companies also put in money in the series B including Clip CEO, Adolfo Babatz, QuintoAndar CEO, Gabriel Braga, BlockFI CEO, Zac Prince, and others. Their Series A closed in May 2021 at a valuation just north of $100 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Jeeves has raised $188 million to date to fuel its international expansion.

What’s next: In addition to its expense management platform and corporate card, the company has launched Jeeves Growth – allowing startups and SMEs to scale faster with easy to access non-dilutive capital in their local currency. Jeeves Growth, a new product that provides revenue-based financing solutions to companies across the globe, leverages the company’s infrastructure and platform to provide longer-term financing options to startups and SMEs on top of our cards and revolving credit lines. This aims to solve a significant challenge faced by global startups and SMEs.

Ask from the community: Kick-off 2022 by getting ahead. By signing up for a Jeeves card, you’ll get access to a no-fee, no-interest corporate credit card with up to 3% cashback – no strings attached. To get started and to learn more, please apply now at https://tryjeeves.com/ or reach out directly to kevin@tryjeeves.com.

30. ForwardAI

Founded: 2021
Founders: Nick Chandi CEO & Co-Founder; Jag Barpagga CIO & Co-Founder, Joe Mutti CTO & Co-Founder
Key people: Jane Ingram
Website: https://www.forwardai.com/

Elevator Pitch: ForwardAI aggregates accounting and other financial data to offer financial institutions, lenders, and small business-focused fintechs the opportunity to provide better services to small businesses, including faster loan underwriting and predictive cash flow tools. Our aggregated data is supplied through seamless, secure workflows in three forms: historical, real-time, and predictive. Our three core products are the versatile Precise API, the streamlined Access Partner Portal, and Predict-as-a-Service, a premium white-label cash flow forecasting and planning tool.

How it got started: Our leadership team has made it their life’s mission to help small businesses stay financially healthy. Co-founders Nick and Jag have worked in the accounting field for over 40 combined years. Starting out in systems administration, they eventually founded and sold one of Canada’s largest accounting IT companies. While working on that project, they also founded and built from scratch an online accounting software used by over 40,000 businesses worldwide. Nick and Jag became increasingly aware of how complicated the small business loan application process was during the start of the pandemic. Their accounting users would be requesting PDF statements weekly while applying for loans to provide new information to the lenders. For some SMBs, it took months to secure financing. These hiccups were confusing – after all, with their experience with accounting systems, it seemed strange that lenders weren’t using technology to connect to directly to the information they needed. After more research, they realized that small business services, in general, were underdeveloped across the banking industry. Determined to make a difference, ForwardAI was created to bridge the gap for financial institutions, lenders, and other fintechs.

Growth to date: ForwardAI’s first year was spent securing SaaS agreements with companies in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. We also released three products (an API and two portals) and several major product updates. This includes Predict-as-a-Service, a premium white-label cash flow forecasting tool for banks to offer SMB clients, and PreciseMatch, a revolutionary intelligent transaction mapping technology for small business lenders, which can turn accounting books validation into a process that takes only seconds.
We’ve also entered into partnerships with various industry organizations across North America, including becoming an approved vendor of the Canadian Lenders Association (CLA) and joining the Financial Data Exchange (FDX).

What’s next: We’re developing our current integration offerings by expanding to payments and commerce software such as Square, Stripe, Paypal, Amazon Marketplace, and Shopify. Meanwhile, we’re constantly working on new product updates for our Precise API, Access portal, and Predict-as-a-Service tool.

Ask from the community: We’re looking to make connections with like-minded fintechs and connect with companies looking to make small business services (especially lending and banking) more accessible and streamlined. We’re also looking to double our current workforce in 2022, so please get in touch if you’re interested in being a part of our growing team.

29. Edgecom Energy

Founded: 2016
Founder: Behdad Bahrami
Website: EdgecomEnergy.ca

Elevator Pitch: Edgecom Energy’s all-in-one energy platform simplifies the consumption and management of energy, leading to reduced costs and emissions for large energy users.

How it got started: Behdad Bahrami was an industrial energy manager, handling over $30M+ in energy spending per year. The tools and devices used to manage his home energy which cost $100/month were more advanced than anything commercially available for industry. This gave Behdad the spark to start Edgecom energy.

Growth to date: Edgecom Energy serves a growing customer base of 50 large industrial and commercial clients including RBC, CF (Eaton Centre), and Metrolinx.

What’s next: Edgecom Energy’s next big step will be launching our IoT platform which will simplify and speed up energy metering solutions.

Ask from the community: We’re looking to connect with partners, developers and talent in general.

28. Local Line

Founded: 2016
Founder: Cole Jones
Website: localline.ca

Elevator Pitch: Local Line is a commerce platform for the local food supply chain. We help farms, wholesalers, and farmers markets sell B2C and B2B.

How it got started: Cole, the founder, started connecting farms & chefs in University and offering farm fresh delivery for a fee. It snowballed into a SaaS platform after he graduated and went full time at the business.

Growth to date: Local Line has over 9,000 active farms across North America using our platform. We’re opening access to the UK, Australia, and New Zealand in early 2022.

What’s next: We launch our brand new Local Line 2.0 platform in Q1, which includes over 300 new features and improvements.

Ask from the community: we’re looking for talented marketers and sales professionals to join our team. Apply at site.localline.ca/careers.

27. Kalendar AI

Founded: 2021
Founder: Ravi Vadrevu
Website: https://kalendar.ai/

Elevator Pitch: Kalendar AI books new meetings on autopilot by sending personalized invitations

How it got started: After three years of building in AI labs, we’ve identified a core problem that’s stunting the growth of B2B. Sending personalized invitations to take a meeting has brought down the time to prospecting from 7 days to 30 seconds.

Growth to date: $3.2m raised, reached $1m ARR in 3 months

What’s next: Our goal is to reach $10m in revenue in the next 18 months.

Ask from the community: If anyone’s looking for a pilot, we are happy to offer 40% off for your foundersbeta community.

26. Adaptive Pulse

Founded: 2020
Founder: Jennifer Huynh, Johnson Phanyaseng
Website: https://adaptivepulse.com/

Elevator Pitch: Adaptive Pulse analyzes customer behavior and produces actionable insights to drive business outcomes for data-driven teams. We predict and identify at-risk and expansion customers for B2B SaaS companies. We help prioritize retention efforts, reduce churn and increase revenues. Using advances in NLP and predictive analytics, we analyze internal and external data sources including structured and unstructured data to provide a unified view of the customer, which segments are the most at-risk, likely to expand, and recommend how to successfully convert them.

How it got started: Jennifer discovered this problem first hand at the B2B SaaS company that she was previously working with when trying to understand and increase customer retention while Johnson built similar internal tools for the retention team at the company that he was previously working at.

Growth to date: Adaptive Pulse has grown from just the 2 founders bootstrapping for 14 months to an amazing team of 15 and growing after oversubscribing their pre-seed round. They are serving both U.S. and Canadian companies, from growth stage to public organizations, and are continuing to grow. Adaptive Pulse has taken part in many great programs including CDL, Intuit and Highline Beta, NextAI, and FoundersBoost accelerators.

What’s next: Adaptive Pulse aims to help all businesses better understand and retain their customers by helping keep a Pulse on every customer with their proprietary AI models, which continuously improve and get better overtime. By getting visibility into the whole customer journey, we can accurately prioritize which customers need to be focused on. Armed with this data and insights, we are becoming the go to intelligence layer sitting on top of customer data.

Ask from the community: Adaptive Pulse will be looking to raise their seed round in the near future with commitments interest from some prominent seed funds, but introductions to B2B SaaS obsessed funds would be appreciated. Introductions to Customer Success professionals to join Communitech’s P2P group would also be appreciated as we are always looking to connect people in the industry to share insights and experiences.

25. Vetster

Founded: 2020
Founders: Mark Bordo, CEO and Regan Johnson, CTO
Website: vetster.com

Elevator Pitch: Vetster is the world’s fastest growing veterinary telehealth platform connecting pet owners with top-rated licensed veterinary professionals. Pet owners can speak to a veterinary professional from the comfort of their own home by video or online chat – 24/7.

How it got started: Mark and Regan are serial entrepreneurs who have built world-class marketplaces. The duo built CanadaStays, Canada’s first short-term rental marketplace which was subsequently sold to Expedia. The deal was a competitive acquisition rounding out Expedia’s offering at a time when Airbnb was entering the country and the short-term rental market was heating up. Like most entrepreneurs, it wasn’t long before Mark and Regan were thinking about their next venture. Mark, who has a 14 year old cockapoo Riley with veterinary care needs, recognized a massive gap in the market. Similar to the trend of human telehealth, veterinary telehealth is a fantastic option for convenience, safe and effective care that takes the stress out of the experience. When the pandemic hit, Mark and Regan accelerated their idea and quickly built a marketplace with thousands of licensed veterinary professionals across all provinces and states in North America. At a time when consumers adopted more pets than ever before, causing the industry to balloon to $100B, veterinarians were overloaded and trying desperately to see as many animals as possible while managing COVID-19 constraints. Vetster has become a go-to resource for pet owners looking to access care.

Growth to date:
Vetster closed an oversubscribed Series A at $12.5M CAD in May, 2021.
The company has expanded across all provinces in Canada, states in America and is now expanding into the UK.
In August, the company expanded its marketplace to include prescription fulfillment and direct-to-home delivery with its Online Pharmacy VetsterRx.

What’s next: Vetster is on a mission to become the world’s leading veterinary marketplace for virtual pet care. We will continue to expand internationally, establish partnerships that drive deeper value for our pet parents, and continue building our world class experience to help pet parents manage their pet’s health.

Ask from the community: Vetster is hiring for roles in engineering, design, marketing and business development (https://careers.vetster.com). We’re building a progressive, inclusive global brand ideal for candidates with startup experience and a roll up your sleeves attitude.

24. Shinydocs

Founded: 2013
Founder: Jason W. D. Cassidy
Website: https://shinydocs.com/

Elevator Pitch: Shinydocs is rethinking how data is used to drive real business results. Through our two versatile products, Shinydrive and Shinydocs Cognitive Suite, we connect all of an organization’s information so they can make more efficient and informed business decisions. We also arm them with a comprehensive understanding of their data, empowering them to tackle any data challenge with confidence. By rethinking how data and documents are accessed and used, we transform how businesses function.

How it got started: Shinydocs CEO Jason Cassidy has been solving digital enterprise technology challenges for over 20 years. He founded Shinydocs with the belief that there is a better way for organizations to manage their data. Together with our other founders, David Yoon and Khalid Merhi, Jason incorporated Shinydocs in 2013 and the company has been growing exponentially ever since.

Growth to date: Since 2013, Shinydocs has grown year over year organically through successful bids and attracting industry-leading enterprise customers. The company’s financial performance over the last 3 years has been impressive with their customer base and revenues growing significantly over that period. The company has recently secured several significant large deals and is finalizing renewals with various current customers.

What’s next: Shinydocs is on a mission to change the way organizations find, understand, and action their data to make better business decisions. To keep up with growth and to ensure continued success, the company is planning a bold hiring strategy over the next five years. They will be filling roles in a variety of areas, including business development, product, R&D, marketing and support.

Ask from the community: Shinydocs is currently looking to hire a number of roles – mostly on the dev and technical side of the business – and are always interested in talented folks. Join our growing team today by visiting our website: https://shinydocs.com/careers.

23. Agilicus

Founded: 2018
Founders: Don Bowman, Angelo Compagnoni
Website: Agilicus.com

Elevator Pitch: At Agilicus, we believe that good cybersecurity should be simple and affordable, for organizations big and small. Through a cloud-native cybersecurity platform, we help organizations provide simple, secure access to corporate resources for their workers. As a result, Agilicus ensures any user, on any device from anywhere in the world can access authorized resources without the need for a VPN.

How it got started: After the global success of Sandvine Incorporated which was acquired in 2017, former co-Founder/CTO Don Bowman set out to combine his passion for cyber security with cloud native technology to make remote access easier, more secure and affordable. The idea and concept was tested and developed in an operational setting with 1000s of users.

Growth to date: Agilicus developed the platform with strategic customers through paid trials. These customers needed to provide secure remote access to hundreds of frontline line workers to corporate applications. Those organizations are now customers. With their support, feedback, and a proven need for an affordable, easy to deploy cybersecurity platform, Agilicus is acting on its vision of a safer internet and adding new clients. In 2021, through our initial success, Agilicus was proud to introduce it’s platform and bring on institutional investors and strategic individual investors.

What’s next: In 2022, we are resolute in our mission to deliver secure remote access to organizations of all sizes, helping to make the internet a safe place to do business. We are focused on product expansion, helping new clients and customers improve their cyber resilience, and extending our team as we grow Agilicus into a global cybersecurity company.

Ask from the community: Accessibility to cyber security has never been more important. Our team is excited to find partner organizations who share our vision of making a safer internet for people and businesses and can help make that happen. We are also always on the lookout for talented individuals ready to help make a difference in the way people are accessing the internet. As we expand we will be looking for developers, sales, and marketing professionals.

22. Goose Chase

Founded: 2011
Founder: Andrew Cross
Website: https://www.goosechase.com/

Elevator Pitch: Inspired by scavenger hunts, GooseChase is an online platform that enables people to create exceptional experiences for their communities. From teachers aiming to boost learning in the classroom all the way to Fortune 500 organizations using GooseChase to run their employee onboarding, the use cases really are endless. If your goal is to activate, engage, or educate a group, in a delightful, meaningful way, GooseChase is the easy (and fun!) solution for you.

How it got started: GooseChase was “hatched” at a Hackathon at the University of Waterloo. Like most good ideas, it had legs (wings!) of its own, and we instantly saw demand for the platform. We knew this was going to be interesting when we saw people completing missions like jumping into pools fully clothed, shaving company logos onto their heads…all for a GooseChase (and maybe good karma and bragging rights). We knew we had tapped into something exciting and engaging, and so we built the platform to keep up with that power!

Growth to date: To date, millions of app users have participated in more than 630,000 GooseChase experiences.

What’s next: Our team has grown by 200% in the past two years. With the right people in place, we’re poised for more innovation and more success than ever! Without sharing too much, here’s what we’re busy hatching…
Connecting communities is at the heart of everything we do. Our Product team will be rolling out new features to bring that to life within the platform. Time and again, we’ve seen customers use GooseChase in ways we never could’ve imagined. We thought we would facilitate scavenger hunts and games, when in reality we’re used on the daily for onboarding, training, fundraising, learning, tourism, and in a million other ways to make everyday tasks more exciting. We’re working on subscription offerings to support organizations year ‘round. We’ve been in flight for more than a decade, and our feathers could use some preening. We’re working on exciting updates to have our branding reflect our vision, mission, and the fun personalities that make up our flock.

Ask from the community: We are always looking for smart, passionate people to join our flock! See open roles here: https://apply.workable.com/goosechase/

21. Pronti

Founded: 2021
Founder: Mila Banerjee, Ian Kemp, Andrea Veintimilla
Website: https://www.pronti.app/

Elevator Pitch: Getting personalization right for Retailers is a $1 Trillion dollar opportunity. The privacy landscape, and cost per click are barriers for retailers to personalize the shopping experience. With over 6 million searches a month on how to put together outfits – consumers are looking to answer “how do I wear that?”. Pronti provides styled and personalized outfits to help with a shoppers see how they can wear an item from their favourite store. Shoppers can explore in Pronti’s app or through an e-commerce integration. The Pronti app unlocks further personalization and curation.

How it got started: Mila was coaching a young woman and discovered that she spent 1 hour -1 hour and a half preparing her outfit for the next day. This was an important part of her self expression, confidence, and professional image. The more people Mila spoke to, the more she realized the magnitude of the shared closet and shopping struggles. When Covid hit and shopping online became the only way to find new things, Shop with Closet in Pronti was born.

Growth to date: 1000 MAU since September 2021 and 19 retail partnerships. We have also been supported by technology development projects through the Ontario Centers for Innovation.

What’s next: We are growing and innovating every day – with new updates and improvements weekly. Watch for exciting improvements to shopping! We also have exciting features such as deeper integrations and recommendations with the weather. 2022 is going to be a great year for retailers to create great personalized experiences with Pronti.

Ask from the community: We are seeking innovative retailers who would like to pilot our website integration – Convert with Outfits. We are also open to introductions and outreach from investors excited about the personalization opportunity.

20. Frugl

Founded: 2021
Founder: Michael Gauthier, Megan Woerlein
Website: https://www.getfrugl.com

Elevator Pitch: Frugl is the future of financial wellness in a post-pandemic world. Frugl offers a platform for employers to champion financial wellness and contribute to employees’ money goals directly through their employees’ Frugl App. The Frugl App helps employees build better money habits by tapping into their psychology, and makes money social with team challenges, and weekly personal insights. When it comes to company perks, financial wellness is the new ping pong table.

How it got started: Michael and Megan teamed up on Frugl as a personal mission after witnessing how big of an impact financial wellness has had on those around them. Since the pandemic put a spotlight on the fragility of people’s finances, and also accelerated the shift to a remote-first workplace, they saw a perfect storm where people needed help financially more than ever and where the perks and benefits offered by employers would soon become irrelevant.

Growth to date: Frugl has raised Angel funding for their launch and has over 5,000 people (and growing weekly!) signed up on our pre-launch waitlist.

What’s next: Frugl is currently onboarding beta companies and will be available publicly to Canadian companies in early 2022

Ask from the community: We are continuing to raise funds to expand our team. We are looking for companies interested in being part of the next evolution of inclusive financial incentives to sign up for our early access program to receive reduced pricing.

19. Mappedin

Founded: 2011
Founder: Hongwei Liu
Website: https://www.mappedin.com/

Elevator Pitch: Headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, Mappedin is the leading platform for indoor spatial data management, digitizing venues, and building best-in-class indoor mapping and wayfinding experiences. Built for scale, Mappedin’s flexible platform and enterprise grade tools enables them to work with leading operators, developers and integrators around the world. Mappedin has set out to digitize all indoor spaces, regardless of vertical, enabling their customers to leverage maps for a variety of use cases and experiences.

How it got started: As an electrical engineering student at the University of Waterloo Hongwei Liu had just come off a work term with Research in Motion, when he applied to live at the University’s Velocity Incubator residence. While there, the idea for Mappedin was conceived as something to help other students find their way around campus.

Mappedin signed up two malls, the university, and a casino as their first four customers. Along the way, they hired their first paid staff and Liu decided to postpone his engineering studies and work on the business full time.

Soon after, Liu realized the most valuable problem Mappedin was solving was helping customers — property managers such as Cadillac Fairview or Ivanhoe Cambridge — manage their entire portfolio of indoor maps with centralized, user-friendly tools. Or, as Mappedin likes to call it, a word processor for maps – something anyone can use. Mappedin’s CMS and Map Editor product enables those property managers to manage their location data in one place instead of scribbling changes on eight different pieces of paper.

Growth to date: In 2021 alone Mappedin more than doubled its number of customers, most of that growth coming from non-retail verticals and platform integrations. To date, Mappedin is used across more than 850 venues in 40 countries around the world. This amounts to 750,000,000 square feet of indoor space being powered by Mappedin’s products.

What’s next: Chances are that the last mall you went to, anywhere in the world, is our customer. Now a growing number of airports, hospitals, stadiums, and Fortune 500 sponsors on the sides of those stadium fields are our customers, too. Every month, Mappedin helps millions of people around the world find stores, gates, seats, coworkers, empty desks, and other points of interest. Our tools are used by thousands of users (office managers, marketing coordinators, facility managers, leasing reps, fire prevention officers) to maintain a single source of truth – one map everywhere. Heading into 2022 we are focused on the next users of Mappedin’s products including the Department of Homeland Security as part of an emergency response initiative and all the new verticals utilizing Mappedin to supplement their visitor experiences.

Ask from the community: We have lofty goals for 2022 and in order to hit those, we’re hiring! We have open roles across our engineering team, product, marketing, sales, customer success and customer support. Feel free to checkout our careers page for all open roles. https://www.mappedin.com/careers/

18. Wagepoint

Founded: 2012
Founder: Shrad Rao
Website: www.wagepoint.com

Elevator Pitch: Wagepoint is a small-but-mighty fintech company on a mission to simplify payroll – and maybe even dare to make it delightful! Their online software was created just for small businesses, automating the most “ugh” parts of payroll – like calculating wages and reporting on taxes – so that their customers can get back to doing, well, literally anything else. Backed by the world’s friendliest team, Wagepoint is always supportive, never stuffy and refreshingly human. Founded in 2012, they make payroll magic happen for more than 17,000 small businesses, accountants and bookkeepers across North America.

How it got started: Paying people is a mechanical and essential part of running a business. The challenge is that most small business payroll software has simply been trimmed down from an x-large enterprise version to small or x-small with less than flattering or functional results. At Wagepoint, we’ve turned this story around and given it a better ending by creating small business software cut from a different cloth. Instead of resizing existing designs, we’ve tailored a solution that’s built just for small businesses with the human factor woven deep into the fabric. This is how we’ve become simple payroll software, created just for small businesses and backed by the world’s friendliest team. Now, we can all live happily ever after.

Growth to date: Our user base is rapidly growing as we win the hearts of small businesses, bookkeepers and account firms across North America. Our recent transaction with Providence Strategic Growth in September 2020 includes more than $10 million of new capital that will be used to fuel Wagepoint’s next phase of growth, including continued product innovation, scaling the go-to-market and best-in-class customer support organization, and pursuing strategic acquisitions, in order to better serve Wagepoint’s small business clients across North America.

What’s next: Wagepoint proudly serves over 17,000 customers and continues to rapidly grow our customer and partner base.

Ask from the community:
Sign up at https://secure.wagepoint.com/signup.html. Don’t forget to use code FOUNDERSBETAPAYROLL to get 1 month free.
Sign up for our partner program today!
Check out our open roles and apply today.

17. Auvik

Founded: 2011
Founder: Alex Hoff, Marc Morin, and David Yach
Website: www.auvik.com

Elevator Pitch: Auvik makes network management easier. By automating and simplifying network management, our cloud-based software improves the efficiency and capacity of IT teams and helps protect their business from network risk. Auvik is one of the fastest growing North American technology companies, and is winner of the Deloitte Technology Fast 50, Deloitte Fast 500, and recognized as the #1 ranked Canadian company in the FT Americas’ Fastest Growing Companies 2020.

How it got started: For the first three years of Auvik’s existence, Marc, Alex, David, and a small team were heads down in market research and development. After a year of brainstorming ideas, interviewing network administrators, and forming an advisory board of top network experts, they decided on designing software to simplify network management, a process that hadn’t seen much improvement since the 1990s. In summer 2014, over 400 network admins participated in our beta to help us refine and improve the product, and in December 2014, we officially launched the product.

Growth to date:
Raised $6M in Series A financing in 2013 with 21 employees
Beta networking & management product was launched in 2014
First paid subscriber was celebrated in 2015
$15M was raised in Series B financing in 2017
$20M was raised in Series C financing in 2018
Talaia, a Spanish network traffic analytics company was acquired in 2018 and opened Barcelona office
First international distributors were signed in 2018
Auvik TrafficInsights flow analytics feature was launched in 2019
Secured $250 Million growth investment from Great Hill Partners

What’s next: The recent investment by Great Hill Partners is expected to accelerate our mission by funding product development, segment expansion, geographic reach, and other strategic growth initiatives.

Ask from the community: We are always on the lookout for great talent. If you want to work at a company that is building impactful, relevant technology, and are excited by our mission in making network management easier, please check our careers page for any suitable openings.

16. Carbon Neutral Club

Founded: 2021
Founder: Jack Bruner, Jeff Packer, Roee Eidan
Website: www.carbonneutralclub.com

Elevator Pitch: Carbon Neutral Club’s mission is to make climate action accessible to everyone. Carbon Neutral Club members estimate and offset their personal carbon footprints in minutes, and as a reward, gain access to year-round savings with 50+ sustainable brands that help members reduce their environmental impact by shopping more sustainably.

How it got started: Over COVID, Jack, Jeff, and Roee noticed that despite climate being a topic for discussion like never before, individuals were not taking meaningful action. They realized that this inaction was a result of people simply not knowing where to begin. So the three of them quit their jobs at leading tech companies in Toronto to fundamentally solve this problem – help individuals begin their climate journey, and reward them for doing so.

Growth to date: 40-50% MoM growth since launch in July of 2021 without a dollar spent on marketing. Tens of thousands in sales driven to Carbon Neutral Club brand partners. 10+ employers signed up for Carbon Neutral Club’s Employee Program – make your workforce carbon neutral, and let them save year-round at sustainable businesses.

What’s next: Carbon Neutral Club will be delivering a suite of new functionality focused around carbon footprint reduction in order to help its members to make an even greater impact. It will also be growing its brand partnerships to greater than 100 sustainable brands, and onboarding several new employer partners to its Employee Program.

Ask from the community: We’re looking for any introductions to value-aligned investors, brands, or employer partners to continue to grow our community.

15. Flywheel

Founded: 2018
Founder: Chris Sell, David Joosten, Tameem Iftikhar
Website: https://flywheelsoftware.com

Elevator Pitch: Flywheel is the leading 1st Party Data Platform. With flywheel you can build customer segments on your Data Warehouse and use them in any marketing, sales, customer service tool, no SQL required.

How it got started: David and Chris met while working at Google in 2011. They were responsible for running marketing campaigns to millions of Google’s small business customers. The major challenge was activating customer data sitting in the data warehouse to send messages through email, sms, push, and other channels. Chris and David realized that while Data Warehouses had great business intelligence tools for data visualization like Tableau, PowerBI, Looker, there were no great tools for data activation (commonly referred to now as Reverse ETL). So, they started Flywheel as a simple way for business users to activate 1st party customer lists from their data warehouse to any marketing, sales, customer service channel in minutes.

Growth to date: Flywheel is fully bootstrapped & works with top enterprise clients like Google, Indeed, NASCAR, Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, and others. We have grown revenue and headcount 10x since 2018. Several key trends are coming together to support Flywheel’s growth: 1) Companies are moving their data to modern data stacks and the Cloud at an increasing pace 2) Privacy and security regulations and positions by Apple and Google are making companies focus on how they get smarter with using their 1st Party data for growth.

What’s next:
Flywheel’s vision is to activate customer data sitting in any data store with a SQL interface in minutes. We are working on several important initiatives to support this vision:
1) Deploy in any Cloud Platform (AWS, GCP, Azure)
2) Ability to query any data store (BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Databricks, Synapse)
3) Creating an Audience Marketplace that will generate intelligent 1st party audiences (ie. high LTV customers) automatically for companies we work with.
The level of DevOps, Data Engineering, and ML challenges we are tackling are formidable and exciting.

Ask from the community: We have several key roles open in engineering we’re looking to hire for. If you are interested, please reach out to tameem@flywheelsoftware.com. If you are a data consulting company working with clients on their data warehouse, we would love to chat as well. There are great potential partnership opportunities.

14. Chocolate Soup

Founded: 2016
Founders: Pj Lowe, Dan Silivestru, Megan Hall
Website: https://www.chocolatesoup.ca/

Elevator Pitch: Chocolate Soup was born out of a sheer passion for building great company culture to support happy, caring, and respectful teams. We help companies of all sizes discover the power of radical generosity, surprise, and delight by recognizing important employee personal and professional milestones with expertly curated gifts. Chocolate Soup offers subscription-based employee recognition plans and remote-team gift boxes that can be customized for your culture and team.

How it got started: Celebrating milestones to show recognition is something that runs deep in our DNA. Pj built recognition into our culture throughout our past startup journeys, striving to recognize our team for more than just work milestones. We recognized those events that we knew were important to them – their birthdays, their significant others’ birthdays, children’s birthdays, anniversaries, and more. When we made the hard decision to wind our last startup down, it was vital for us to make sure we could create soft landings for our employees by helping them find new roles. We brought the team together to give them the news and offered to connect them with hiring companies. Their reaction shocked us to our cores. Instead of jumping ship right away, all of our team insisted on staying to help automate their current jobs as much as possible to allow us founders to give it one last go. Later on, we asked our former teammates why they made that choice – and the answers were all the same. Our employees felt connected with the business, us, and each other. It was a community, and they were in it until the end.

As Pj and I looked for our next challenge, we kept coming back to the same thing. It wasn’t some employee engagement software tool that made that happen. It was simple, personalized recognition. We knew this was something other businesses could use – a way for them to recognize their employees the way that we have without all the heavy lifting.

Growth to date: Chocolate Soup has seen 5x revenue growth and 5x increase in our subscription plans over the last 12 months. We’ve expanded our facilities twice to support the growth as we head into 2022.

What’s next: We’d like to grow our team in 2022 to build out our HRIS integrations and self-service portal as well as to scale our services across Canada and the U.S.

Ask from the community: We are currently looking to partner up with strategic investors that want to join us on our growth journey into 2022 and beyond. We’re also welcoming new clients who are looking to improve their employee recognition programs!

13. CruxOCM

Founded: 2017
Founder: Vicki Knott and Roger Shirt
Website: https://www.cruxocm.com/

Elevator Pitch: Just as planes have autopilot to assist—but not replace—pilots, CruxOCM enables the autonomous control rooms of tomorrow, working alongside control room operators within the safety constraints of today. CruxOCM’s revolutionary technology leverages machine learning and advanced physics-based methodologies to uncover unforeseen efficiencies in heavy industrial control rooms such as energy, utilities, renewables and beyond to maximize ROI, without ever compromising safety.

How it got started: CruxOCM was born from the belief that control room operators should be given the best tools available to perform their jobs safely and efficiently, while at the same time minimizing environmental impact and maximizing bottom-line revenue for operating companies while leveraging their existing equipment. Our founder’s thought, if pilots have autopilot software, why don’t control room operators? Inspired by the challenges our founders experienced working in major control rooms and in process control, CruxOCM’s founders Vicki and Roger set out to build the tools needed to operate major industrial assets more effectively from the heart and soul of the operation, the control room.

Growth to date: CruxOCM has raised $7.6 million CAD ($6 million USD) to fuel its product development and expansion efforts.

What’s next: CruxOCM has proven a strong product market fit over the last three years and is on track to provide more control room operators with the best tools available to perform their jobs safely and efficiently. Our company’s software is also instrumental in helping companies to minimize environmental impact and maximize bottom-line revenue via increased asset utilization and throughput. CruxOCM will also plans to use current capital to bolster installations so that it can expand across client asset bases faster and begin pursuing additional product lines into gas plants, gas pipelines and offshore facilities.

Ask from the community: We are hiring for multiple positions – we are looking to hire Senior Software Engineers, Software Engineers, a Product Designer, a Advanced Process Control Engineer and a SCADA/Commissioning Software Deployment Engineer.

12. Railz

Founded: 2020
Founder: Sohaib Zahid (CEO) and Derek Manuge (CTO)
Website: https://www.railz.ai/

Elevator Pitch: Railz is building the largest financial data network to support the future of finance. The Railz Accounting Data-as-a-Service™ API enables innovators to build the next generation of data-powered financial services. Integrate with top accounting service providers through our API and access normalized financial data on your small- and medium-sized business customers.

How it got started: Railz’s two co-founders, Sohaib Zahid and Derek Manuge, realized that the slow approval processes were a result of limited access to quality financial data on their small- and medium-sized businesses to enable decision-making. Getting access to granular, high quality, and clean financial data on businesses has been a problem for all financial institutions — whether it’s lenders, banks, fintechs, governments, and other financial service providers. Derek’s past experience in quant led him to realize the problem of accessing quality data to build better models. He found himself spending more than half of his time trying to access these data points. Sohaib realized that while small- and medium-sized business (SMB) accounting data was accessible from cloud accounting packages, these datasets weren’t available in a standardized format. It is virtually impossible to manually standardize these datasets into a useful format. He also knew the challenges that SMBs have in getting access to business loans — the process is painstakingly long! Normalized data was the key to success.

Growth to date: Railz raised $15M, with $12M in Series A in May 2021. Our team has grown from 5 to 40 in just a year’s time. We are continuing to scale our customers, partners, and integrations, as well. We recently announced new integrations and partnerships.

What’s next: We have many more exciting integrations with top accounting service providers and commercial financial data sources to be announced shortly. We continue to launch new features for our product and you will soon be able to follow along on the product journey with our public roadmap. Join our Railz Slack Community to participate and provide feedback and requests.

Ask from the community: Railz is scaling fast which means we need more incredible team members to drive our vision forward! We are hiring, globally and remote-first, across engineering, marketing, product, and sales roles. Join our Great Place to Work Certified® company and the future of fintech!

11. TriplePlay

Founded: 2020
Founders: Mark Hlady & Yuri Takhteyev
Website: tripleplay.ai

Elevator Pitch: TriplePlay is your space for virtual socials where you get to know others through immersive games. Other platforms focus on one guest speaking to everyone and have no built-in activities to make coming together natural. TriplePlay is designed for guest-to-guest interactions, free movement between smaller conversations, and customizable social games for 2-200 players. TriplePlay supports social ties at the world’s leading remote and hybrid organizations like Telus, Deloitte, Avanti, Ledn and McGill. It’s easy to set up; create an event in 1 min and simply send your guests a link with no sign-ups or downloads required.

How it got started: TriplePlay started as Lobby, a space that you’d add onto events to create a social component. Since then, our platform and built-in programming have evolved into so much more for our clients. We’ve become the complete destination for virtual relationship building through fun — an all-in-one platform unlike any other product on the market.

Growth to date: Over the past year, TriplePlay has supported hundreds of clients in enabling remote connection through fun. As organizations are moving to be permanently remote or hybrid, our role in clients’ strategies has been solidified, and we’ve seen a mass influx of new clients embarking on their permanent remote and hybrid journeys.

What’s next: TriplePlay will continue to support our incredible clients in relationship building through fun. Our roadmap is jam-packed with even more immersive, fun, social-focused games and features that will continue to secure our role as the third space outside of your office and home. As we onboard more and more organizations each week, we look forward to enabling relationship building through fun at organizations across the globe.

Ask from the community: Our north star is enabling human connection through fun at as many organizations as possible. Our ask is that if you or someone you know is at an organization where relationships matter, check out tripleplay.ai or reach out to us at hi@tripleplay.ai to test-drive our platform and built-in programming.

10. bidmii

Founded: 2020
Founders: Jon Christensen(CEO), Phillip Stack (CTO), James Christensen(COO)
Website: bidmii.com

Elevator Pitch: bidmii puts homeowners in the driver’s seat to get home improvements done, right. bidmii is the easiest way for homeowners to get multiple bids and work with local, trusted contractors to Get It Done. bidmii’s easy and competitive bid process provides homeowners with confidence that they are getting a fair price for their renovation project. The innovative two-way rating and review system opens the lines of communication from the start and builds immediate trust between homeowners and contractors.

How it got started: The home improvement industry is inefficient and lacks trust. It causes business challenges for contractors and leaves homeowners frustrated and vulnerable. 69% of Canadian homeowners struggle to find a contractor they can trust. Obtaining competing quotes on projects is tedious and time-consuming. 81% of contractors spend a significant amount of time chasing money owed, with invoices taking an average of 73 days to be paid. Project flow is inconsistent, and expensive with an average cost of $50-$200 per lead. bidmii is a community that brings together a fragmented industry so homeowners can easily hire reliable and trusted contractors to complete their projects; and contractors can easily connect with qualified homeowners allowing them to focus on getting the job done.

Growth to date: To date, the company has raised $1.5M CAD and is growing at an average rate of 55% month-over-month since it’s launch on June 1, 2021. Bidmii also announced an exclusive partnership and investment from real estate expert, contractor and HGTV’s, Scott McGillivray. Bidmii is available to homeowners and contractors across Ontario with marketing efforts focused on Guelph, Kitchener-Waterloo, London, Windsor, and Niagara Falls.

What’s next: Early in 2022, bidmii will expand into five additional cities in Ontario, followed by a Toronto launch in spring. Bidmii will also be launching a SAAS product for contractors, providing enhanced features such as gig-based insurance, and project financing.

Ask from the community: As bidmii continues to accelerate growth and become the central ecosystem for renovations, bidmii is looking to partner with organizations in adjacent verticals that target users with a high disposable income. bidmii is an innovative platform that welcomes working with like-minded entrepreneurs and companies to provide value-add opportunities and services for its community.

9. MedMe Health

Founded: 2019
Founder: Purya Sarmadi (Chief Executive Officer), Rui Su (Chief Operating Officer), Nicholas Hui (Chief Product Officer)
Website: www.medmehealth.com

Elevator Pitch: MedMe is building the operating system for the pharmacies of the future, powering their transformation from dispensaries to community healthcare hubs.

How it got started: Purya, a health data scientist and Nick, a product engineer at Tesla, met through the Next 36. They’d watched their own parents managing multiple medications for chronic illnesses and rely on their pharmacists for care. With the rise of online pharmacies and automated dispensing, they identified the need for pharmacists, the most accessible yet underutilized healthcare professional, to shift beyond the traditional retail model to providing more healthcare services for patients in their communities. Driven by the prospect of this transformational healthcare opportunity, they were introduced to Rui, a pharmacist who had experienced first-hand the barriers to delivering clinical services in the community pharmacy setting. Together, they set out to transform and enable the future of pharmacy practice through technology.

Growth to date: Over 3000 community pharmacies are using the MedMe platform. The platform has powered over ~14M patient services, including playing a critical role across the country throughout the pandemic, MedMe has raised over $3.7M USD to date including from M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), MaRS IAF, and Y-Combinator.

What’s next: MedMe is building on their rapid growth and role throughout the pandemic to take their modular platform to the next level; providing community pharmacies of all sizes and geographies the transformative technology to service high-quality care experiences and accessible healthcare offerings to their patients.

Ask from the community: MedMe is growing fast and if you or anybody you know looking to transform healthcare for communities across the country (and beyond) reach out for roles in engineering, project management, product, customer success, and more: https://jobs.lever.co/bloom?team=MedMe

8. DirtMarket

Founded: 2021
Founder: Asad Jalib & Emma Kirwin
Website: dirtmarket.ca

Elevator Pitch: DirtMarket instantly connects soil generators and soil receivers to save earthmovers time and money through beneficial soil reuse.

How it got started: We experienced illegal soil dumping firsthand on a development property in Toronto. After experiencing illegal soil dumping, we know there had to be a better way for earthmovers to find nearby, cost-effective sites to put their excess soil. We built an excess soil exchange to do exactly that: make excess soil management easier and more cost-effective.

Growth to date: Since DirtMarket’s launch, we’ve had over 1000 earthmovers, construction teams, developers, and engineers join our platform. DirtMarket has moved over 100,000 m3 of soil across Ontario and reduced trucking distances by 100,000 kms.

What’s next: DirtMarket will continue to promote beneficial soil reuse across Ontario with powerful, digital tools. We are also opening our first investment round in January 2022 to fund our team, operations, marketing, and product. We have lots of exciting updates so stay tuned on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram for more announcements!

Ask from the community: We are looking for introductions VCs and angel investors who want to support construction-tech and female-led companies. Please email emma@dirtmarket.ca for more information on our current investment round.

7. Uvaro

Founded: 2019
Founder: Joseph Fung, Donna Litt and Derek Hall
Website: https://uvaro.com/

Elevator Pitch: We started Uvaro because the old approach to tech hiring is broken. The fastest-growing segment of our economy needs 250,000 new sales professionals and colleges and universities aren’t training them fast enough. Worse yet, programs offered by traditional education institutions take so long to develop that by the time you get into the workforce what you were taught is often obsolete. Which is why we’ve developed our programs with instructors who have hands-on experience in the field. We pair this training with a powerful network of technology companies, 1:1 career coaching, and automated job search systems. The results speak for themselves — our grads launch new careers within 3 weeks, they double their previous income, and they achieve 150% their onboarding sales targets at their new employers.

How it got started: Formed by our three co-founders, Joseph Fung, Donna Litt, and Derek Hall, they saw that traditional education institutions could not properly teach and train tech-sales effectively because the program lengths and development time often meant that what was taught in class was obsolete by the time the student graduated. It was through combining the three pillars of career success, in-class learning, technological solutions designed to ease learning, and peer-to-peer and mentor networking, that we could accelerate training while at the same time not make any sacrifices to program content.

Growth to date: Since our beginnings we have brought career success to hundreds of individuals across North America. Our students are able to land roles in their new careers within 6 weeks of graduating, and our last cohort was 60% hired before finishing their program! Because of our Members’ career success, we have been able to offer our second program; a 4-week accelerator course, and are graduating more students than ever.

What’s next: Rapidly growing and hiring!

Ask from the community: We’re hiring rapidly and are looking for talented individuals to fulfill a variety of roles. Go to our About page (www.uvaro.com/about) to find the latest job openings.

6. Truly Financial

Founder: 2021
Founders: Kanchan Kumar (CEO), Sandeep Todi (Chief Business Officer)
Website: https://trulyfinancial.com

Elevator Pitch: Truly Financial’s U.S. domiciled checking account and corporate Visa cards unblock spend management for remote teams in any country, and simplify daily business banking.

How it got started: Small businesses are consistently falling through the gap between business payments and business banking. This no man’s land has entrepreneurs juggling multiple services like cards, banks, and payment providers – cobbling together solutions that are rarely water tight and that come at a high cost to their business. After successfully building a platform for Canadian businesses to send payments to 150+ countries, Kanchan and Sandeep decided to build a financial service that would bridge this gap. Truly Financial’s all-in-one banking service with corporate Visa cards, in-built spend management capabilities, and multi-currency accounts are designed to support entrepreneurs and empower their distributed teams. As the world increasingly becomes a global marketplace, Truly Financial aims to set up smaller businesses for success by enabling them to operate and scale on an international stage.

Growth to date: Raised $3.2 million

What’s next: We plan to continue expanding our offering via banking and payment integrations with other software products that serve the needs of entrepreneurs. We are also introducing a perks program that will offer our customers curated products and services from our partners.

Ask from the community: Connecting with partners – have a product or service that’s perfect for smaller businesses? Talk to us about our perks program! Looking for people across Product, Marketing, Customer Support, and Sales. Actively hiring for a product marketing and communications specialist, customer support specialists, and sales development representatives.

5. BioBox

Founded: 2019
Founder: Christopher Li, Hamza Farooq, Julian Mazzitelli
Website: Biobox.io

Elevator Pitch: Analyzing your sequencing data shouldn’t be this hard. The data and the tools required to analyze it are fragmented and the tools themselves require advanced technical skills to use them. These challenges make resources inaccessible to scientists who want to analyze, explore and interpret their data. The BioBox Platform is an integrated multi-omics platform that enables scientists to go from raw sequencing data to exploration in a singular no-code platform.

How it got started: “Does it need to be this complicated?” The founding team asked this question 2 years ago while conducting life sciences research. United over a passion for technology, and the conviction to make genomic analysis easier and accessible to every scientist and clinician, BioBox was founded.

Growth to date: $1.9 Million in pre-seed funding

What’s next: Launching our Academic Partnership Program! Academic researchers can get access to the BioBox Platform free for an entire year!

Ask from the community: We’re looking to connect with researchers who are currently working with next-generation sequencing data to partner with them on future project

4. Synctera

Founded: 2020
Founders: CEO Peter Hazlehurst, CTO Kris Hansen , CPO Dominik Weisserth
Website: https://www.synctera.com/

Elevator Pitch: Synctera connects community banks with FinTechs, allowing the bank to grow and the FinTech to launch quickly. It streamlines day-to-day processes like reconciliation, operations and regulatory compliance, so FinTech Banking doesn’t impose a resource burden. This lets community banks expand their reach beyond just the local communities they continue to serve and allows FinTechs to launch quickly.

How Synctera got started: Synctera was founded to solve a common pain point between Banks and FinTechs. The Bank-FinTech partnership model was broken; connecting Banks and Fintechs was an extremely manual and burdensome process for both parties. Our three co-founders have firsthand experience with pain points and difficulties managing FinTech-Bank partnerships. Together, they worked to solve this problem for both sides of the ecosystem and created Synctera, which enables Banks and FinTechs to partner quickly and grow together. Providing Banks with additional revenue streams and FinTechs with the ability to build and launch their financial products in a matter of weeks.

Synctera Growth to date: Since Synctera’s launch in December 2020, the company has rapidly grown, expanding product offerings, raising additional funding, recruiting new talent and more. The team has announced funding of $33M Series A.

What’s next: 
Launching t-minus10, our developer experience that will enable customers to build and test the MVP of their FinTech product within a live environment, including the ability to issue physical cards and test end to end with real money
Launching lending capabilities across a range of credit use cases, including credit cards, BNPL, personal loans, and overdraft
Enhanced support for the bank<>FinTech matching process
Support for cross-border payments
Launching a services and partner API marketplace to extend coverage of the capabilities we offer to our FinTech customers

Ask from the community: Synctera is hiring for a bunch of roles, here. Join our Synctera Community Slack Platform, here. Any FinTechs that want to launch in the U.S can sign up and reach out to us.

3. Commit

Founded: 2019
Founders: Greg Gunn, Beier Cai
Key people: Tiffany Jung
Website: https://commit.dev/

Elevator Pitch: Commit is the first professional network founded by software developers that puts the career needs of Startup Engineers first. We’re building a collaborative, remote community with life-long peer-to-peer support, personalized career development, and unique access to startup opportunities.

How it got started: Co-founders Greg Gunn (CEO) and Beier Cai (CTO), who met as early employees at Hootsuite, bootstrapped the company while they worked out the details of how they wanted Commit to work. Greg was an EIR at Inovia Capital and saw so many amazing founders with world-changing ideas who had raised money, but their biggest challenge was getting an engineer to join them.

Growth to date: $6m seed round raised to fuel growth

What’s next: Launching a new p2p network for startup developers.

Ask from the community: Check out Commit on commit.dev.

2. Able Innovations

Founded: 2018
Founder: Jayiesh Singh, Philip Chang
Website: https://www.ableinnovations.com/

Elevator Pitch: Able Innovations’ mission is to develop innovative, robotic technologies that protect front-line staff from career-ending injuries and burnout by automating the task of transfers. Currently, between 2-8 staff are required to exert back-breaking effort to transfer a single patient (e.g., bed to stretcher). The problem is especially relevant today, as many facilities battle short-staffing and burnout. Able’s ALTA Platform™, solves the repetitive and painful task of lateral supine patient transfers (e.g., moving patients from beds to stretchers, imaging tables, etc.) by allowing staff to conduct effortless, contactless transfers using a single caregiver.

How it got started: For over a decade, Able Innovations’ founders, Jayiesh (Jay) and Philip, have launched numerous high-scale robotic products together – which has grown into a successful business partnership. The founders had separate journeys that led them to the same conclusion: transfer is a dangerous and labour-intensive task that needs to be automated. Jay was exposed to how unsafe and uncomfortable current patient transfer methods are for both patients and caregivers while volunteering at long-term care facilities. With a rapidly aging population, and increasing rates of injuries amongst front-line staff, he knew something had to be done. In parallel, Philip had been subjected to numerous transfers himself while undergoing procedures- he felt that the process was undignified, and he too felt that there was room for improvement. The founders’ shared love for developing technology for good and the conviction that they were the right individuals to disrupt this field brought them together once again to tackle the massive challenge of transfers.

Growth to date: At a time when hospitals are battling short-staffing, Able Innovations’ technology is highly relevant. Over a short period of time, Able Innovations has ramped up its operations to rise to the demand and challenge. They have refined their game-changing technology and are in advanced conversations with leading Canadian facilities to pilot the technology. Most recent achievements include the company receiving regulatory approval from Health Canada, as well as signing a collaboration agreement with 7 U.S. Veterans Health Administration (VHA) hospitals.

What’s next: In the near-term, Able’s core focus is to work with partner facilities to reduce burden on front-line staff and make caregiving more sustainable. The company is achieving this through pilot studies at two of Canada’s leading hospitals as well as working with the VHA to study device usability. To continue this path, Able Innovations is about to launch a Series A round, which has already started receiving significant interest from funders.

Ask from the community: If you share our passion for the problem we are solving, we would like to hear from you. This includes individuals who have had personal experience with the problem, front-line staff, engineers and programmers who want to make a difference, hospital operators who would like to learn more, or investors who would like to be a part of our journey. We are uniquely positioned to help with one of healthcare’s most pressing problems- short staffing and burnout- and welcome connections with aligned partners including facilities, distributors as well as investors that can accelerate growth and commercialization.

1. EnrouteAI

Founded: 2020
Founder: Neil Ferandes, Michael Anthony
Website: https://enrouteai.com/

Elevator Pitch: EnrouteAI is a SaaS solution that simplifies last-mile logistics. Our AI-driven dynamic route optimization engine is used to plan and manage complex delivery routes with constraints like customer time windows and real-time traffic. Our routes get even better over time as the AI learns the ‘fingerprint of the city’. EnrouteAI provides customers with a cloud-based dashboard for route planning and management, real-time tracking, greater visibility, and dispatching. Included in EnrouteAI is a very intuitive iOS and Android app for delivery drivers, automatic and proactive delivery notifications for end customers, and a robust API service for integrations with existing systems.

How it got started: Neil was working with a supply chain consulting firm run by an MIT professor. On several projects he noticed that most companies were struggling with their last-mile operations. This included Fortune 500 companies that had invested in state-of-the-art routing software. That “state-of-the-art” software however, would plan routes that did not achieve the desired results in the real world. Neil was surprised that almost none of their deliveries were completed on time, and the fleet often had to work overtime to complete routes. This was because routes were being planned without considering traffic conditions or the actual time it takes to complete the delivery once the driver was on site. In developing EnrouteAI, Neil knew it had to be extremely intuitive and easy for delivery drivers to use, with no training required. He developed the product by meeting daily with dispatchers, route planners and riding along with delivery drivers for months. He did this to understand in detail exactly what was causing delays and how we could build a solution that route planners, dispatchers, and delivery drivers could easily use.

Growth to date: EnrouteAI now powers more than 50,000 deliveries a month. We are in 8 US cities and are on track to doubling that footprint by Q2 2022. We also have several pilots currently running with medium and large enterprises that have 100s of vehicles in their fleet. An initial friends and family round was completed earlier this year enabling us to scale up to 10 people. This allowed us to recently add two new pilot projects with large accounts. These pilots should transition to company-wide rollouts in 2022. At this point we are out of capacity to take on more customers in the short term.

What’s next: EnrouteAI’ s growth has regularly surpassed our capacity. There is now a waiting list of customer implementations to work through. Looking forward, we will be scaling up substantially throughout 2022 and 2023. Using a mixture of revenue and potentially an additional capital raise, we expect to reach $1 million ARR by year end 2022. Projecting forward, we will be hiring in several key areas to support our growth.

Ask from the community: We’re looking for experienced software engineers to scale our platform and business development executives that have experience in selling SaaS products to large enterprises.

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