Montreal

There are 68 posts filed in Montreal (this is page 7 of 23).

A Startup Festival

Our friends Philippe Telio (@ptelio), JS Cournoyer (@jscournoyer) and Alistair Croll (@acroll) have pulled together a spectacular festival in Montreal for startups. They launced today at AccelerateMTL and the speaker list includes great folks:

This is just the tip of the iceberg. A fantastic group of entrepreneurs, marketers, advisors and investors converging on Montreal at the very beginning of the Just for Laughs comedy festival (which looks to be happening July 14-31, 2011).

It is great to see the availability of capital being deployed by Jacques Bernier and the Teralys Capital team start to propagate out into the culture building events. The creation of YearOneLabs, Real Ventures, AccelerateMTL, NextMontreal, Notman House are all directly or indirectly beneficiaries of the capital available in Montreal. It might feel like these changes, conferences and programs happen overnight, but it has been a 5-7 year campaign from a dedicated group beginning with Montreal Startup, John Stokes and Austin Hill. This group has been laser focused on building a culture of high tech entrepreneurship and the necessary infrastructure from education, funding, investment, talent, culture, media and events to support the current and next generation of entrepreneurs. It is really a feat and accomplishment that has made Montreal a hotbed for new companies.

Year One Labs — The Perfect “Incubator”?

I abhor the term “incubator”. I remember in fifth grade when our teacher brought in a chicken incubator to show us how chickens are born.

We waited and waited and waited a while longer still.

All the little Chickens were dead, it turned out. We weren’t quite sure why but most of us thought that one of the guys in our class with “anger issues” was somehow responsible.

So to this day when I hear the term incubator, I think of a sea of dead chickens and the broken dreams of little boys and girls.

So I was surprised when I walked in to Year One Labs today and, rather than chickens, I saw a lot of people. Not just any people either, but some of the best entrepreneurs I have met in years.

We wrote about the launch of Year One Labs back in September 2010

The current portfolio of Montreal based Year One Labs includes:

High Score House

HighScoreHouse was founded by Kyle Seaman and Theo Ephraim. The company is building a fun, entertaining solution to help parents use positive reinforcement to motivate their children.

They have yet to launch but you can learn more at highscorehouse.com.

Localmind

Localmind was founded by Lenny Rachitsky and Beau Haugh. Localmind allows people (from the web or their mobile phone) to ask questions of people checked in at locations. Questions can be in real-time or not. The big vision is to empower people to know anything they need to know about any place at any time.

Localmind is currently available online at localmind.com.

Please Stay Calm

Please Stay Calm was founded by Garry Seto andKen Seto. The company is building a massively co-operative location based social game with a zombie theme. They have not yet released the game, but you can sign up for news at pleasestaycalm.com.

And you can learn more about the game and their progress on their blog.

as well as Assemblio and one other as of yet unnamed startup.

There are some things to love about Year One Labs:

  • The founders of Year One Labs have their own money invested
  • The founders of Year One Labs are experienced founders with good operational backgrounds. It seems clear to me that they know how to gradually disengage as the founders of resident companies get their feet under them. They aren’t constrained by awkward incubator contracts or “client service agreements” where a lot of resources go more and more unused as a startup outgrows them. That flexibility is important.
  • They have a bar built right in to the lobby

It’s not all ice cream and pie for these guys though, from the outside it is clear to me that follow-on financing relationships are always going to be tough for groups like this and keeping the lights on does become a heavy expense over time.

This sort of activity, much like Extreme Venture Partners in Toronto and the work that BootupLabs had been doing in Vancouver is the lifeblood of an early stage startup community. Whenever politicians give speeches and talk about things like the “IT Sector” and “knowledge workers” — this is what they are talking about. We have to find careful ways to support efforts like Year One Labs but also keep the market competitive enough that the best ones may rise to the top. In the current model of massive infusions of cash for real-estate and bureaucrats does not let the market pick the winners.

The entrepreneurs are the ultimate customers here and they will be the ones who make or break Year One Labs and every other similar effort in Canada.

Chango closes a $4.5m Round B

Chango has announced today that they have closed a $4.5 million B round that includes their existing investors as well as lead participation from Rho Ventures (Canada) and iNovia. Roger Chabra lead the deal for Rho and this represents his first placement since joining Rho Ventures last year.

Christopher Dingle has also joined Chango from his role as EIR at iNovia (although he seems to have joined in October, so I am just catching up it seems). Notably absent from this round as well as the Series A is MantellaVP, who seem to be participating in the form of sweat equity but not in the form of capital placements as Duncan Hill is actively operating on the management team. Perhaps I am unclear as to Mantella’s model, I thought they were operating as a traditional fund but perhaps their model is changing. That could make sense as both Duncan Hill and Robin Axon have a lot to contribute in terms of operating capability.

Chango is an AdWords style platform for display (banner) advertising which is focused on low-latency ad targeting and serving across networks. As inventory has become realtime they are able to distribute highly targeted ads across that inventory. This sort of targeting was not possible in past models and Chango seems to be utilizing capital to stay ahead of the curve as more players enter the space. Chango also has the unique ability to automatically generate the banner ads being served.

The most important aspect of this deal is that Canadian capital is being put to work to power a high-potential company that otherwise likely would have closed a US focused deal. This type of growth capital was much less active just up until recently and it represents the critical role that iNovia, Rho and others are going to play in the Canadian landscape in the coming 5 years. The health of these funds is critical to our ability to create value based in Canada that can attach US and international markets with a comparable amount of resources. Albert Lai famously made a splash about the lack of growth capital in Canada in 2008 and it is my hope that the situation is now changing.