Capital Angel Network

Are you excited about 2025? I'm energised about all of the opportunities and challenges ahead and feel blessed to have formed an ace - all founder ceo seasoned team to meet all the moments ahead! The talented Melissa Pole joined TEAM Capital Angel Network recently as Stakeholder Relations Coordinator. She is entrusted with keeping our investment cycle running smoothly for our investor and coporate members. Melissa kicked off two steps ahead of us demonstrating her insights and initiative from day one. Please join me in extending a warm welcome to Melissa as she joins Joseph Beals, PhD, MBA, FAMIA and I serving the entrepreneur and investor community.

This week is Global Entrepreneurship Week, and it is a good time to remind ourselves of just how much we have going on in Canada. We have work to do but we have lots of successes to build on. It was a busy week in Ottawa for entrepreneurship starting Tuesday with the pitch finales for the Invest Ottawa Immigrant Entrepreneurship bootcamp and SheBoot. Trailblazing founders building high impact businesses with investors and capital for the top companies. Wednesday and Thursday were at SAAS NORTH Conference. This is always an amazing event and there was quite a buzz in the air this year! Wonderful to see Capital Angel Network well represented with Sarah Sedgman CEO LearnExperts and Sarah Daniele CEO Mydoma Inc ( Powered by Studio Designer) sitting down with Nick Quain to share their paths launching and growing their startups. Mike Potter CEO Rewind and Ewan Reid CEO Mission Control shared 3 Epic fails on their roller coaster journeys. It was a great time to catchup with friends and colleagues from across the country, and meet new people building great companies and changing the face of capital in Canada. It was a great showcase for the breadth and depth of the innovation economy. Great representation and thoughtful discussion on the founder journey with impactful Canadian success stories such as Passage and VCs such as Staircase Ventures. Thanks to L-SPARK Startup Accelerator 🇨🇦 and SAAS NORTH Conference for a well run and informative couple of days! Wrapping up the week with Capital Angel Network Selection Committee and 6 strong founders solving problems from improving health care to cleaner water to satellite efficiency. Innovation in Canada is strong. Let's build on our successes!

This weekend The Globe and Mail published a feature story that I’ve been thinking about for well over a year, and which I’ve spent several months preparing: A look at Canadian scaleup tech and tech-enabled companies. I’ve covered the Canadian tech scene since I joined the Globe nearly 13 years ago. Things were pretty moribund then: Nortel was gone, BlackBerry was on the decline and tech made up a dismal 1.6 per cent of the S&P/TSX Composite Index. Companies were small, underfunded, prone to foreign takeovers at bargain prices and venture capitalists were asking for help from Ottawa. Shopify was still a small startup occupying an old building in the seedier part of Ottawa’s ByWard Market. But I could see that something interesting was happening. It was much easier to start a tech company than a decade earlier. New opportunities had opened up everywhere, thanks to the explosion of mobile data communications, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. I convinced my editors we should really lean into covering the sector, because I felt these trends would power an explosion of successful software companies around the world – and Canada would have its share of them. By the 2020s, it was evident that this had come to pass. I started to compile a list of companies that had reached the US$100m mark in revenues – a sign of maturity and enduring success in tech. Companies that reached that size would have options when the prolonged tech downturn ended – and many of them would go public. And that IPO wave would be a lot different than the previous two in Canada. The companies would be mature, big, profitable – and valuable. The question was, would many of them skip the Toronto Stock Exchange and just head straight to NYC? Last spring, I started to put more effort into figuring out who was missing. The list turned out to be lot bigger than I thought it would be – 71 companies, and counting. Some of them are more than 40 years old and have gotten new life in recent years. Some are rocket ships that are barely a decade old. Most have attracted private capital. And a lot of them want to build “heavy” companies, as Jeff Bezos aspired to do in Amazon’s early days. The US$100m club features some of Canada’s best-known tech brands: 1Password, Wealthsimple Questrade Financial Group and Hopper and others you'll be hearing a lot about (or already have) like GeoComply, Geotab, Clio - Cloud-Based Legal Technology and StackAdapt. Why does a story on Canada’s US$100m club matter? The narrative about our tech sector has been exceedingly negative of late. To be sure, the sector overall is in a funk. But these successes should be a bigger part of Canada’s economic story. They are a testament to the fact the sector has depth, breadth, maturity and scale it once lacked. It has come of age. Some say we have a “go for bronze” mentality. I beg to differ. What do you think?

🎉 Exciting News! 🎉 Bringing home some very cool hardware from #MaRSClimateImpact week in Toronto! We are honoured to share that Hyperion has been recognized with the 2024 Decarbonizer of the Year Award, presented by MaRS Discovery District, St Marys Cement and the Cement Association of Canada. This inaugural award from industry leaders is especially meaningful, highlighting the impact of a Canadian cleantech company driving scalable decarbonization and materials innovation with proven climate benefits, and momentum in the marketplace. Truly humbling to be chosen among such exceptional nominees. A huge THANK YOU to our amazing team, partners, advisors, and champions who have made this achievement possible. 🌎 What a perfect way to cap 2024 — a year of major milestones and a testament to the power of teamwork, innovation, and steadfast determination! Key Highlights: 💫 Hyperion launched the World’s First Tandem Carbon Recycling System©, a groundbreaking solution to capture and transform waste into mineral components that permanently store carbon and enhance low-carbon concrete, among other industrial applications. 💫 500% Growth: From our original Carbon XPRIZE prototype to fully validated industrial pilot operating at Lafarge Canada's Ontario cement plant in Bath, ON and ready to scale further! 💫 Driving Circularity: Developing practical, sustainable solutions to deliver substantial environmental and economic value to industrial partners. 💫 Hyperion’s patented technology is proudly Made in Canada, manufactured in Ontario, and supported by local suppliers, trades, and skilled engineers. We look forward to building concrete solutions together in 2025 and beyond! 🌀 *Special shout-out to Canadian concrete artist Kim Prokopowich at Studio50 for this beautiful, functional award design! 🏆 Leah Perry Tyler Hamilton Ria Perrault Heather Ward Rick VanSant, ICD.D Rob Perrins, P.Eng. Sarah Petrevan Adam Auer Resha Watkins Alanna Aqui Dr. Andrew J Stewart David Redfern Rob Cumming Jennifer Wagner Alice Havill Thistledown Fiona McKean Tobias Lütke Techstars Foresight Canada Invest Ottawa Capital Angel Network National Research Council Canada / Conseil national de recherches Canada #Decarbonization #Innovation #Cleantech #NetZero #Sustainability #CarbonRecycling #BuiltEnvironment #Teamwork #IndustryExcellence #MadeInCanada