Connecting The Dots: November 2022

Each month, the team at Switchboard Public Relations connects the dots between the trends, headlines and narratives informing the B.C. tech sector.

For November’s Connecting The Dots, the team breaks down recent funding announcements and multimillion-dollar M&A action, highlights awards wins across the B.C. tech ecosystem, and provides resources for those impacted by layoffs.

Cleantech Funding flows into B.C. tech

The Short: Audette secures a $12.8-million seed round; Metaspectral receives $4.7 million; and Carbon Engineering receives millions from aviation industry leaders.

The Long: Victoria cleantech startup Audette raised $12.8 million to help decarbonize commercial buildings across 150 North American cities over the next two years. The company’s end-to-end platform provides data for emissions-reduction opportunities and helps building owners source financing and incentives that can reduce the cost of retrofit projects by up to 90 percent. This latest round of funding received contributions from Buoyant Ventures, Energy Impact Partners, Turnham-Green Capital, Active Impact Investments, Powerhouse Ventures, and Undivided Ventures. Other investors include Osgoode Properties, which owns and manages over 5,000 apartment rentals throughout Canada; and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning company Johnson Controls.

Following recent funding from the Canadian Space Agency, Metaspectral closed a $4.7 million seed round. The Vancouver startup is advancing computer vision through deep learning and hyperspectral imagery, and plans to use this new capital to support continued development and refinement of its Fusion platform, which makes it easy for those with or without technical expertise to train and deploy deep learning models that analyze hyperspectral imagery in real-time.

As the aviation sector takes steps to reach net zero, Squamish-based Carbon Engineering (CE) recently announced millions of dollars in investments from industry giants Airbus and Air Canada. This funding will contribute to CE’s ongoing technology development work at the CE Innovation Centre, the world’s largest dedicated direct air capture (DAC) research and development facility.

A winning awards season

The Short: Yield Exchange wins big at SAAS North; MintList earns second Stevie Award; 19 B.C. tech companies are named in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 program list; tech leaders are well represented in BIV’s 2022 “Forty under 40 Awards”; and a record number of finalists are announced for the Victoria Tech Community Awards.

The Long: Burnaby-based Yield Exchange won big at the SAAS NORTH Conference in Ottawa this month. The online marketplace for guaranteed investment certificates (GICs) won $100,000 by coming out on top of a group of 10 Firehood finalists, and was also crowned winner of the AWS PitchFest, picking up $10,000 from Amazon Web Services.

MintList was awarded its second Stevie Award this year after being named the winner of a Gold Stevie® Award in the “Startup of the Year – Consumer Services Industries” category. “It is an honour to be recognized at the 19th-annual Stevie Awards for Women in Business,” said Mehrsa Raeiszadeh, MintList’s Co-founder and COO. “Earlier this year, we were the first Canadian company to win a Stevie Award for ‘Tech Startup of the Year,’ and this is further proof that our platform’s uniquely innovative approach to simplifying the process of buying, selling and trading vehicles is the incredible product that we envisioned.” More details about the Stevie Awards for Women in Business and the list of Finalists are available here.

Each year, Deloitte Canada announces the winners of the Technology Fast 50, recognizing the world-class achievements of the best in tech companies across Canada. The program reached a huge milestone this year, celebrating 25 years of recognizing Canadian technology companies’ achievements, outstanding innovation, leadership, and growth. Including the “Clean Technology,” “Enterprise Fast 15,” and “Companies-to-watch” rankings, it also marks the highest number of B.C. companies on the annual lists, beating last year’s total of 18. Check out the full lists here.

The recipients of BIV’s 2022 Forty under 40 Awards will be featured in the annual magazine and in person at an event on February 22nd, 2023. Tech-oriented honourees include:

• Anna Baird, head of culture and innovation, customer experience, Google Cloud
• Ashiq Ahamed, managing partner, SolvedAF Consulting
• Ben Samaroo, co-founder and CEO, WonderFi Technologies
• Benjamin Thiede, director, business development and licensing, STEMCELL Technologies
• Graham Manders, CTO, DarkVision Technologies
• Ken Conroy, director of data science, Glia Technologies
• Matt Carlson, co-founder and CEO, Floorspace
• Maxime Charron, CEO, LeadingAhead Energy
• Mehrsa Raeiszadeh, co-founder and COO, MintList
• Ramtin Rasoulinezhad, director of engineering, Shift Clean Solutions
• Richard Vandegriend, co-founder, Arya Electronic Health Records
• Sherry Aulin, CFO, Xenon Pharmaceuticals
• Travis McPherson, senior vice-president, corporate development, NexGen Energy

The Victoria Tech Community Awards are back and VIATEC announced that the awards received more nominations than ever. After reviewing an outstanding 187 nominations, 59 finalists from 47 companies were selected for ten award categories. The finalists in each category will be reviewed by a panel of delegates from VIATEC, Island Women in Science and Technology (iWIST), Women’s Equity Lab, Capital Investment Network (CIN), Alacrity Canada, and UVic’s Coast Capital Innovation Centre. The awards will be presented at a gala dinner on December 8th. Check out the full list of finalists here.

Resources for those impacted by layoffs

The second half of 2022 has been challenging for tech ecosystems around the world, and B.C.’s is no exception. In the wake of earlier layoffs by B.C.-based companies and multinationals, Dapper Labs, the company behind “NBA Top Shot” and the Flow blockchain, recently laid off 22 percent of staff; Vancouver-based Kabam Games reduced its workforce by 7 percent, and roughly 5% of the staff at Hootsuite were let go. According to media reports, an undisclosed number of Vancouver-based Amazon employees were affected by the company’s layoffs of around 10,000 workers globally.

For those impacted, several regularly updated online resources highlight enduring career opportunities across the B.C. ecosystem:

• BetaKit provides a list of hundreds of companies that are continuing to hire
• The BC Tech Association’s job board showcases several open roles in the industry
• Tech Talent Canada explores some of Canada’s key tech regions and opportunities available in each