For over a year now, businesses across Canada have adapted to remote or hybrid work environments made necessary by the Covid-19 pandemic. Most Canadians have now familiarized themselves with applications and virtual collaboration tools like Zoom, Skype, and Microsoft Teams to keep working, and stay connected throughout lockdowns and distancing measures. Yet even as organizations […]
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PDFTron Announces Strategic Growth Investment from Thoma Bravo
Vancouver’s PDFTron Systems has landed a strategic growth investment from Thoma Bravo, a private equity investment firm focused on the software sector. PDFTron’s highly configurable software development kits (SDKs) help more than 2,000 customers improve productivity, accelerate application development lifecycles, and reduce time to market. Since its founding in 1998, PDFTron has developed the industry’s definitive […]
SOTW 010: ThyForLife
Welcome to Startup of the Week, a column highlighting BC’s most innovative and exciting tech startups. Today, we’re featuring Vancouver’s ThyForLife. With World Thyroid Day coming up on May 25th, it’s the perfect time to highlight ThyForLife—an award winning mobile thyroid health tracking app. Over 400 million people around the world have thyroid conditions but […]
Vancouver’s StoryTap Scales Up With USD $2.3 Million Seed Round
Vancouver’s StoryTap has raised a USD $2.3 million seed round led by Refinery Ventures and including StandUp Ventures. StoryTap’s patented video storytelling platform enables brands to engage and grow by harnessing the power of authentic social video stories. StoryTap was founded by CEO Bernadette Butler and CTO Sean Braacx (pictured) and has been bootstrapped for […]
Vancouver’s Metaspectral Selected For SCALE Aerospace Accelerator Program
Vancouver’s Metaspectral has been selected to join the SCALE Aerospace Accelerator Program. Run by the Starburst Aerospace Accelerator in collaboration with UCLA, SCALE is an early-stage, aerospace-focused accelerator that helps entrepreneurs launch and scale their businesses. Metaspectral’s unique technology derives real-time insights from artificial intelligence (AI) using ultra-high-resolution, visible-to-infrared (hyperspectral) images. This is enabled by its […]
Shopify & Thinkific Collaboration Helps Entrepreneurs Sell Products And Skills In One Basket
While impacts of the pandemic to businesses have varied wildly across sectors, it has been particularly painful for small operators. For many service based entrepreneurs; coaches and instructors, beauticians, stylists, and personal trainers, ‘business as usual’ literally shuttered overnight. Those running small online businesses selling physical goods, themselves struggled with cratering supply chains, disrupted shipping […]
Dooly Raises USD $80 Million Series B Two Months After Series A Round
Just two months after raising a Series A round, Vancouver’s Dooly is back at it with a Series B. Today the CRM automation software startup announced it has raised a USD $80 million funding round led by Spark Capital with new participation from Greenspring, Tiger Global, and Lachy Groom, and continued participation from boldstart ventures, […]
Creative Destruction Lab Establishes CDL-Seattle At University of Washington
Canada’s Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) will launch its third U.S.-based location in Seattle this fall. CDL is a nonprofit organization for massively scalable, seed-stage, science- and technology-based companies, with ten locations including CDL-Vancouver at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia. Based at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, CDL-Seattle will […]
Celebrating Bitcoin Pizza Day and How Far Bitcoin Has Come
In May 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz, a developer from Florida, made the first known purchase of a good with bitcoin. He was mining tens of thousands of bitcoin from his home. Even though he had large amounts, he had nowhere to spend his bitcoin. Fortunately, he was part of a Bitcoin Talk Forum started by Satoshi […]
BC Research Funders Create Partnership For Nine New COVID-19 Projects
Genome BC, the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, and the BCCDC Foundation for Public Health have partnered for the first time to fund rapid response research initiatives that will have a direct impact – in a matter of months – on people in British Columbia during the COVID-19 pandemic. Valued at approximately $1.3 million, […]