Participated · Seed · May 2024

Maia Farms is a Vancouver-based food-tech company that engineers mushroom and mycelium ingredients through liquid-state fermentation, extrusion processing, and a proprietary "fungal intelligence" platform. Its products target food manufacturers that want sustainable, nutrient-dense alternatives to conventional animal or plant proteins. The startup already collaborates with more than 70 global service companies and maintains an impact partnership with The Greater Vancouver Food Bank. With a focus on scaling, Maia plans to accelerate commercial production, broaden its ingredient portfolio, and deepen partnerships across the food industry. The firm will also expand its fermentation and extrusion capacity to meet anticipated demand. Including non-dilutive capital, the company has secured more than $6.5 million in funding to date, underscoring strong early investor and grant support for its technology and mission.

Participated · Equity · Jul 2022

BIOS Health develops an AI-driven brain data and neural digital therapy platform that identifies neural biomarkers to connect nerve activity with specific illnesses. The company focuses on leveraging nervous-system data to create neural digital therapies and accelerate precision medicine for conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. BIOS positions its technology as a way to codify the "neural code" and enable a new generation of medicines and data-driven clinical trials. The firm says it will use the new funds and revenue growth to build market share. BIOS was founded in 2015 by Cambridge University researchers Emil Hewage and Oliver Armitage and its team spans neuroscience, machine learning, software, applied biomaterials, biotech and medicine. Earlier this year the NIH and institutions including the University of Minnesota, the Mayo Clinic, and Stanford chose BIOS’ technology to power the three-year, eight-clinic REVEAL programme, described by BIOS as the largest clinical investigation of human brain data to date. BIOS Health is developing an AI-controlled closed-loop neuromodulation system aimed at treating chronic cardiac conditions by linking neural and cardiac signals. The company collaborates with academic partners including Mila, McGill University and Université de Montréal, and works closely with researchers Dr. Blake Richards and Dr. Guillaume Lajoie. Its work focuses on using machine learning to decode neural‑to‑cardiac relationships and identify neural biomarkers that enable personalized, second-by-second modulation of cardiac function. The technology aims to preferentially modulate cardiac activity while reducing side effects on other organs, potentially replacing some pharmaceutical interventions. BIOS plans to advance the program toward human clinical trials, with the CEO stating the next stage will take the project up to the point of clinical testing. The company’s research programme began with a CA$800,000 partnership launched in 2020 and is being expanded through new, project-specific funding. BIOS is developing a core neural interface product and related AI that the company says can connect to organs and nerve systems across the body. Its first product, described as a “USB connector for the body,” enabled a Prosthetic Interface Device (PID) that lets amputees connect prostheses directly to the nervous system and is about to enter clinical trials. R&D has produced safer, more accurate hardware and yielded a large neural data set that BIOS uses to train its algorithms. The company plans to both build some products itself and partner with commercial and academic organisations, expanding access via tools, data sets and algorithms for discovering neural biomarkers. BIOS is originally based in Cambridge, U.K., and has opened an additional R&D office in Montreal, Canada. The startup will use the funding to double its technical team and further develop its core neural-interface technologies while helping push industry standards and formats for neural data.

Participated · Seed · Sep 2020

Replica Analytics develops technology to generate privacy-protected synthetic data that maintains the statistical properties of real data without breaching regulatory privacy requirements. Its flagship product, Replica Synthesis, provides synthetic real-world data and synthetic clinical trial data to data scientists and researchers. The company is led by co-founder and director Khaled El Emam and is based in Ottawa, ON, Canada. Replica Analytics raised new pre-seed funding to accelerate research and further develop its data synthesis and data simulation technologies. The financing supports continued product and research efforts around privacy-preserving synthetic data generation.

Participated · Equity · Jan 2016

BioIntelligence Technologies, based in Sherbrooke, QC, Canada, develops AI-powered instruments and software to monitor, understand, predict, and optimize industrial bioprocesses using fermentation. Its core product, the BioIntelligence Analytics Solution™ (BAS™), measures microorganism evolution, nutrient consumption, and product synthesis directly in fermenters and bioreactors and performs advanced customized analytics in real time for plant operators. BAS™ is already commercial with industrial clients in North America and Europe. The company says its solutions reduce product losses, cut water and energy consumption, and lower CO2 emissions while improving consistency and profitability for industrial clients. Led by CEO and founder Joel Sirois, BioIntelligence creates and commercializes intelligent instruments and software for biotech companies. It raised $5M to accelerate growth in America and Europe. Founded in 2014 and based in Sherbrooke, BioIntelligence Technologies has developed two proprietary technology platforms and licensed a third from the University of Sherbrooke to optimize biological processes in real time. Its smart probes and server-analysts (the BioAnalyst product) monitor multiple key variables and recommend actions to maximize the profitability of biological cultures. The company completed a first financing round to support commercialization of the BioAnalyst and to accelerate development of additional products. Management says initial commercial targets are industrial biotechnology customers in the U.S. and Europe, with biopharmaceuticals targeted later at a global scale. BioIntelligence operates from the Espace-INC incubator and has received local acceleration support from Sherbrooke Innopole and ACET. The company has also won regional entrepreneurial awards and competitions in 2015.