‘Mega Demo Day’ gives tech startups a chance to shine
For 12 tech startups in Montreal, three months of sleepless nights and caffeine-fuelled days culminated in one blockbuster event this week.
About 1,400 members of Montreal’s startup community packed the Olympia Theatre on Wednesday afternoon for #MegaDemoDay, an opportunity to hear from the startups that took part in this fall’s InnoCité MTL and FounderFuel accelerators.
Investors, entrepreneurs and curious bystanders listened as the companies’ founding teams pitched their hearts out, hawking their products — “revolutionary,” as most described them — in efforts to raise funds for the next investment round.
To bring readers up to speed, these two Montreal startup accelerators offer mentorship programs designed to get young businesses off the ground in three months.
The startups are usually given $50,000 in exchange for an equity share, and are expected to create a deliverable product by the end of the 12 weeks.
FounderFuel, an accelerator created by venture-capital firm Real Ventures, has sent eight cohorts, including the most recent one, into the startup world since 2011. But for InnoCité MTL — a product of Montreal’s smart-city action plan — the process was brand new.
“In a way, InnoCité was a startup in itself,” said Sylvain Carle, the general manager of the FounderFuel accelerator program, in an interview a day before Demo Day.
All 12 startups from both accelerators spent the three months at Notman House, a major tech hub in the city. “It was a pretty full house this fall,” Carle said.
As part of the smart-city mandate, InnoCité MTL’s startups — Ubios, Sensequake, Digital State, Dasbox and Prkng — are makers of technologies designed to improve city life.
Ubios, for example, makes connected-home hardware that turns old-fashioned sockets, light switches and thermostats into smart devices. CEO Mathieu Lachaîne described its potential as a smart water valve that shuts off when no one’s home, limiting the potential for water damage in multi-unit buildings.
Digital State, another of InnoCité MTL’s startups, is looking to standardize cities’ 311 municipal-reporting systems into easyto-use interactive tools. Sinking city resources into developing independent citizen-engagement platforms is unnecessary when every city administration essentially wants the same thing, CEO Stephen Russett explained.
“I’ve had mayors personally calling me,” he said in his pitch.
Each company from either accelerator announced it is seeking between $500,000 and $1 million in seed capital to advance its commercial ambitions, with the exception of Montreal-based Delve Labs, which has already raised $600,000 for Warden, its autonomous online-security product.
Delve Labs founder Gabriel Tremblay surprised the room when he said his company’s next capital goal is to raise $5 million in a Series A round.
Raising that kind of cash for a Montreal startup is not as impossible as it may have been a few years ago, thanks in part to the attention that young firms like Breather, Bus Bud and the partly Montreal-based App Direct — the latter of which most recently raised $140 million in its Series E round — have brought to the tech ecosystem here.
“My favourite thing about this process is, as much as we work to select and find (startups) — it’s really hard to predict who’s going to take what from the program and what’s going to happen for them,” said FounderFuel GM Carle.
Carle, who emceed the FounderFuel portion of the afternoon, beamed like a proud papa when introducing his startup children.
This past group comprised the aforementioned Delve Labs, as well as OneSet (Instagram for fitness lovers), SpherePlay (a customizable virtual-reality player), Zora (a prospective-tenant scoring system for landlords), GradeSlam (a $15-a-month, 24/7 chat-based tutoring system), Periodic (an ecommerce platform for booking time-based services) and PACTA (an automated, cloud-based tool to manage contracts).
Carle said many of the 200-plus applicants to FounderFuel were far more mature and advanced that in previous instances.
As a consequence, Carle said FounderFuel is pausing the next cohort’s applications until the New Year so it can recalibrate its offer to both maximize its usefulness, and make it more competitive against other accelerators.
“We are competing overall for the best startups, but there’s a fantastic supply of startups that need help,” he said.
We are competing overall for the best startups, but there’s a fantastic supply of startups that need help.