early-stage seed funding

Whirlscape exits beta, launches version 2.0 of the Minuum keyboard

March 13, 2014
Susanne Staer
Media Coverage

Whirlscape Inc., a graduate of the University of Toronto Early-Stage Technology (UTEST) program’s cohort graduate, exits beta with the version 2.0 release of Minuum, their hit “small keyboard for big fingers.”

Whirlscape Inc. graduated from the University of Toronto Early-Stage Technology (UTEST) program’s first cohort. UTEST is accepting applications for its third cohort until April 17. Click here to apply.

Version 2.0’s release is already a popular download for Android Apps in the Google Play store. Users can get a 30-day free trial of Minuum and experience new features, including a widely anticipated addition of a Brazilian Portuguese language module, the company’s most requested language.

Screen Shot 2014-03-13 at 10.20.33 AM — Whirlscape Inc. released version 2.0 of the Minuum keyboard with a host of new features, including the highly-requested addition of a Portuguese (BR) language module.

Will Walmsley, Whirlscape’s CEO, spoke with Daniel Bader of MobileSyrup. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“We’re constantly testing out new features and improving the disambiguation algorithms,” says Will Walmsley, CEO and co-founder of the company he started at U of T’s Dynamic Graphics Project lab. The company raised $500,000 in seed funding earlier this year, and under the advisement of Y Combinator, began releasing often, trialling new features in what they call Bonus Panels, secondary functions that quickly allow users to change languages, add emojis and more.

Whirlscape’s Minuum keyboard makes SmartTV typing easy

February 26, 2014
Susanne Staer
Media Coverage

University of Toronto Early-Stage Technology (UTEST) graduate Whirlscape Inc. released a video on February 25, 2014 showing how their Minuum keyboard can make typing on Smart TVs and consoles easy.

UTEST is currently accepting applications for its third cohort. Apply now.

Minuum, the “little keyboard for big fingers” is making waves in wearable technology with their disambiguation algorithm and advanced language modelling, which can be used on Android devices and smart watches.

Read Darrell Etherington‘s article about Minuum on Smart TVs and consoles in Tech Crunch and coverage in Geeky Gadgets, an online technology review and resource publication. You can also read more about the U of T science behind Minuum here.

UTEST accepting applications for third cohort of University of Toronto entrepreneurs

February 19, 2014
Susanne Staer
Crowdmark

MaRS Innovation-U of T accelerator program among Canada’s best

The University of Toronto Early-Stage Technology accelerator program (UTEST) is now accepting applications for a third cohort until April 17, 2014.

Applicants must be current students or faculty at U of T, or have graduated within the last two years.

UTEST has just launched a new website with complete application information about the early-stage incubator and a link to the application form:

The 12-month program allows selected U of T affiliates to access office space, mentoring and $30,000 in funding, with opportunities to access follow-on funding from MaRS Innovation later on.

WaveCheck co-directers talk crowdfunding commercialization research on CBC’s “The World This Weekend”

MaRS Innovation staff and WaveCheck Campaign Co-directors Dr. Fazila Seker and Elizabeth Monier-Williams spoke with the CBC’s Colleen Ross about the process of crowdfunding WaveCheck’s partner-based clinical studies on “The World This Weekend.”

The radio segment, called “Crowdfunding Science,” aired on January 25, 2014 and discussed the lack of funding researchers have access to for commercialization, making it harder to advance research that could be helping people in a variety of industries.

To listen to the full interview, click here.

WaveCheck’s crowdfunding campaign is an example of how MaRS Innovation gets creative when traditional funding channels take too long or run dry, speeding up the commercialization process.

Xagenic founder Shana Kelley’s MRI blog post on bringing research to market

U of T professor shares tips to her team’s commercialization success

When it comes to bringing research from the lab to the market, the University of Toronto’s Dr. Shana Kelley knows firsthand what it takes. She’s co-founder of Xagenic, a MaRS Innovation and U of T start-up company that’s developed the first lab-free molecular diagnostic platform with a 20-minute time-to-result based on her research with fellow U of T colleague Professor Edward Sargent.

Xagenic recently announced a Series B financing announcement following their successful $10 million Series A round and more than $2 million seed funding round.

In her guest blog post for the Ministry of Research and Innovation, Kelley outlines what she’s learned through her experience in the commercialization process (emphasis ours):

1. When ready to commercialize, look in your own backyard for investment and support

Dr. Shana Kelley, co-founder of Xagenic Inc. and University of Toronto professor.

When the Xagenic technology was mature enough to consider commercialization, we started to call venture investors all over the world to see if we could get them to back the company. We always got the meetings we wanted, and lots of enthusiasm and encouragement, but it was difficult to get people engaged. We were fortunate to get seed funding from a group of local organizations including MaRS Innovation, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, the Innovation Acceleration Fund (IAF), and Ontario Centres of Excellence and then finally found the group that would eventually be our Series A lead investors, CTI Life Sciences Fund.

With CTI, we immediately got the traction we had been looking for from a venture investor that indicated genuine interest in the company. When we later made the rounds for the Series B investment outside of Canada, we repeatedly heard the comment: “we’re glad to see you could do the Series A in your own backyard.”

When I probed about why this was important, I found that the investment community thinks it is important to have your early investors as close geographically as possible. The level of interaction when a company gets off the group needs to be fairly intense — being geographically closer helps entrepreneurs and investors keep in better contact. This is definitely not a hard-and-fast rule, but I found it interesting that many investors had this perception. And it creates a particular challenge for Canadian companies given how little venture capital is available locally!

CBC News’ “The National” Features Granata Decision Systems

Amanda Lang interviews U of T prof and co-founder Craig Boutilier in segment on innovative start-ups and Canada’s future

Following an appearance on the CBC’s “Lang and O’Leary Exchange” on November 28, MaRS Innovation UTEST company, Granata Decision Systems, appeared on CBC news “The National.” The segment included an interview with Amanda Lang.

Watch Boutilier’s interview with Lang for “The National” on CBC’s website.

Screen Shot 2013-12-02 at 4.49.56 PM — **Granata Decision Systems’** Co-Founder and University of Toronto Professor **Craig Boutilier** gives his pitch at a OneEleven investor session. Boutilier and Granata were featured on CBC News’ “The National.”

Founded by Craig Boutilier and Tyler Lu, Granata Decision Systems is one of the first six companies incubated through the UTEST program for early-stage technologies, jointly administered by MaRS Innovation and the University of Toronto.

Granata is one of eight companies to join OneEleven’s accelerator program for companies tackling big data problems.

Their software allows marketers to optimize the effectiveness of their campaigns.

The segment features co-founder Craig Boutilier’s pitch at an invitation-only investor gathering at OneEleven to secure funding to further the success of Granata Decision Systems.

WaveCheck to Transform Chemotherapy Monitoring for Women with Breast Cancer

Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for North American clinical study during Breast Cancer Awareness Month; 12 artists donate 13 original works worth over $15,000 to support campaign

Toronto, Canada (October 9, 2013) — WaveCheck — a painless, non-surgical clinical technique developed by a Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre oncologist and a Ryerson University physicist and supported by MaRS Innovation — is poised to transform chemotherapy response monitoring for women with breast cancer.

Dr. Gregory Czarnota of Sunnybrook Health Sciences (left) and Professor Michael Kolios of Ryerson University, WaveCheck's inventors. — Dr. Gregory Czarnota of Sunnybrook Health Sciences (left) and Professor Michael Kolios of Ryerson University, WaveCheck’s inventors.

WaveCheck combines traditional ultrasound with new software to detect responses to chemotherapy in breast cancer tissues. By making better, more accurate information available about a woman’s response to her chemotherapy treatment in weeks rather than months, WaveCheck creates greater transparency through dialogue between a women and her doctors, empowering her to participate in discussions about whether a given chemotherapy treatment is effective.

Contribute to WaveCheck‘s Indiegogo campaign and help make this technology available to all women with breast cancer faster.

Media coverage: CTV News Channel, the Globe and Mail and Canadian Healthcare Technology have covered WaveCheck’s campaign.

Developed by Dr. Gregory Czarnota, chief of Radiation Oncology at Sunnybrook’s Odette Cancer Centre, and Michael C. Kolios, professor of Physics and Canada Research Chair in Biomedical Applications of Ultrasound at Ryerson, WaveCheck has been used in clinical studies with nearly 100 women receiving upfront, neoadjuvant chemotherapy to treat locally-advanced breast cancer. These results are published in two leading journals, Clinical Cancer Research and Translational Oncology.

In the Indiegogo campaign video, Czarnota, Kolios and three of the 100 women who participated in the first Sunnybrook study explain WaveCheck’s impact.

“The hard truth for women with breast cancer is that 60 to 70 per cent of chemotherapy treatments fail,” said Czarnota, who is also a senior scientist and director of cancer research at Sunnybrook Research Institute and assistant professor in the University of Toronto’s Departments of Radiation Oncology and Medical Biophysics within the Faculty of Medicine. “The 1.5 million women worldwide who will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year need to know that their chemotherapy is working as soon as possible. But this kind of treatment monitoring doesn’t currently exist in standard clinical practice. Instead, a woman’s tumour response is evaluated after she completes her chemotherapy treatment, which is typically a four- to six-month process.

Dr. Hofstein’s Op-Ed for The Hill-Times, “Biotechnology research: A knowledge economy”

This op-ed on Canadian biotechnology and the knowledge economy appeared in The Hill-Times (subscription required), Canada’s politics and government newsweekly, September 9:

Obesity, cancer, heart disease and stroke, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, or the more general stresses of an aging population: no matter which area of concern holds our collective gaze from moment to moment, improving health outcomes and healthcare is the No. 1 challenge for the world’s economy.

Canada has the holistic approach and translational research necessary to address health care’s pervasive challenges, with particular strengths in biotechnology.

In 2007, the Government of Canada made advancing translational research a top priority through the Science and Technology Strategy, with emphasis on cancer, metabolic disorders and, most recently, neurology, as part of the government’s response to the burdensome realities of neurodegenerative disorders.

Scientific research has made significant progress in unraveling the underlying causes of disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease, but translating these findings into useful clinical treatments is the key to attaining meaningful accomplishments. Only clinical treatment successes will alleviate pressure on the economy.

Transformational research is the essential first step in this process, but even more importantly, it needs to be put in the hands of those who can translate it into realistic and useful outcomes for patients in particular and society in general.

Thanks to research analytics that capture publications, citations, and other significant metrics, we know Canadian researchers punch above their weight, particularly in medical research. Canada’s challenge is not the quality or quantity of our research ideas but our ability to commercialize those ideas and translate them into market-ready products.

Aware of and concerned by this gap between fundamental basic research and useful patient, social, and economic outcomes, the Canadian government established the Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research (CECR) program in 2007. Part of the internationally-recognized Networks of Centres of Excellence suite of programs, the CECR program is a unique collaboration between the three federal granting agencies (the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council), along with Industry Canada, and Health Canada.

Designed to bridge the challenging gap between innovation and commercialization, the CECR program matches clusters of research expertise with the business community to share the knowledge and resources that bring innovations to market faster.

MaRS Innovation was among the first CECRs to be created in 2008, largely based on the founding belief of its members that Toronto is a fertile research land for precisely this kind of translational activity.

Cellax profiled in SciBX; MaRS Innovation’s MSc PoP program cited in National Post supplement

The Cellax technology was profiled in a recent issue of SciBX (subscription necessary). MaRS Innovation is mentioned in the article as the technology’s commercialization agent.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Ontario Institute for Cancer Research scientists have developed glycopolymer-conjugated docetaxel nanoparticles that outperform Abraxane in mouse models of breast cancer. The Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) is backing the program with $1.5 million to take it to the clinic. The expectation is that the product’s ability to target the tumor stroma rather than the tumor itself will differentiate it from Abraxane and other chemotherapeutic formulations.”

Call for Applications: MaRS Innovation seeks applicants for early-stage MSc POP projects

September 4, 2013
Susanne Staer
BresoTec Inc.

MaRS Innovation (MI) seeks applicants for the Medical Sciences Proof-of-Principle (MSc PoP) program, which supports early-stage medical science technologies and allows their founding teams to conduct crucial proof-of-principle work.

Through the two-year MSc POP program, MI will distribute funding awards to qualified applicants within its membership on behalf of the Ministry of Research and Innovation (MRI). Funds are available in $25,000 or $75,000 grants.

“At MaRS Innovation, the PoP program functions as a kind of internal Dragons’ Den,” says Dr. Raphael Hofstein, president and CEO of MaRS Innovation. “For three years, we’ve used a panel of industry leaders to hear pitches from the founding teams of the most promising technologies in our intellectual property pipeline. Based on their assessments, the strongest projects receive PoP funding to fuel their prototyping and other proof-of-principle work.”