Calgary’s Thin Air Labs has reached a major milestone, the consulting firm announced on Tuesday, outlining that it has now secured more than $100 million in funding for startups through its Funding Catalyst service.
Co-founded in 2019 by James Lochrie, Gregory Hart, Jim Gibson, and Kirk Simpson, Thin Air Labs supports the growth of tech and innovation startups. Today’s milestone represents more than $100 million in non-dilutive funding deployed across more than 300 projects from nearly 400 companies, according to Thin Air Labs.
“We want to help founders keep ownership of the businesses they have built.”
Initially conceived of as a way for Thin Air Labs to “de-risk” its own portfolio companies, the Funding Catalyst service has grown over its five-year lifespan into a national consulting service working with founders and startups nationwide in sectors as diverse as defence, life sciences, cleantech, AgTech, manufacturing, and more.
The Funding Catalyst service pursues financing opportunities for clients through a variety of pipelines, including grant programs, tax credits, wage subsidies, government awards, and other public funding programs that offer non-dilutive financing, allowing founders to retain ownership in their companies. Participating companies work with Thin Air Labs to develop capital strategies, identify business growth opportunities, and manage end-to-end requirements of the various funding programs.
“It took our team five years to reach this milestone, and it is a significant milestone,” Ania Sergeenko, the Funding Catalyst service’s managing director, told BetaKit in an email. “We want to help founders keep ownership of the businesses they have built. Non-dilutive funding is a way for business leaders to … grow their business while maintaining the ability to make key decisions about the future of their venture.”
Sergeenko said that Funding Catalyst is more than a grant-writing service, instead offering business consulting tailored to the needs of specific clients and industries.
Image courtesy Thin Air Labs.
“When we onboard a client, we do our own due diligence on the business and technology they are building,” she said. “In doing this, we come to deeply understand the company, the problem they’re looking to solve, and what their growth trajectory could look like over 18 to 24 months.”
Among the companies Sergeenko and the Thin Air Labs team have worked with is Bio-Stream Diagnostics, an Edmonton-based biotech company developing portable diagnostic tools capable of tracking health biomarkers and detecting pathogens outside of traditional lab settings.
CEO John Murphy, who has been working with the Funding Catalyst team for two years, said the program helped Bio-Stream secure significant funding in a way that fit the needs of their unique field.
“We’re up hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many hundreds of thousands. These guys are a little bit next level as far as we’re concerned,” Murphy said. “They really got the flexibility of our business model and they worked with us on finding strategic grants and … what makes the most sense for the business and the opportunity ahead of us.”
“The point is, this isn’t just a service where they’re going to write the grant and you submit it,” Murphy added. “This is a much more collaborative kind of engagement where they really do know all about our company.”
BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.
Feature image courtesy Kyler Nixon via Unsplash.