After announcing a joint accelerator in September, SaaS-focused L-SPARK and BlackBerry have selected seven companies to be part of their program.
BlackBerry said it would help companies research and develop product prototypes in robotics, device security, sensor fusion (e.g. LiDAR, radar, cameras and GPS), functional safety, analytics, medical devices, and autonomous vehicles.
“We are honored to launch the BlackBerry/L-SPARK Accelerator and bring together the passion and innovation of our SME companies with the global footprint of BlackBerry. Together, we will bring to light the best and brightest to serve our community,” said Leo Lax, executive managing director of L-SPARK.
At the end of the program, a pitch event will allow finalist companies to demonstrate their progress and proof of concepts that they plan to take to market.
“We were extremely impressed with both the quality and breadth of applicants for our first ever accelerator program with L-SPARK,” said Grant Courville, VP of product management and strategy at BlackBerry QNX. “The future of technological innovation is all about collaboration and we look forward to helping these companies over the next six months bring to market their next-gen products that will help shape the way we’ll live, work and play in the future.”
The seven finalists include:
Martello (Ottawa, Ontario): Martello’s solutions manage and optimize the performance of real-time services on cloud and enterprise networks. Designed for real-time communications such as voice and video, Martello’s solutions detect, identify, and address network performance problems before service quality is impacted.
KyberSecurity (Montreal, Quebec, Canada): KyberSecurity helps companies combat sophisticated cybersecurity attacks. The technology does not require source code modifications nor prior security knowledge to protect applications. From a user perspective, the protection process is straightforward, automated and transparent.
Evolved Vehicle Environments (Ottawa, Ontario): Evolved Vehicle Environments (EVE) offers connected car experiences via a SaaS subscription model available in Tesla and Subaru cars. It offers an in-market connected car solution that is fully functional, user customizable, and continually evolving.
Visionary Semiconductor Inc. (Waterloo, Ontario): Visionary Semiconductor Inc. focuses on realizing color imaging and depth mapping with one compact device, which solves the heavy computing and form factor problems of current 3D imaging technologies. Their products extend from the source of 3D imaging technology, advanced image sensors, to intelligent 3D imaging device and modules with Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities.
Bluink (Ottawa, Ontario): Bluink allows customers and citizens to carry their identity on their smartphone in a secure wallet app called eID-Me. This e-identity can be used by citizens for omni-channel login to websites to assert their identity in person. eID-Me can carry a driver’s license and health card, plus secure cryptographic keys to unlock doors of buildings and cars or to access IoT devices.
Acerta (Kitchener, Ontario): Acerta provides an AI-powered solution for automotive applications. By integrating domain expertise into its machine learning models, the company works to reduce scrap and rework and reduce root cause analysis.
Soltare (Edmonton, Alberta): Soltare offers an emergency vehicle siren detection – iHear – that is designed to notify both the existence and direction of an approaching emergency vehicle.
