Ottawa-based SaaS accelerator L-Spark has announced the startups participating in the fall 2019 cohort of its SaaS-focused program.
Beginning this week, six SaaS startups will go through an intensive six-month program, receive tactical and strategic support, relevant workshops, and advice from L-Spark’s team. The program will help the cohort receive investments, reach product-market-fit, establish sales channels, and navigate government funding. The accelerator is now in its sixth year and has helped 51 companies to date.
Since the launch of the first cohort, L-Spark said it has assisted 51 companies in raising a combined total of $45 million.
“We’re moving into our sixth year here at L-Spark and the community is really rallying behind our efforts. Our selection committee was the largest yet with representation from most of the major VC firms and angel investment groups across Canada,” said Leo Lax, executive managing director at L-Spark. “We’re also glad to see that two of the companies in this cohort are in the cybersecurity space as this is a strong indicator that Canada is becoming much more of an innovator in that area.”
The L-Spark team narrowed down a list of 300 startup applicants, and met with various investors to conduct due diligence on candidates. While L-Spark conducted a four-city roadshow in search of its cohort, visiting in Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, and Ottawa, five out of six selected companies are based in Ottawa, where L-Spark is located, and one is from Toronto. The successful applicants include:
Click Armor (Ottawa)
Click Armor provides a gamified cybersecurity training platform, aimed at improving employee behaviours and reducing the risk of cyberattacks that target human vulnerabilities.
F8th (Ottawa)
F8th is an AI-based solution that provides vendors with a predictive capability that can detect fraudulent online transactions while allowing clients to improve their sales and the customer experience.
MyPitboard (Ottawa)
MyPitboard offers real-time lap time feedback for track-based sports, which includes training analytics and tools for a monthly fee, and racing information displayed in real-time.
Neurovine (Ottawa)
Neurovine aims to make the concussion recovery process visible to patients and clinicians while also providing real-time feedback that prevents recovery regression caused by overexertion.
Nugget.ai (Toronto)
Nugget.ai uses job-relevant challenges to quantify people skills and help employers hire and develop best-fit talent, capturing over 400 data points to correlate skills and gaps to employee performance benchmarks.
SoftwareSecured’s Reshift (Ottawa)
Reshift is a code security tool built for development teams, to automate finding vulnerabilities in source code, and reducing the efforts required to remediate them.
Since the launch of the first cohort in January 2015, L-Spark said it has assisted its companies in raising a collective total of $45 million. It has claims to have over 20,000 SaaS investors, corporate partners, and startups in its network.
Image courtesy L-Spark via Facebook