Sixteen projects under Canada’s Ocean Supercluster (OSC) will see $52 million in funding flow towards them. The OSC is providing $23 million, while the remaining funding will come from the project teams.
Kraken Robotics, CoLab Software Management, and Kognitiv Spark, are among the startups receiving funding.
The new funding will help the projects scale up and expand, and are part of the OSC’s Capacity and Supply Chain Expansion (CASCE) Program, which launched in 2021 under the cluster’s first round of funding.
The CASCE Program aims to strengthen and grow supply chains and enable Canadian ocean-focused companies to accelerate commercialization.
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The OSC is the federally-backed, industry-led innovation cluster focused on tackling ocean-sector challenges. It has approved 86 projects with a total value of $400 million. Those projects are set to deliver more than 130 new made-in-Canada ocean products, processes and services to sell globally.
The funding will be shared among 16 projects, all of them previously announced and underway with the innovation cluster. There will be $1.4 million for the creation of a service hub called Tech Companion, which centralizes data for use in ocean industries. Also included is $3.3 million to scale up and produce a portable technology that collects and analyzes acoustic data on autonomous underwater vehicles.
The federal government created OSC under Canada’s Innovation Superclusters Initiative in 2017, which has since been rebranded to Global Innovation Clusters. Other clusters are dedicated to digital technology, protein industries, advanced manufacturing, and artificial intelligence (AI).
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The clusters were established to encourage industry and academia to collaborate on large-scale projects with the goal of accelerating growth across several industries. Led by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED), funding flows into the clusters through co-investments by government and industry, with an expectation of dollar-for-dollar matching.
Of the federal government’s renewed committed to the Global Innovation Clusters, $125 million has been allocated to OSC.
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