When we covered the Series 401 event last week at the OneEleven space, we hadn’t heard too much about the new space, other than that it was funded by OMERS Ventures. Today though, OneEleven has announced that it is launching as Canada’s “first community for data-driven entrepreneurs.”
The OneEleven coworking space is located at 111 Richmond St. in Toronto, otherwise known as “The Google Building,” as Google has its Toronto offices in the building on separate floors.
Now, according to OneEleven, entrepreneurs building big data enterprises have a new community to call home. “In OneEleven, we’re creating a community where talent and technology collide,” said managing director Bilal Khan. “OneEleven positions Toronto as a global leader in big data by providing entrepreneurs with the resources they need to accelerate the commercialization of cutting-edge research that will enhance the economic prosperity of the region.”
OneEleven has also described itself as Canada’s first “accelerator” created to address the technical needs of successful, visionary entrepreneurs who will benefit from access to the power of high performance computing. That being said it will be interesting how the accelerator is structured in terms of teams, equity and duration. According to the website, OneEleven’s teams are: BigViking, clio, Finmaven, Granata, OpenCare, Relay, rubikloud and Tulip Retail.
OneEleven is co-founded through investments by OMERS Ventures and Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), with the recent addition of Ryerson University as the founding academic partner.
The organization said that the accelerator portion is for entrepreneurs with proven track records “to be part of a peer community that also includes venture capital, industry, academia and government.” Eight new tech ventures have set up shop at OneEleven and more will be brought in through an” intensive screening and scouting process.”
“OneEleven will be a community of the most promising and sophisticated data-driven entrepreneurs and home to some of Toronto’s best technology start-ups,” said OMERS Ventures’ John Ruffolo. “OneEleven will allow its member companies to create scalable entrepreneurial opportunities by solving previously unmanageable problems through the aggregated power of high performance computing.”
The partnership with OCE means that OneEleven will round out its vision by “bringing in academic-based research and bridging the commercialization gap to support the development of solutions to highly complex, data and time-intensive problems.”
“We are going to remove the barriers to entry for big data-related startups by having the expertise and infrastructure they need in one place,” said OCE president Dr. Tom Corr. “Ontario has some of the world’s brightest computing minds and the entrepreneurial spirit to develop the next generation of advanced technologies and OneEleven will provide the resources and support to develop the next generation of big data technologies.”