Every year Accelerate Okanagan selects 15 high-performing startups from across Canada and fly them out to British Columbia’s wine country for 2.5 days. There the startups link up with “some of the brightest minds from California’s Silicon Valley and other technology centres across North America” and take part in Metabridge.
It’s a pretty cool idea that gives startups and “bright minds” a bit of luxurious extravagance, which can be a nice switch-up from the daily office grind of startup life.
From 83 applications, the 15 startups that will be headed to Metabridge June 12-13 are:
Battlefy (Vancouver)
BitLit (Vancouver)
Change Heroes (Vancouver)
Commonsku (Toronto)
Farm At Hand (Vancouver)
Foodee (Vancouver)
Hurrier (Toronto)
Input Logic (Nanaimo)
MediaCore (Victoria)
Preo (Toronto)
SpaceList (Vancouver)
Squeeze CMM (Toronto)
Thinkific (Vancouver)
topLog Inc (Halifax)
WTFast (Kelowna)
“We are extremely impressed with the response and the caliber of companies that applied to participate in metabridge this year,” said Jeff Keen, head of Accelerate Okanagan. “The 83 applications and 15 selected companies are a great representation of the strength and vibrancy of the Canadian technology startup ecosystem.”
Three of the four startups representing Toronto, Hurrier, Preo and SqueezeCMM, are all part of the Extreme Startups family. Hurrier and Preo are currently participating in the program while SqueezeCMM is a recent graduate. On that note Extreme’s managing director Marcus Daniels said the program has “significantly evolved” its accelerator model over the past 10 months “to both attract premier founders and give them an unfair advantage through our hands-on programming.”
“There is a lot of noise in the accelerator market, especially in Canada, but clearly only a few of programs globally that truly accelerate product-market fit & get companies venture ready,” he added.
We’ve also done feature article in the past on Farm at Hand, Foodee, MediaCore, SpaceList and topLog.