Three Canadian, women-led tech startups have been tapped to join the 2024 cohort of Google’s Women Founders accelerator program.
The Women Founders program, which is part of the Google for Startups Accelerator, was launched in 2020 with a goal of reducing barriers for women founders in North America.
“Here in Canada, women entrepreneurs, in particular, make up only 17 percent of small and medium-sized business owners.”
The 10-week program, which is open to companies across North America and takes no equity from startups, offers mentorship, technical support, and workshops focused on product design, customer acquisition, and leadership.
This year, three Canadian startups made up the 15 total companies in the Women Founders cohort: MedReddie, Nimble Science, and SkyAcres.
“Around the world, underrepresented founders face a disproportionate lack of access to capital and support networks,” Iran Karimian, Google’s head of startup developer ecosystem for Canada, said in a statement. “Here in Canada, women entrepreneurs, in particular, make up only 17 percent of small and medium-sized business owners.”
MedReddie is a B2B healthtech startup that uses large language models to improve healthcare supply chains. The startup, based in Kitchener-Waterloo, is led by founder and CEO Kara LeBlanc, who has previously negotiated multi-million-dollar contracts and managed procurement processes in the healthcare sector.
In September 2023, LeBlanc won a $450,000 cash investment at Elevate Festival’s inaugural Women + Pitch Prize to scale MedReddie.
Surrey, British Columbia-based SkyAcres is an agtech startup that offers an indoor farming software and marketplace for fruit and vegetable growers and commercial buyers. The platform is aimed to allow years with underutilized residential and commercial space to grow and sell produce.
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A key member of SkyAcres’ leadership team is strategy officer Zaffia Laplante, who has been recognized as one of Canada’s Top 30 Under 30 Sustainable Leaders. According to Google, Laplante has previously spoken at the 2022 United Nations Commission on the Status of Women and British Council about her experience as an Indigenous woman in agriculture.
Calgary-based Nimble Science has developed an ingestible device that is capable of collecting samples from the small intestine. The sample, which CEO and co-founder Sabina Bruehlmann has previously described to BetaKit as looking like a fish oil pill, has been clinically validated to collect an uncontaminated sample from the deepest and previously inaccessible regions of the small intestine.
Nimble Science closed $2.7 million in seed financing last year in a round led by Fusion Fund.
In a statement, Google said the Women Founders program has so far worked with 47 women-led startups who have collectively raised $93.2 million USD since graduating. Canadian alumni include NLPatent, BorderlessHR, Monark, Blossom Social, Emaww, and MedEssist.
Google’s Women Founders 2024 program officially kicks off in the spring.
Features images courtesy Google.