It was a good week for Toronto's startup ecosystem as three of the city's startups announced that they had secured significant outside investment.
On Wednesday, Pressly, a company that's responsible for a unique content curation and marketing platform, sent out a press release that said it had completed a $2.1 million Series A round. Similarly on the same day, Vanhawks, which wowed the Kickstarter community with its futuristic, smartphone connected Valour bike last year, announced that it had secured a $1.6 million seed round.
The biggest catch, however, was accomplished by ChipCare, a University of Toronto-based healthcare startup. The company announced last week that it had closed a $5 million Series A round. The company's upcoming product, a portable device that monitors the concentration of t-cells in a HIV patient for a fraction of the cost of traditional diagnostic methods, was so impressive to investors that the company was able to raise more money than it had intended to do so.
According to James Fraser, ChipCare's CEO, the cash his company has just secured will go towards completing work on their initial HIV scanner and to take the scanner through verification and clinical trails. He says the company hopes to start shipping in the second half of 2016. He also adds that they have plans to build a scanner than can track and monitor other diseases such as malaria.
"We’re a small UofT startup and, while we’re gaining momentum, we wouldn’t gotten here without the support of Grand Challenges Canada and the Ontario government through the Ontario Centres of Excellence," says Fraser. "Both the federal and provincial government, the University of Toronto and MaRS Innovation are working really hard to help build an ecosystem of innovation here. I think they deserve kudos"
Source: MaRS
Photo: ChipCare