Digital : Innovation + Job News

Futurestate IT, an Entertainment District-based company that was recently named one of the 10 Canadian Cloud Companies to Watch, has secured $1.5 million in financing from government and private investors to finance its growth.

One third of the money will come from FedDev Ontario, the federal government's regional economic development agency, through its Investing in Business Innovation initiative. The remaining investment is shared by the MaRS innovation incubator and the angel investors of the Maple Leaf Angels investor group.

Futurestate IT CEO, CTO and founder Alex Topitsch says he has been working in IT consulting for about 15 years, and founded Futurestate two years ago specifically to help companies solve the problems of migrating existing data and software to new operating systems with a custom software product. The company's AppRx software is the first cloud-based automatic solution for migration to new operating systems.

In two years, the company has grown to employ 14 staff. The capital injection from FedDev and the other investors will help fuel expansion, Topitsch says.

"Really, it helps us expand into the US, and that's really where we're going to make out mark," he says, saying the financing will allow the hiring of US sales staff and developers to enhance the product line. Topitsch expects the staff to reach 22 by the end of the year.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Alex Topitsch, CEO and CTO, Futurestate IT; FedDev Ontario

North York-based health technology startup Infonaut's innovative disease surveillance system, Hospital Watch Live, has been generating buzz for a while now—it's been about 18 months since the product was featured in Popular Science magazine, as Yonge Street reported in November 2010. But the system will now be tested in real hospital conditions after Infonaut signed a contract with the University Health Network last month.

After two years of live tests at various hospitals and a full-time simulation at George Brown College, Infonaut CEO Niall Wallace says this 18-month trial will be the "final-stage commercialization test" for the company.

"Innovation is a tough game," he says. "There's invention and then there's innovation. Innovation is when people start paying you for your invention." The system will be tested at Toronto General Hospital in the multi-organ transplant unit. Wallace says Infonaut is very focussed on selling to the US market; hospitals south of the border will be watching results from Toronto General very closely. "It's a very well respected academic and teaching hospital," he says.

The technology is designed to prevent the spread of infectious organisms in hospitals by automating disease surveillance and infection control functions. "Infonaut is the only system that automates and applies these techniques inside the hospital to save money, save lives and create a new gold standard for safety and quality that is driven by evidence and analytics," Wallace said in an announcement. The system tracks the movements of and interactions between patients and staff, while preserving patient privacy, in order to identify chains of transmission and prevent the spread of infections.

In preparation for its final commercialization, the company has been staffing up. Wallace says they've hired five employees in the past 10 weeks, bringing their staff to 12; they continue to hire developers, as well as sales and marketing staff.


Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Niall Wallace, CEO, Infonaut

Greengauge founder Lindsey Goodchild doesn't think of herself as a "typical entrepreneur." About 18 months ago, she finished her post-graduate work at Ryerson in sustainability and started doing consulting work for corporations. "I started consulting with really large companies and saw a lot of really good strategies, but when it came to executing those strategies they fell flat." What they needed, she realized, were tools to allow them to better implement their well-intentioned strategies after they left the boardroom.

She submitted an idea to a GreenApp challenge sponsored by Ryerson and Blackberry to develop an application for mobile devices and the web to allow companies to better monitor and implement their green strategies. She won the contest, and Greengauge was born. She raised $30,000 in seed funding last fall, around the time she was finally able to quite her full-time job to focus on the company. She hired a full-time CTO at the start of this year, bringing her staff to "two-and-a-half," she says, including their part-time CFO.

Just as Ottawa-based Coral CEA has invested in Greengauge as part of funding it announced for four Ryerson DMZ companies, Goodchild says the company is now weeks away from launching its first product for limited private beta testing.

"We're really focussed on researching how to embed sustainability into organizations," says Goodchild, noting that she's drawn invaluable support from the academic community, the Ryerson DMZ and some advisors at MaRS.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: Lindsey Goodchild, CEO, Greengauge; Coral CEA

Craig Follett, founder of the Toronto startup uniiverse, which launched publicly last week, describes his company as catering to the "sharing economy."

"It's a person-to-person marketplace for services and activities," he says. "It allows anyone to monetize their time, resources, skills or their possessions." He says, for example, that people can offering cooking classes, rent out their power tools or organize car sharing. "One cool thing we have in Toronto is lunch sharing. If you get, say, five people who all work at BCE Place who are sick of food courts, they can join together and everyone in the group takes turns bringing in lunch for all five people." That's just one example, he says, of how the site encourages in-person interaction as much as commerce.

Though it launched globally, the platform sorts users by location, offering hyper-local functionality. "For instance, it will take your location as The Junction, and show you first offers based closest to The Junction."

The idea for the company occurred to Follett and his co-founder Ben Raffi about a year ago while he was working for a management consulting firm in Toronto. They found a CTO, and began working on it full-time in June, 2011, with the founders putting up their own savings as seed money. They attracted $750,000 in angel investment, and have now grown their team to nine staff working out of a Jarvis Street office in the St. Lawrence Market neighbourhood.

Follett says that in the first 24 hours after the site launched on Feb. 7, the number of listings grew by 200 per cent. "In the wake of the economic crisis, and a number of economic, social and cultural trends," he says, including decreased attachment to ownership and an increase in freelance work, "this allows people to be a bit more resourceful."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Craig Follett, Founder, uniiverse

One year ago, says founder Chris Ye, Uken Games had five staff, and it has grown since then to employ 27 people in its Toronto office. And they're still hiring.

"We are expecting to be 40 people by the end of this quarter," he says. "We think that 2012 will be the year mobile gaming really blows up, and we think over the next two to five years, a few really large companies will emerge to dominate the field. We aim to be one of them."

The company was launched three years ago when Ye and co-founder Mark Lampert met at a Facebook app development camp. "We had some success with some gifting apps," he says, noting that a trick-or-treating application they developed for the social network drew sponsorship from Nestle. "We had a million monthly active users, we made money, and that got us excited."

The duo began making games, and eventually started selling those games across multiple platforms so they were not just playable on Facebook, but through iPhone, Android and Blackberry mobile devices. They now have eight titles, and a game engine that allows them to develop more new games quickly. "We've got 25 million installs now, and we've got large-scale distribution. So we're focused on launching new titles."

Ye says that the company has been profitable for two years now, and has been able to finance its growth through revenue without taking on outside investment. And that has meant, too, that they haven't had to consider moving.

"You can do it without going to Silicon Valley," he says. "There's great talent here in Toronto, which was the driver for us in choosing to stay here. But we also like being at home."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Chris Ye, Founder and CEO, Uken Games

The Ryerson University DMZ—short for Digital Media Zone—launched in the spring of 2010 to incubate new, innovative businesses from Ryerson students and alumni. Less than two years and 39 startups later, the incubator is growing.

This spring, it will open a new 5,400 square-foot space in the basement of the building it occupies at 10 Dundas Street East, bringing its total space to about 15,800 square feet.

"With the addition of the new space, the Zone will be able to accommodate about 50 new innovators," says DMZ media representative Lauren Schneider.

Schneider says that the Zone's successes so far—including noteworthy startups 500px, Shape Collage and Teamsave—have seen seven companies "graduate" to their own office spaces and have created 357 new jobs, plus 48 direct jobs supporting the Zone at Ryerson.

The growth, Schneider says, builds on the DMZ's mandate. "The Digital Media Zone will continue to play a key role in Toronto’s new digital economy by fostering young innovators... to help keep the world’s best talent here and contributing to our economy."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Lauren Schneider, Media Relations, Ryerson DMZ

Mississauga's Seawell Networks recently announced the closing of a $5-million Series B funding round, which Seawell VP Andy Beach says will finance the video software company's rapid growth.

"We're at a stage where we're expanding the company to get into the market in a larger way," Beach says. "This funding will allow us to do that."

Seawell was founded in late 2008 to help solve some problems for network operators with delivering video to various devices. Seawell's technology allows operators a system to provide video with a better user experience, and gives them more control over various elements of the streaming process, including the display of ads.

The company has grown, Beach says, from about 20 staff to 28 in the past 12 months, and expects to hire another 10 to 12 in the coming year, including sales and marketing staff and developers.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Andy Beach, VP Marketing and Product, Seawell Networks

About 18 months ago, SurfEasy founder and CEO Chris Houston was looking for a product that would help him maintain privacy as he conducted business online from various different computers. "I found some things that you could hack together if you followed all 38 of the instructions," he says, "and I found some enterprise-level solutions for large businesses." What he didn't find was a simple plug-and-play way for regular people to protect their information. In an age where more and more business is conducted in the cloud or otherwise online. This struck him as an opportunity.

His attempt to fill that gap in the market launched at the high-profile CES show in Las Vegas last month. "It was fantastic," Houston says. "We got a great reception from potential distributors and potential partners." The product is a USB key that contains its own browser. Plug it into any computer and you can access your own customized browser with your own passwords, cookies and bookmarks stored on it. Unplug the key, and all the information travels with you.

The concept has very quickly attracted financing, first from two private venture capitalists, and then from the MaRS-affiliated provincial government Innovation Accelerator Fund. "We're pretty well funded now, and we're ready to take this thing out to market," Houston says.

The company, only officially incorporated a year ago, has already grown to 10 staff, "most of them development focused." Houston says that over the next six to 12 months, he expects a "big growth spurt." New staff are starting this month, more new positions are being advertised now, "and we've got more new positions coming."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Chris Houston, Founder and CEO, SurfEasy

When Upverter officially launched its web-sharing software for hardware design at the prestigious Demo conference in fall 2011, the company went from 500 Beta users to 1,500 users in a single day. Now they're up to 3,500 "early adopter" users, says company co-founder and CEO Zak Homuth, as they plan to launch a second version of the software this spring.

In a nutshell, the product can be described as "Google Docs for hardware," allowing designers and engineers to collaborate on the web while designing machines and other real-world objects. "Building real things is really hard and it costs a lot," Homuth says. "We're trying to make that easier."

Homuth and his two co-founders were friends and roommates as engineering students at the University of Waterloo, when they decided to try to solve some of the field's problems by introducing the kind of team-sharing software that had already been introduced to office functions and software design. Homuth says the field of industrial design software was well-established and can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and perhaps because of its maturity as a software sector, it has been slower to see innovation.

The company got an early boost through a Silicon Valley residency at the Y Combinator incubator, but came home to Toronto to establish itself. "We came back for the talent," Homuth says. "The money goes three times as far, and we're hiring the same guys as the companies in the Valley hire, from the University of Waterloo and the University of Toronto, but we're offering them the city environment that they want, that feels like home."  The company has raised three rounds of funding so far, and expects to raise more revenue for a broader marketing push after the new version is launched this spring, likely in April.

Homuth says his team has grown from the three original founder to seven staff now, and expects that after the spring launch, the team will double in size.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Zak Homuth, Founder and CEO, Upverter

Cisco is out recruiting 100 graduate-level engineering staff right now as part of a five-year expansion of R&D at its two Toronto locations and its location in Ottawa.

"We'd like to bring in as many people as quickly as we can," says Paul Howarth, the company's director of strategic initiatives. "We're out on campus now, hiring up to 100 people for this year."

In a recent announcement, the provincial government heralded its investment of $25 million in Cisco under a memorandum of understanding signed last year. The agreement will see 300 new jobs created in Ontario—a doubling of Cisco's R&D staff—with roughly half of those new hires working in the company's Scarborough and Liberty Village offices, according to Howarth. The move is a bounce back for Cisco, which had trimmed its Canadian workforce by five per cent last year as it focussed on its core activities in response to the global economic downturn.

Howarth says that the investment from the province is a key factor in the multinational company's decision to expand here. The favourable corporate tax regime alongside Ontario's stable economy are also factors.

"Aside from that, the key thing is access to talent. Toronto is a hotbed for software development. It may not be well known as such, but it is," he says, citing the concentration of top-tier universities in the area.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Paul Howarth, Director of Strategic Initiatives, Cisco

Richmond Hill's iSign has been offering its patented software to retailers since before 2008—and the company went public in 2009. But it had a coming out of sorts in its GTA hometown late last month. "We've demonstrated this product at shows all across North America," says founder and CEO Alex Romanov. "We must do 10 shows a year, but I think the DX3 show last week was the first time we've ever really done a show in Toronto."

Romanov said the product was well received at DX3, Canad's premier trade show dedicated to digital marketing, advertising and retailing. iSign's product allows retailers to use Bluetooth and wifi to send advertisements and offers to shoppers who are in close proximity to their store. Romanov says that the units contact phones within a 300-foot radius, ensuring that discounts are being offered to people in a position to make an impulse buy.

Originally founded in 2006 in Vancouver, the company moved to Richmond Hill after becoming a partner with IBM's POS kiosk division. In 2007, iSign rolled out in 620 store locations in Singapore, and has since been expanding steadily in North America. Romanov says the company's biggest Canadian customer used to be Pinpoint Media, which operated displays in 5,600 Mac's Milk locations—until iSign purchased Pinpoint.

Romanov says the company has grown in the past 12 months to 16 employees from six. While he anticipates possible hiring in the near future, he says the company is more likely to expand through contracting. A pending three-year agreement with convenience and grocery-store display giant SelectCore will soon see iSign's technology in 7,000 locations across the US and Canada.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Alex Romanov, Founder and CEO, iSign Media

After launching its microvideo social networking platform in September, Toronto startup Keek got a shot in the arm late last year when it attracted $5.5 million in financing. The concept is simple: it takes the status update stream format of Twitter, but replaces the text-based messages with YouTube-style short videos (up to 36 seconds) that can be posted from Android and iPhone mobile devices or from desktop computers.
 
"The youth of today clearly want to use video for both communication and entertainment," said Keek founder and CEO Isaac Raichyk in launching the product last fall. "We've created a platform that provides users with a fun new way to connect and share their lives."
 
Based at Yonge and Eglinton, the company has grown to about 30 employees since launching in early 2010. With the new capital in hand and a mission to constantly refine and build out its platform, it continues to grow its team. 

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Miranda McCurlie, Manager, Public Relations and Marketing, Keek Inc.

A venture capital investment of $23 million landed by Toronto mobile company Fixmo in late 2011 has already seen the company add 10 staff members, according to Fixmo chief marketing officer Tyler Lessard, bringing the total staff to 50. He says they will continue to grow their staff over the next six to 12 months as the company gears up to develop a broader global profile (they have postings for multiple positions up now).

Founded in 2009, the company originally set out to provide personal data security to users of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, through a set of software tools. But the mandate changed somewhat in 2010 when Fixmo partnered with the US National Security Agency (NSA) to commercialize the intelligence agency's internal integrity monitoring system.

"Fixmo was chosen for that partnership because of our record of success in the field of mobile security," Lessard says.

The company, headquartered on Yonge Street near King, soon opened a Virginia office and acquired Conceivium to offer a "holistic range of mobile integrity management software."

2011 saw rapid growth as the trend towards "bring your own device" policies in corporations has led to increased challenges for IT departments, who now need to secure data across a range of operating systems and software brands used by their employees. As the mobile age evolves, Lessard sees the demand for these services continuing to grow as they expand beyond North America and broaden the range of products they offer.

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Tyler Lessard, Chief Marketing Officer, Fixmo

Jeff Brenner, CEO of Toronto startup Pressly, says that the company was born out of two core perceptions. "It comes out of our belief that the battle for publications on touch devices is going to be fought on the web, through browsers, more than through native applications. And the web today is really broken on those devices—it's build for a click and scroll desktop environment."

That led Brenner, through his company Nulayer, to build a platform that allows publishers to automatically optimize their websites for the touch-and-swipe world of tablets. The platform, launched a few months ago with the Toronto Star, is very low maintenance for publishers, who need only drop an RSS feed into Pressly to let the platform do its work.

The innovative approach and the success of the Star's launch recently led Startup North to proclaim Pressly one of the Canadian startups to watch in 2012. The company already provided much to watch at the tail end of 2011. Over the holidays, they launched with the tablet-optimized retail site logicbuy.com, and just this week prestigious UK business magazine The Economist launched an entirely new publication on Pressly.

Brenner says that within the next two to three months, he expects the company to launch its self-serve platform for smaller publishers. So far, the Pressly team has grown to 10 staff members, Brenner says. He expects that number to grow. "I can tell you the rate we've been growing the past few years is to double every year, and I expect that to pretty much continue on into the future."

Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Jeff Brenner, CEO, Pressly