The following companies in the MaRS Cleantech network were looking for financing during Q2 2018. If you would like to receive more information about a venture for the purpose of investing, please contact Alexandra Zakreski at azakreski@marsdd.com.
Advanced Technology Emission Solutions (ATES) has developed a patent pending technology that significantly reduces overall harmful emissions for the automotive industry. ATES’ solution is an active induction heated catalyst ensuring optimal performance of the catalyst during all driving conditions, particularly during cold starts. Cold-Start Emissions are produced by all internal combustion engines at start up. Vehicles emit the majority of pollution during the first five minutes of engine operation before the catalytic converter has warmed up sufficiently to be effective. The total addressable market is huge, light vehicle production alone will exceed 100 million units annually by 2020. Their simple solution doesn’t disrupt the supply chain and is low cost.
Round: Seed
Amount: $0.5M
Use: Investment proceeds will be focused on continuing to propel the company’s proprietary clean air technology forward through to commercialization in the automotive industry.
Website: www.atesinc.ca
AOMS Technologies develops specialty fiber-optic sensors for harsh environments where conventional sensors fail or lose performance. Backed by over a decade of research and development, the company has invented a series of powerful technologies that change the landscape of sensing in applications where accurate, high-fidelity, and reliable measurement of data is paramount. Target customers include those in energy, environmental services, clean technology, structural health monitoring, automotive, aerospace, and defense.
Round: Series A
Amount: $2M
Use: To grow sales and marketing.
Website: www.aoms-tech.com
The BuiltSpace SaaS platform transforms facilities management, to improve operational and energy efficiency, across large building portfolios. BuiltSpace allows building owners, landlords, tenants, occupants and service providers to collaboratively manage buildings within an IoT-centric digital marketplace.
Round: Series A
Amount: $2M – $5M
Use: Sales & Marketing – Build sales team (currently 3) to accelerate sales in Canada and US markets. R&D – Improve integration capabilities and ongoing development including AI, blockchain & IoT security, to maintain our lead and exclude competition. Customer Success – Improve onboarding processes and provide implementation services, to generate additional service fees and provide exceptional customer services.
Website: www.builtspace.com
CircuitMeter has developed groundbreaking electrical energy submetering hardware, integrated with its Big Data and cloud-based CircuitMonitoring enterprise software. The company’s advanced energy analytics represent a major step forward compared to current practices. Its software can identify unnecessary and inefficient equipment usage at the circuit level, enabling users to better manage their consumption and reduce costs.
Round: Series A
Amount: $6M
Use: Funding of marketing and sales, buildup of operations group to support growth, continuation of Product Development program, further certification of the company’s submeters of tenant billing application in California and Canada.
Website: www.circuitmeter.com
Dropbike’s dockless and “smart” bike-sharing service has already launched in parts of Toronto, Montreal, and Kingston, and agreements with a number of U.S. cities are in the works. This spring Dropbike will launch in Kelowna, British Columbia, while a growing number of cities and smaller municipalities are considering dockless bike-share programs as a more convenient, less costly and flexible alternative to programs that rely on customers to pick up and drop off bikes at specific docking locations.
Round: Pre-Series A
Amount: $10M
Use: Dropbike has signed 12 exclusive market contracts. They are raising to build their complete multi-modal platform (bikes but also e-bikes and other equipment) as well as execute on these markets.
Website: www.dropbike.co
The company helps residential customers reduce household energy consumption by showing them personalized, relevant and timely insights about their energy use using big data analytics and machine learning. Their analytics basically turn smart meter data into an appliance-level breakdown of energy use, allowing for personalized insights and recommendations based on the latest in behavioural science research.
Round: Series A First Tranche
Amount: $0.75M
Use: The company will use the financing to drive revenue growth and access new markets.
Website: www.ecotagious.com
Envio has developed an end-to-end building management system capable of turning any existing commercial building into a smart building. Its intelligent controls can be easily and affordably integrated within any type of facility regardless of its size, age or sophistication level. Its low cost “Cube” controllers and energy conservation algorithms are able to provide unprecedented energy savings of 20% to 60% at a quarter the cost of comparable solutions, resulting in the shortest payback period in the industry.
Round: Series A
Amount: $2.5M (USD)
Use: To increase delivery capacity to 25+ projects per month, launch Sales/Marketing/PR campaigns, further establish distribution partnerships with utilities/insurance providers/Energy Services Companies, increase outbound sales and pursue white label opportunities, launch ‘App store’ and third party API, integrate demand management functionality and further backend infrastructure for data aggregation, further add key team members and technical support infrastructure.
Website: www.enviosystems.com
Forward Water Technologies is commercializing a low-cost, low-energy technology, which uses forward osmosis to treat industrial wastewater that is currently treated via thermal methods or deep well disposal.
Round: Series A
Amount: $2M – $4M
Use: Round will target closing based on completed commercial scale field pilot in Alberta. Fund will be used to expand business development related to service and equipment sales. A portion of funds will be used to expand IP base, continue process improvements, and expand technology offerings for additional sectors.
Website: www.forwardwater.com
Greyter Water Systems offers smart water solutions that save both water and money by reducing the water demands of residential and commercial buildings by up to 35%. The company’s packaged solutions recover and treat shower and bath water (that is, greywater),as well as rainwater, so that they can be reused for toilet flushing, irrigation and other purposes. With pressures on fresh-water resources and with costs of water rising, Greyter’s mission is to work with builders, developers, engineers, architects and municipal officials to create water-efficient communities.
Round: Series A
Amount: $3.5M
Use: After successful beta testing and an upcoming soft-launch in June, funds will be used to launch the Greyter HOME solution widely across several major markets in the United States in Q4, 2018.
Website: www.greyter.com
Indoor horticultural operations consume massive amounts of energy in Canada. Growers can typically cut this energy usage in half compared to industry standard HID lighting with Growratio’s proprietary LED lighting system and integrated orchestration software. After completing extremely successful trials earlier this year and having just received CSA certification in September 2017, Growratio is now poised for growth.
Round: Seed
Amount: $1M
Use: After successful trials in the last year, it is now ready to commercialize their products. It has $5 million in the pipeline and is looking for $1 million in funding for further product refinements, as well as building a world-class growth team to expand its sales and marketing efforts across Canada and the US.
Website: www.growratio.com
Novarc Technologies is a Vancouver-based robotics company specializing in the design and commercialization of collaborative robots for industrial applications.
Round: Series A
Amount: $6M
Use: Expanding sales and marketing to secure sales outside North America. Expanding R&D.
Website: www.novarctech.com
PowerHub is a simple, cloud-based asset management solution designed by and for renewable energy professionals.
Round: Series A
Amount: $3M
Use: Growth capital – keep growing their ARR and team through enhanced global sales, marketing efforts and continued product R&D.
Website: www.powerhub.com
Promethean Labs saves Argentine farmers on pesticide costs. It tells them which ones to avoid and where not to spray them. It uses artificial intelligence to interpret infrared imagery from drones, airplanes and satellites. Promethean Labs uses the full infrared spectrum to map diseases and weeds by species in Argentina. Short term, it will sell direct to farmers. Long term, it will sell big picture crop knowledge to inform the agriculture supply chain. Its service is faster, more affordable and smarter because it uses AI and a unique mix of imagery techniques. It alone is targeting a big data play to sell to the agriculture supply chain and is also tapping into Argentina’s virgin market that is ripe for the taking.
Round: Seed
Amount: $1.2M (USD)
Use: Product development, business development, permanent operations in South America.
Website: www.prometheanlabs.ca
The company has developed an all-in-one filament recycler unit for 3D printers. Using patent pending extrusion technology, its first product, ProtoCycler, is able to produce 3DP filament at over 10 times the efficiency of the competition, from either virgin or recycled material. ProtoCycler is fully automatic, comes with a built-in grinder, and is pending UL safety and environmental certification. This ultimately breaks down the economic and environmental barriers associated with 3D printing, allowing truly unlimited creation.
Round: Seed
Amount: Contact MaRS for more information.
Use: Now that it has received its first patent and is shipping units, it’s looking to grow its sales and revenue as much as possible within the next 12-18 months.
Website: www.redetec.com
Sensa Networks is an online system that allows waste collection organizations to manage every compactor in their network right from their desktop. This market-leading technology puts them in complete control: they can track pick-ups, monitor performance, even see their individual compactors. By optimizing their network, Sensa provides substantial cost savings, time-efficient management, and a reduced environmental footprint.
Round: Series A
Amount: $3M
Use: To enhance IoT solution/SaaS platform, business development, marketing and sales.
Website: www.sensanetworks.com
Senswear is disrupting the field of Sensing and Monitoring by developing Optical Sensing Technologies to monitor gases, chemicals and environmental parameters especially designed for harsh environments; while providing significantly higher performance and accuracy at a fraction of the cost of existing solutions. Their optical-based technology platforms provide a drift-free, low maintenance, and high precision solution for a large number of industries, such as the automotive, aerospace, power generation, oil & gas and polymer processing industries to reduce environmental pollution, save energy and be economically competitive by increasing the efficiency of industrial processes.
Round: Seed
Amount: $1M
Use: Senswear is finalizing its 1st sale through BCIP program and is in process of establishing the business structure for its next phase of growth. The money is used for the following purpose: Hiring tech and BD employees, prototyping of its 1st product for prospect customer demonstration, admin costs, preparation for scale up and for next round of financing.
Website: www.senswear.com
Smarter Sorting has a patented technology, fuelled by machine learning, that helps cities and businesses save money and reduce CO2 emissions by sending chemical products into reuse instead of disposal.
Round: Seed
Amount: $5M
Use: Funding new customer acquisitions and preparing to scale.
Website: www.smartersorting.com
With lithium-ion battery technology the dominant form of energy storage for electric vehicles and increasingly grid-scale applications, there remains a need to further drive down costs and reduce environmental impacts. Mississauga-based Springpower International addresses both issues with its closed-loop, lower-cost process for manufacturing advanced cathode materials, which is the most critical component in lithium-ion cells.
Round: Series A
Amount: $3M
Use: To help fund construction and operation of a pre-commercial demonstration plant in Ontario, where up to 250 metric tons of cathode materials would be produced annually and qualified for major customers.
Website: www.springpowerintl.com
Surgically Clean Air is quickly becoming a market leader in the high end premium indoor air purification industry. It has developed premium air cleaning solutions to help a range of businesses deal with the consequences of bad indoor air quality. Surgically Clean Air products offer superior air cleaning through sophisticated filtration systems, high volume air flow capacity and lower sound levels than any other premium air cleaner that is readily available on the market today.
Round: Seed
Amount: $2M
Use: Surgically Clean Air designs, manufactures and sells commercial air purifiers. It currently has over 10,000 dental professionals and many of the top North American professional sports teams enjoying clean, pure, re-energized air. They will use the funds to scale, build molds and increase inventory.
Website: www.surgicallycleanair.com
TransPod is a startup dedicated to bringing the Hyperloop (a very high speed ground transportation concept developed by Elon Musk) to reality. In a TransPod hyperloop system, passengers and cargo travel inside capsules driven by magnetic motors and exceeding 1000 km/h inside low-pressure tubes. TransPod is a zero-emissions advanced hyperloop technology, offering a strong business value by breaking time barriers and slashing logistics costs.
Round: Series A
Amount: $50M
Use: To build a test facility and pursue R&D work in Canada and Europe.
Website: www.transpod.com
DISCLAIMER: MaRS Cleantech disclaims any and all liability in the event any information supplied here proves to be inaccurate, incomplete or unreliable, or results in any investment or other losses. The information here is believed reliable, however MaRS does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of such information. MaRS is a non-profit that does not collect fees from any capital raised by companies in our venture network.