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Hello friends, and welcome to Week in Review.
Last week, I talked a bit about NFTs and their impact on artists. If you’re inundated with NFT talk just take one quick look at this story I wrote this week about the $69 million sale of Beeple’s photo collage. This hype cycle is probably all the result of crypto folks talking each other up and buying each other’s stuff, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be lasting impacts. That said, I would imagine we’re pretty close to the peak of this wave, with a larger one down the road after things cool off a bit. I’ve been wrong before though…
This week, I’m interested in a quick look at what your kids have been talking about all these years. Yes, Roblox.
If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox from the newsletter page, and follow my tweets @lucasmtny.
(Photo by Ian Tuttle/Getty Images for Roblox)
The big thing
Roblox went public on the New York Stock Exchange this week, scoring a $38 billion market cap after its first couple days of trading.
Investors rallied around the idea that Roblox is one of the most valuable gaming companies in existence. More than Unity, Zynga, Take-Two, even gaming giant Electronic Arts. It’s still got a ways to go to take down Microsoft, Sony or Apple though… The now-public company is so freaking huge because investors believe the company has tapped into something that none of the others have, a true interconnected creative marketplace where gamers can evolve alongside an evolving library of experiences that all share the same DNA (and in-game currency).
The gaming industry has entered a very democratic stride as cross-play tears down some of the walls of gaming’s platform dynamics. Each hardware platform that operates an app store of their own still has the keys to a kingdom, but it’s a shifting world with uncertainty ahead. While massive publishers have tapped cloud gaming as the trend that will string their blockbuster franchises together, they all wish they were in Roblox’s position. The gaming industry has seen plenty of Goliath’s in its day, but for every major MMO to strike it rich, it’s still just another winner in a field of disparate hits with no connective tissue.
Roblox is different, and while many of us still have the aged vision of the image above: a bunch of rudimentary Minecraft/Playmobile-looking mini-games, Roblox’s game creation tools are advancing quickly and developers are building photorealistic games that are wider in ambition and scope than before. As the company levels-up the age range it appeals to — both by holding its grasp on aging gamers on its platform and using souped-up titles to appeal to a new-generation — there’s a wholly unique platform opportunity here: the chance to have the longevity of an app store but with the social base layer that today’s cacophony of titles have never shared.
Whether or not Roblox is the “metaverse” that folks in the gaming world have been hyping, it certainly looks more like it than any other modern gaming company does.
SHENYANG, CHINA – MARCH 08: Customers try out iPhone 12 smartphones at an Apple store on March 8, 2021 in Shenyang, Liaoning Province of China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)
Other things
Apple releases some important security patches
It was honestly a pretty low-key week of tech news, I’ll admit, but folks in the security world might not totally buy that characterization. This week, Apple released some critical updates for its devices, fixing a Safari vulnerability that could allow attackers to run malicious code on a user’s unpatched devices. Update your stuff, y’all.
TikTok gets proactive on online bullying
New social media platforms have had the benefit of seeing the easy L’s that Facebook teed itself up for. For TikTok, its China connection means that there’s less room for error when it comes to easily avoidable losses. The team announced some new anti-bullying features aimed at cutting down on toxicity in comment feeds.
Dropbox buys DocSend
Cloud storage giants are probably in need of a little reinvention, the enterprise software boom of the pandemic has seemed to create mind-blowing amounts of value for every SaaS company except these players. This week, Dropbox made a relatively big bet on document sharing startup DocSend. It’s seemingly a pretty natural fit for them, but can they turn in into a bigger opportunity?
Epic Games buys photogrammetry studio
As graphics cards and consoles have hit new levels of power, games have had to satisfy desired for more details and complexity. It takes a wild amount of time to create 3D assets with that complexity so plenty of game developers have leaned on photogrammetry which turns a series of photos or scans of a real world object or environment into a 3D model. This week, Epic Games bought one of the better known software makers in this space, called Capturing Reality, with the aim of integrating the tech into future versions of their game engine.
Twitter Spaces launches publicly next month
I’ve spent some more time with Twitter Spaces this week and am growing convinced that it has a substantial chance to kneecap Clubhouse’s growth. Twitter is notoriously slow to roll out products, but it seems they’ve been hitting the gas on Spaces, announcing this week that it will be available widely by next month.
Seth Rogen starts a weed company
There’s a lot of money in startups, there’s really never been a better time to get capital for a project… if you know the right people and have the right kind of expertise. Seth Rogen and weed are a pretty solid mental combo and him starting a weed company shouldn’t be a big shock.
SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Extra things
Some of my favorite reads from our Extra Crunch subscription service this week:
Coupang follows Roblox to a strong first day of trading
“Another day brings another public debut of a multibillion-dollar company that performed well out of the gate.This time it’s Coupang, whose shares are currently up just over 46% to more than $51 after pricing at $35, $1 above the South Korean e-commerce giant’s IPO price range. Raising one’s range and then pricing above it only to see the public markets take the new equity higher is somewhat par for the course when it comes to the most successful recent debuts, to which we can add Coupang.” More
How nontechnical talent can break into deep tech
“Startup hiring processes can be opaque, and breaking into the deep tech world as a nontechnical person seems daunting. As someone with no initial research background wanting to work in biotech, I felt this challenge personally. In the past year, I landed several opportunities working for and with deep tech companies.“ More
Does your VC have an investment thesis or a hypothesis?
“Venture capitalists love to talk investment theses: on Twitter, Medium, Clubhouse, at conferences. And yet, when you take a closer look, theses are often meaningless and/or misleading…” More
Once more, if you liked reading this, you can get it in your inbox from the newsletter page, and follow my tweets @lucasmtny.
SpaceX has delivered another 60 Starlink satellites to orbit — meaning it has sent 180 in total to join its 1,000+ strong constellation in the past two weeks alone. Today’s launch also set a record for SpaceX for its Falcon 9 rocket reusability program, since it was the ninth flight and ninth landing for this particular first-stage booster.
The booster was used previously on a variety of missions, including five prior Starlink launches, as well as the Demo-1 mission for the company’s Crew Dragon capsule, which was the uncrewed test flight that proved it would work as intended from launch all the way to docking with the International Space Station and then returning back to Earth.
SpaceX set its prior reusability record in January this year – another Starlink launch – using this very same refurbished first stage, which had just flown in December of last year before that. SpaceX not only wants to continue to show that it can re-fly these boosters more and more times, but also that it can turn them around quickly for their next mission, since both speed and volume will have a significant impact on launch costs.
Rocket reuse is of particular importance when it comes to these Starlink missions, which are happening with increasing frequency as SpaceX pushes to expand the availability of its Starlink broadband internet service globally. As mentioned, this is the third launch of 60 satellites for the constellation in just 10 days — the most recent launch happened just Thursday, and the first of this trio took place the Thursday before that.
From here, expect SpaceX to just continue to launch at roughly this pace for the next little while, since it has two more planned Starlink launches before March is over, including one tentatively set for next Sunday. As the company is its own customer for these missions, it’s eating the cost of the launches (at least until Starlink starts operating beyond its current beta and bringing in more revenue) so re-flying boosters is a good way to help mitigate the overall spend.
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here.
Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.
Every quarter we dig into the venture capital market’s global, national, and sector-based results to get a feel for what the temperature of the private market is at that point in time. These imperfect snapshots are useful. But sometimes, it’s better to focus on a single story to show what’s really going on.
Enter AgentSync. I covered AgentSync for the first time last August, when the API-focused insurtech player raised a $4.4 million seed round. It’s a neat company, helping others track the eligibility of individual brokers in the market. It’s a big space, and the startup was showing rapid initial traction in the form of $1.9 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
But then AgentSync raised again in December, sharing at the time of its $6.4 million round that the valuation cap had grown by 4x since its last round. And that it had seen 4x revenue growth since the start of the pandemic.
All that must sound pretty pedestrian; a quickly-growing software company raising two rounds? Quelle surprise.
But then AgentSync raised again this week, with another grip of datapoints. Becca Szkutak and Alex Konrad’s Midas Touch newsletter reported the sheaf of data, and The Exchange confirmed the numbers with AgentSync CEO Niji Sabharwal. They are as follows:
- Present-day revenues of less than $10 million, but with ARR growing by 6x in 2020 after 10x expansion in 2019.
- No customer churn to date.
- Its $25 million Series A valued the company at $220 million, which Konrad and Szkutak describe as “exactly 10x AgentSync’s valuation from eight months ago.”
That means AgentSync was worth $22 million when it raised $4.4 million, and the December round was raised at a cap of around $80 million. Fun.
Back to our original point, the big datasets can provide useful you-are-here guidance for the sector, but it’s stories like AgentSync that I think better show what the market is really like today for hot startups. It’s bonkers fast and, even more, often backed up by material growth.
Sabharwal also told The Exchange that his company has closed another $1 million in ARR since the term sheet. So its multiples are contracting even before it shared its news.
2021, there you have it.
Meet Conscience.vc
Also this week I got to meet Ariana Thacker, who is building a venture capital fund. Her route to her own venture shop included stops at Rhapsody Venture Partners, and some time at Predictive VC. Now she’s working on Conscience.vc, or perhaps just Conscience.
Her new fund will invest in companies worth less than $15 million, have some form of consumer-facing business model (B2B and B2B2C are both fine, she said), and something to do with science, be it a patentable technology or other sort of IP. Why the science focus? It’s Thacker’s background, thanks to her background in chemical engineering and time as a facilities engineer for a joint Exxon-Shell project.
All that’s neat and interesting, but as we cover zero new-fund announcements on The Exchange and almost never mini-profile VCs, why break out of the pattern? Because unlike nearly everyone in her profession, Thacker was super upfront with data and metrics.
Heck, in her first email she included a list of her investments across different capital vehicles with actual information about the deals. And then she shared more material on different investments and the like. Imagine if more VCs shared more of their stuff? That would rock.
Conscience had its first close in mid-January, though more capital might land before she wraps up the fundraising process. She’s reached $4 million to $5 million in commits, with a cap of $10 million on the fund. And, she told The Exchange, she didn’t know a single LP before last summer and only secured an anchor investor last October.
Let’s see what Thacker gets done. But at a minimum I think she’ll be willing to be somewhat transparent as she invests from her first fund. That alone will command more attention from these pages than most micro-funds could ever manage.
A whole bunch of other important shit
The week was super busy, so I missed a host of things that I would have otherwise liked to have written about. Here they are in no particular order:
- FalconX, a startup that powers crypto-trading on other platforms, raised $50 million this week. The round comes after the company raised $17 million last May. I wrote about that here. Tiger Global led the round, natch, as it has led nearly every round in the last month.
- The FalconX round matters as the company grew from what we presume was a modest trading and revenue base into something much larger. Per the company, in “less than a year” the company’s “trading volume” grew by 12x and its “net revenue” grew 46x. That’s a lot.
- Privacera also raised $50 million this week. Insight Partners led the round. The deal caught my eye as it promised a “cloud-based data governance and security solution.” That reminded me of Skyflow, a quickly-growing startup that I thought might have a similar product. Privacera CEO Balaji Ganesan politely corrected my confusion in an email saying that “Skyflow is like a vault for customer data. They replace customer data with tokens. Our focus is on data governance, so it is broader. We don’t store customer data within our solution.” Fair enough. It’s still an interesting space.
- And then there’s Woflow, which VentureBeat actually got to before I could. I chatted with the company this week, but sadly have more notes than open word count today. So let it suffice to say that the company’s model of selling structured merchant data is super cool. And the fact that it has linked up with customers in its first vertical (restaurants) like DoorDash is impressive.
- Its round was led by Craft Ventures, a firm that has been pretty damn active in the API-powered startup landscape in recent months. More to come on Woflow.
Various and Sundry
Closing, I learned a lot about software valuations here, got to noodle on the epic Roblox direct listing here, dug into fintech’s venture successes and weaknesses, and checked out the Global-e IPO filing. Oh, and M1 Finance raised again, while Clara and Arist raised small, but fun rounds.
Spending millions for a digital work of art that could be screenshotted feels similar to traipsing around a strip of concrete as a tourist activity. The optics don’t make immediate sense — there’s hardly any appeal in something as accessible as a Google image or street.
That’s my best bet at explaining at least some of the confusion around the explosive rise of NFTs, or nonfungible tokens. The token, minted on the blockchain, can give digital assets a unique signifier. In other words, anyone could screenshot a piece of art, but only one of us will own the true, original piece of art. This context is part of the reason why Beeple, a digital artist, had his artwork sold for $69 million just a few days ago.
The reason this topic is coming up in a Startups Weekly newsletter is because of the impact it could have on the cryptocurrency movement, of which there is a growing tide of early-stage and late-stage startups. The popularization of NFTs, as I argued in Equity this week, could be what makes cryptocurrency finally palpable to the average human — beside the average bitcoin hoarder. Platforms that sell NFTs usually need you to use cryptocurrency (usually Ethereum) to purchase anything. Mix that with the fact that humans have an innate desire to own, protect and immortalize their assets, and you might have the perfect storm. Beeple, a digital artist, made $69 million for his work, and this isn’t just a big financing event, it’s a signal that crypto enthusiasts and crypto assets are getting to an inescapable spot in public dialogue.
- Why are memes for sale?
- Why is the digital collectibles frenzy taking off now?
- The explosive (and inclusive) potential of NFTs in the creative world
- Why Terry Crews is launching a social currency
- How the Biden administration is approaching crypto regulations
Ownership as a way for a decentralized network to become mainstream is its own meta conversation, and I’ll be clear that the blockchain and NFTs have a long way to go before they are truly equitable, accessible and hit their stride. But, it’s hard to not to let your mind wander about the opportunities here.
It’s more than a screenshot, it’s about the potential of pixels having more meaning than they ever did before. And it’s more than a strip of concrete, it’s the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Finding exclusive aspects of accessible things in our lives is compelling to a consumer and could be great for creators.
In the rest of this newsletter, we’ll discuss Coupang’s competitive industrial edge, a startup hoping to be the Nasdaq for revenue and Google’s brains fighting Google itself. As always, you can follow me on Twitter @nmasc_ for my thoughts throughout the week and tech news.
The Amazon of South Korea goes public
Coupang, which some describe as the Amazon of South Korea, priced and started trading this week on the public markets. At one point on Thursday, the company was valued at $92 billion.
- How Coupang is ‘out-Amazoning even Amazon,’ according to Goodwater Capital
- Coupang follows Roblox to a strong first day of trading
- Former Uber CTO Thuan Pham joins South Korean e-commerce leader Coupang
Here’s what to know: When Coupang first launched, it found that South Korea had an absence of third-party logistics companies similar to UPS or FedEx in the United States. Now, it wasn’t without competition, but it did have an opportunity to build an end-to-end logistics company that is now worth a boatload of money.
Other IPO news:
- Five takeaways from Coursera’s IPO filing
- Olo’s IPO could value the company north of $3 billion as toast waits in the wings
- Welcome to Bloxburg, public investors
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
The Nasdaq for Revenue
Pipe has a compelling narrative: It’s anti-VC, doesn’t like naming its rounds and says its goal is to be the Nasdaq for revenue. The goal since it started was to give SaaS companies a way to get their revenue upfront by connecting them to investors that would pay a rate for the annual value of those contracts. It turns monthly recurring revenue into annual recurring revenue.
Here’s what to know: The startup raised $50 million in a financing event this week. In the first quarter of 2021, tens of millions of dollars were traded through its platform, reports TechCrunch’s Mary Ann Azevedo.
- Investors discuss alt-financing the role of venture capital
- Arlan Hamilton on the future of Backstage Capital and the ever-changing asset class of VC
- Bessemer’s 2021 cloud report provides context for soaring software startup valuations
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin
Can you beat Google with Google’s brains?
In our main Equity show this week, the trio discussed a slew of news that naturally lended itself over to a piece we wrote months ago, Meet the anti-antitrust startup club.
(By the way, if you want a huge discount for Extra Crunch, just use our code, EQUITY, when you sign up to access great articles like this one and most of our analytical work).
Here’s what to know: Neeva, built by a team of ex-Googlers including the guy who built Google’s advertising engine, is one startup to watch. There’s a lot to chew and we do it best during the episode, so take a listen and figure out if you’re team Natasha and Danny, or team Alex.
Other news bits:
Image Credits: TechCrunch
‘Blaming the intern’ won’t save your startup from cybersecurity liability
As SolarWinds is showcasing, a company can be liable for the mistakes of its employees via a legal term called “vicarious liability.”
Cybersecurity writer Chandu Gopalakrishnan explains what it means for you and what you can do to stay on the right side of the law.
Around TechCrunch
A few house-keeping things this week:
- Here is everything you missed from TC Sessions: Justice. It has recaps, videos and excerpts with embedded notes. Best enjoyed with a dose of reality, truth and coffee.
- We are hiring for a head of product, so apply for a chance to join this wacky and fun team.
- Check out the incredible speakers we have joining us for Extra Crunch Live this month.
- And finally, follow Drew Olanoff, who leads Community for TC, because he’s constantly churning out cool stuff like discount codes, chances to hang and surveys so we serve y’all better.
Across the week
Seen on TechCrunch
Zapier buys no-code-focused Makerpad in its first acquisition
Sequoia Capital puts millions of dollars into Gather, a virtual HQ platform
Seen on ExtraCrunch
There have never been more $100 million fintech rounds than right now
What I wish I’d known about venture capital when I was a founder
White-label voice assistants will win the battle for podcast discovery
When Mike Morrison left his hometown of Fredericton, New Brunswick, for Calgary, Alberta, he assumed he’d never go back except to visit.
Morrison was following a well-trodden path of Atlantic Canadians heading west to find work rom which few returned. During the mid-aughts, Alberta was booming thanks to the high price of oil. To Morrison, migrating west seemed an easy choice. “If I stayed, my options were to be a supply teacher or work in a call center.”
When he arrived in Alberta, Morrison worked three jobs. During his free time, he started a blog to tell his friends back home about his life out west, and also to recommend TV shows. Slowly, Mike’s Bloggity Blog became one of Canada’s premier entertainment sites, and Morrison found himself with a local newspaper column as well as regular television and radio appearances. He then started Social West, a Calgary-based digital marketing conference that, before long, expanded to three cities. His identity and public persona were intertwined with his adopted city.
“For a while, I would tell people that I was being paid to be a professional Calgarian.” Then, in 2021, Morrison left Calgary for Halifax, Nova Scotia, back east.
Morrison and his partner are part of a wave of skilled young people reversing Canada’s natural current of internal migration. In doing so, they’re participating in an economic revival that could change the destiny of the depressed Atlantic region.
When they return, young people like Morrison are finding that Atlantic Canadians have quietly built a robust startup ecosystem that has resulted in a dozen acquisitions to companies like IBM and Salesforce, the sum of which likely surpasses $5 million in cash and stock.
The Atlantic Canada story may provide a blueprint for other rural regions looking to take advantage of the decentralizing impact of COVID-19 to swap resource-based economies for the knowledge economy.
If you’ve never thought of Atlantic Canada before, you’re not alone. Indeed, many Canadians refer to Toronto as “east”’ despite there being 1,900 miles between Drake and The Weeknd’s hometown and St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, the easternmost point of Canada and North America. The four provinces that make up Atlantic Canada (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador) are easy to overlook for their remoteness. Known within Canada for its sleepy seaside towns, kitchen parties, trouble-making red-headed orphans and lobster galore, Atlantic Canada has had a rough few decades.
After the collapse of the cod fishing industry in the 1990s followed by the migration of shipbuilding to Asia, Atlantic Canada defined itself as the have-not region of America’s rational northern neighbor. Despite booming from the war years onward due to its abundant natural resources, since the ’90s Atlantic Canada has watched its young people migrate west to the oil fields of Alberta for blue-collar work and to Toronto and Montreal for white-collar work.
Soon, the region’s hard-luck narrative stuck. Stephen Harper, the country’s prime minister from 2006 to 2015, famously quipped that the region suffered from “a culture of defeatism.” The narrative of the death of the coastal region became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Then, during the pandemic, the narrative drastically changed. In September 2020, Halifax-based fitness data management company Kinduct was acquired by mCube. In November 2020, Newfoundland-based Verafin was acquired by Nasdaq for $2.75 billion in cash. In January 2021, Prince Edward Island-based ScreenScape Networks was acquired by Spectrio for an undisclosed fee, then Halifax-based storytelling platform Wattpad was acquired by Naver in a deal worth $600 million. Atlantic Canada had four major tech acquisitions in a five-month period.
Outsiders were surprised by the sudden upsurge in exits, but momentum had been building for some time. Business writer Gordon Pitts pinpoints 2011 as the game-changing year for the Atlantic startup scene. In his book “Unicorn in the Woods: How East Coast Geeks and Dreamers are Changing the Game,” Pitts recounts how in March 2011 Salesforce purchased New Brunswick-based social media monitoring company Radian6 for approximately $300 million. Then, in November of the same year, IBM purchased another New Brunswick-based startup, cybersecurity company Q1 labs, for a reported $600 million. If anyone considered the Radian6 acquisition a one-off chance event, the subsequent success of Q1 labs demonstrated there was a there there.
Under normal circumstances, one might expect the founders of Radian6 and Q1 labs to disappear into the suburbs of Cambridge or Marin Country, but that never happened. Rather than uproot their newly acquired companies, both Salesforce and IBM opened engineering offices in Fredericton. Verafin would appear to be following suit: in the press release announcing the acquisition, Nasdaq committed to keeping the company’s headquarters in Newfoundland, investing in the local university and contributing to the development of the local ecosystem.
Once lone rangers, Q1 Labs and Radian6 are now surrounded by thriving copycats in a self-sustaining ecosystem. According to Peter Moreira, founder of Entrevestor, a publication that has tracked the Atlantic Canadian startup scene since 2011, the ecosystem has attracted over a billion dollars in investment spread among 700 companies, creating more than 6,000 direct jobs. About 100 companies are created every year in fields as diverse as life sciences, cleantech and ocean tech.
VC firms have taken notice: notable investors in Atlantic Canadian startups include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a fund supported by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson. Indeed, what’s remarkable about the string of recent exits is their diversity across industries and their inside-baseball inclinations, spanning everything from fraudulent credit card transactions to fitness data and video technology.
Sandy Bird is one of the protagonists of the Atlantic Canada tech-driven economic revival. Sandy co-founded Q1 Labs and then, after the acquisition, became the CTO of IBM’s security division. In 2017, Bird and the former CEO of Q1 Labs founded a new cybersecurity company, this one focused on public clouds, called Sonrai Security, which has since raised nearly $40 million in venture capital. Bird takes great pride in having lived his entire life within a 30-minute radius and showing the world that his prior exit was not a one-off event.
According to Bird, IBM was happy to keep an engineering division in New Brunswick because the quality of the engineers is high and employee attrition, one of the obstacles for any fast-growing company operating in the competitive labor market of the San Francisco Bay Area, is low. Atlantic Canada is a place where the idea of the “company man/woman” is still alive and thriving.
Bird noted that “thanks to our high retention, we’re able to build a company culture that makes up for any of the disadvantages of a smaller labor market.” Bird also pointed out that the Atlantic time zones are ideal, enabling effective communications with Europe as well as the rest of North America.
Bird is also honest about the region’s shortcomings. For example, airline connections to Atlantic Canada can be tricky. Getting to places like Denver can take a day and multiple connections. Sonrai Security, for example, has its core engineering team in Fredericton while sales and marketing are in New York, with regional salespeople spread out around North America.
In terms of starting a company, the local ecosystem can provide those first checks to get a company up and running, but growth from Series B onward requires tapping into U.S. venture capital. Another challenge is hiring fast enough to meet the demands of a thriving tech company. Though companies like his can recruit recent graduates and exiled Atlantic Canadians eager to return, Bird mentioned that Q1 Labs opened a parallel engineering office in Belfast, Ireland, to scale-up hiring.
So what is the playbook for other rural regions hoping to copy the Atlantic Canada model of generating tech jobs? Speaking to insiders, all cite the low cost of living and high quality of life as enabling startups to both attract and retain talent. Second, a welcoming attitude toward immigration helps. Even prior to COVID-19, Canada cheekily took advantage of anxiety around U.S. immigration policies to launch a startup visa program to attract entrepreneurs and H1-B visa holders away from the United States, and many cite that program as acting as a strategic advantage for the coastal provinces.
Atlantic Canada’s recent success is owed in part to proactive government. After years of failed top-down economic development initiatives, both the provincial and the federal governments have found formulas to kickstart new companies through grants as well as repayable and non-repayable non-dilutive funding.
Entrepreneurs cite IRAP, the National Research Council of Canada’s Industrial Research Assistance Program, as key to obtaining funds that subsidize wages for staff and contractors. Another federal government agency, the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA), awards funding between CA$500,000 and CA$3 million (roughly $400,000 USD to $2.4 million USD) through its Atlantic Innovation Fund (AIF). Each of the four provincial governments has its own incentive programs, which include grants and wage subsidies as well as incentives for private investors.
Despite these government programs, local entrepreneurs stress that the region’s modest success is primarily driven by the private sector. Each province tends to have a godfather/cheerleader who has championed local startups through investment, advice and connections. Notable also is the accessibility of the success stories of the region’s protagonists. In a place where ostentatious displays of wealth are avoided, successful founders are easy to get a hold of and happy to provide advice, contacts and in some cases capital. Also notable is the region’s mix of 16 public-private universities that produce graduates with varied skill sets across STEM and humanities programs.
Even with these advances, obstacles abound, and it remains to be seen whether politicians and policy-makers can match entrepreneurs with bold initiatives. While countries like Ireland and Estonia have rewritten their corporate tax codes to encourage tech companies to set up in their previously disadvantaged jurisdictions, Atlantic Canada continues to have tax rates above neighboring provinces and U.S. states. Past innovation hubs have relied on physical proximity in order to build networks of human and social capital. Atlantic Canada as a region spans 500,000 square kilometers (193,256 square miles), much of which is hard to get to and poorly connected to the rest of the world.
Having done the hard work of providing the region with a new narrative, and a newfound sense of self-belief, many entrepreneurs hope to finally transition away from a declining resource-based economic model. They want to create a world where ambitious Atlantic Canadians don’t need to choose between staying close to home and pursuing exciting careers.
There are reasons to be hopeful: With every exit, future entrepreneurs are provided the success stories that, like supernovas, explode and act as the base material for new ventures. With every VC investment, the region’s network of startups builds the social capital that can enable the next round of funding. With every innovation, the region’s breadth of knowledge deepens through newfound expertise.
And with Atlantic Canada’s traditional migratory patterns seeming to reverse themselves as workers return to seek a lower cost of living and higher quality of life in small towns with coastal views, the pool of talent has only increased.
In the post-COVID world, talent can go anywhere, proving that constant proximity is not a prerequisite to building high-performing companies. To replicate the Atlantic Canada model, however, rural areas will need to offer more than a lower cost of living, as housing prices quickly catch up to demand.
Atlantic Canada’s modest success can be summarized as the result of fomenting a highly collaborative ecosystem that includes companies, universities, investors and government to ensure that the human capital, social capital and financial capital are available to propel new companies forward. Only by building an ecosystem can we create economic models where instead of talent chasing opportunity, opportunity chases talent.
