L-Spark, an Ottawa-based accelerator for software-as-a-service (SaaS) startups, announced its fresh fall cohort Oct. 2.
The cohort comprises of six companies that are the latest recipients of L-Spark’s valuable connections and resources, helping them to grow and scale globally. The six companies, SoftwareSecured, MyPitboard, F8th, Neurovine, Nugget.ai and Click Armor, were chosen from a list of 300 participating startups.
They will move into L-Spark’s workspaces for nine months of workshops, mentorship, and valuable time with other entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capital firms.
“We’re moving into our sixth year here at L-Spark and the community is really rallying behind our efforts. Our selection committee was the largest yet with representation from most of the major VC firms and angel investment groups across Canada,” said Leo Lax, executive managing director at L-Spark in a press release. “We’re also glad to see that two of the companies in this cohort are in the cybersecurity space as this is a strong indicator that Canada is becoming much more of an innovator in that area.”
The accelerator aims to scale and nurture market-ready Canadian SaaS and cloud firms to help them develop into globally competitive companies through rapid growth with the ultimate goal of propelling them to achieve series A funding and 10x increase in their revenue.
The final six are:
Click Armor: This startup provides a gamified or activity-based cybersecurity training platform. The solutions offered by Click Armor are designed to enhance employee behaviours in a positive way, aiming to minimize the risk of cyberattacks that target human vulnerabilities.
F8th: An AI-based cybersecurity SaaS solution, F8th enables clients to predict/detect any fraudulent online activities or transactions. In addition, this solution also helps clients to enhance customer experience and optimize their sales, thereby leading to more than 28 per cent growth in client retention and 65 per cent growth in sales.
SoftwareSecured: This is an application security solution for modern-day development teams which automates the process of identifying vulnerabilities in source code. In addition to this, it also reduces the effort to remediate identified vulnerabilities.
MyPitboard Inc.: This hardware and software technology firm offers onboard real-time lap time feedback, and training as well as racing tools and analytics for track-based sports. This is still a patent-pending technology.
Nugget.ai: A people analytics platform aimed at helping teams understand their people. Nugget.ai makes use of job-relevant issues for quantifying skills and abilities of candidates to help employers understand and hire most suitable talent. The platform captures more than 400 data points for identifying soft and hard skills, measuring talent gaps and correlating them to the performance benchmarks set for the employees.
Neurovine: Neurovine is a proprietary technology which makes the process of concussion recovery visible to clinicians and patients and also provides real-time feedback to help prevent recovery regression resulting from overexertion.
L-Spark also launched its Secure IoT Accelerator program in partnership with BlackBerry Ltd. and Telus Corp. earlier this year. The accelerator works on secure IoT solutions in partnership with those two firms, in addition to Solace, and also works with autonomous vehicle firms to focus on connected car technologies.
To date, L-Spark said it has accelerated 51 firms headquartered across Canada with more than 50 per cent of those firms raising follow-on funding, totaling to more than $45 million. These companies operate in verticals like cybersecurity, IoT, SaaS, AV among others.
