His Brant County-based business is tackling food insecurity and greenhouse gases . Its self-contained pod system creates an optimized growing environment for more than 50 vegetables, increasing their nutritional values and reducing the cost and carbon footprint of each yield.
It’s no surprise Urban Stalk has drawn funding from academic institutions, accelerators and government organizations. “Once people found out what we were doing, it had a cascade effect,” Mr. Downey says. “Lots of people have come to the table to support these types of technologies.”identified “There still seems to be a lot of new entrepreneurs, researchers and innovators who are coming up with ideas, and I think we’re starting to see them be more market problem and data-driven,” Ms. Jackson says. “But there are some significant challenges.”According to the BCG report, Canada trails its peers in converting startups to scale-ups with only 7 per cent of Canadian funding events over the past five years valued at more than US$50-million, versus 12 per cent in the United States.
She says the challenge with the seed-funding stage is you typically don’t have a product ready for the market. “We needed money before we had paying customers because we needed to build and scale that platform,” Ms. Shumlich says. When they approached U.S. venture-capital firms, they were more willing to assume the risk. “Canadian firms expected us to have those customers and revenue coming in.”