Dennis Bayazitov | Assistant News Editor
Featured Image: Toronto law firm Aird & Berlis will support the winning startup with capital and legal services. | Trina Turl
Last Tuesday, Toronto law firm Aird & Berlis (A&B) announced a new award launched, in collaboration with York, that will support the most successful startup venture to come out of Innovation York’s LaunchYU AccelerateUP program. From now until January, the three front-runners—Lyofresh Technologies, CellFace, and KPI Ninja—will compete to win their legal support.
The A&B StartupSource Market Entry Award will reward the winning startup with $12,500, and the equivalent worth in legal services.
Over the past six months, A&B Partner Randy Williamson, who is also on York’s Board of Governors, and Director of Innovation York, Sarah Howe, collaborated to create the framework for the competition.
“At A&B, we want to help support the next set of great Canadian companies in the GTA and beyond, and university accelerators are a wonderful place where these companies will develop,” Williamson says. “We think that York students and those from its surrounding community participating in LaunchYU will bring unique characteristics to their companies, and we believe this will help them flourish.”
Innovation York’s entrepreneurship unit includes LaunchYU, an entrepreneur-support program that offers additional alternatives. One alternative is the summer accelerator, AccelerateUP, which accepts 20 ventures every year through a competitive process, guiding an intensive 20-week program wherein they learn to build, grow, and scale their ventures. In July, five of those ventures are awarded $3,000, and another three, $5,000, at the end of the program.
“During our LaunchYU Graduation and Launch Day on Tuesday, the recipients of the $5,000 were selected,” says Howe. “Those three will receive mentorship through Innovation York in the fall, and then a final winner will be selected in January to win the A&B StartupSource Market Entry Award.”
The three winning ventures were: Lyofresh Technologies, CellFace, and KPI Ninja.
Lyofresh develops a new freeze-drying technology, which initially aims to commercialize to food processors, says Nicholas Steele, president and CEO of the venture. “Our technology is significantly more efficient and faster than existing freeze dryers, while being priced at a far lower capital cost. This addresses a need for existing freeze-drying users for increased output from these machines.”
Steele believes Lyofresh can address larger societal issues of food security and waste, by scaling this technology to avoid food waste everywhere in the food system where waste occurs; from the consumer, grocer, distributor, and farm. “According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), food waste is a $1 trillion dollar globally economic, social, and environmental problem, and we believe that we can play a part in the solution.”
CellFace develops 3D cell culture technology that provides a reliable, highly customizable, and biologically relevant environment for stem cell study, drug discovery, and toxicology research. “There is a need for a reliable source of cells for the pre-clinical stage of the drug discovery process. An emerging method to produce the desired cells is to use stem cells and transform them into the target cell,” Howe adds.
There is no accepted platform to turn stem cells into desired cell types in an efficient, cost effective manner, without chemicals. Cellface provides stem cell researchers with a highly customization technology that directs the fate of stem cells using only physical features in a biologically relevant environment.
KPI Ninja helps hospitals manage and analyze their data so they can make better, evidence-based decisions to improve health outcomes of their patients, shares Founder Vimal Sharma. “Hospitals do not have enough analytical capabilities, and because the data is distributed in silos, hospitals’ IT teams spend a majority of their time collecting and reporting the data, rather than analyzing it.”
“Our web-based solutions make their job simple, efficient, and affordable. By empowering the decision makers to recognize patterns and trends in their data, our solutions help hospitals create a better patient experience and improve care quality.”
This is the first time York has joined with A&B in a project like this. It will run for four years, awarding a total of four prizes, with the law firm contributing over $100,000.
“As business and strategic advisers helping early-stage companies navigate legal challenges through the consultation of the various winners of these awards, we’ll be able to analyze and assess where these companies are, and how fast they can take advantage of these services,” comments A&B Associate Corporate Lawyer, Graham Topa—one of the A&B co-directors in the project.
His Co-Director, Associate Daniel Everall, clarifies the legal services that the winning venture will receive. “Some winners may have an urgent need to organize and arrange their internal structure, and we would then likely be providing shareholders’ agreements and employment advice,” he notes. “Other winners may urgently need to commercialize their product and we may then be focusing on licensing arrangements and their intellectual property protection.”
“We are pleased to support the manner by which York will select the winner of the Aird & Berlis StartupSource Market Entry Award, but we believe it is appropriately left to LaunchYU and its leadership to evaluate the companies it’s mentoring, and select the winner,” Williamson states.
