Montreal NewTech: 2018 in Review
At Montreal NewTech we passionately labour throughout the year to stimulate entrepreneurship. It only makes sense that at the start of the new year and during this festive season we reflect on WHY we do WHAT we do and WHO we do it for.
All our initiatives such as, start-up kits, demo days, newsletters, collaborative events go through a rigorous internal process and are crafted with a lot of careful thought and purpose that are tailored to the needs of entrepreneurs. We’re thrilled to be sharing this journey with you.
In the last 20 years, sustained efforts by both government and private sectors have established Montreal as a dynamic and thriving innovation hub. With access to 6 world class universities and 12 of the finest colleges, our city offers top class education and global perspective — attracting the best talent and diversity from around the world. Furthermore, as a pioneer in deep learning (MILA), led by world-renowned researchers such as Yoshua Bengio, we’ve continued to strengthen our position as a global hub for AI research and innovation, attracting the world’s most influential tech companies, including Google, Samsung, Facebook and Microsoft. We’re also at the center of the Canadian gaming industry and a significant innovation hub for advanced manufacturing and robotics.
Entrepreneurship is the major driver of innovation, competitiveness and growth. As such, Montreal is supported by a strong network of incubators, accelerators, mentoring programs, and community events. However, what it lacked was the awareness and access to these resources in the startup landscape. The lack of information on the available resources was a barrier to entrepreneurs.
We at Montreal Newtech have designed our programs to address this gap. It is our imperative that the wider community is inspired and has the opportunity to meet peers, to be trained, and to be aware of all available resources to successfully launch and establish a startup in Montreal. In particular, events and meetings are unique opportunities to learn, share, network, build trusting relationships, strengthen community connections, and create opportunities for creative collaborations.
Whether you are a first time or a serial entrepreneur, we educate and connect you with Montreal’s startup ecosystem and help navigate the complex web of information and resources. We’re driven by our values and mission to progressively advance these 5 key tenets that form the center of our mission:
1) Enable entrepreneurs and start-ups to connect with existing resources and infrastructure
2) Accelerate the creation of science and deep technology-based startups
3) Promote diversity and inclusion
4) Facilitate technology commercialization through creative collaborations and open innovation
5) Promote startups with social impact
This year, we’ve engaged and empowered our community through 22 collaborative events. Each and every one of our events can be traced to serving at least one of our 5 key tenets.
A forward from Ilias Benjelloun, President and Open Innovation Director at Montreal NewTech as he describes what’s next in store for Montreal NewTech:
“The year 2019 will be a pivotal year for Montréal NewTech, this is the first time that we will request and activate a grant to advance our mission within the Montreal startup community.
We took the time to put on paper a good part of what we intend to do in 2019–2020. We rely on our values and strengths, and our complementary partnerships with existing initiatives.
It’s not completely final, and the goal is to help accelerate initiatives, to gather, and to complete where it’s needed.”
Here’s a look back at pivotal moments and photos that shaped 2018:
It can be daunting for start-ups (especially early stage start-ups) to find the right talent and cultural fit, while simultaneously it can be challenging for foreign students and job seekers to navigate the entrepreneurial job market. With talent being scarce, engagement and retention of international talent is key to sustaining the growth of our ecosystem. So, with this purpose in mind, we collaborated with partners throughout the year to ensure international and local talent find amazing careers at start-ups
1) The 1st edition of JeChoisisMTL in collaboration with our friends at Montreal International recruited and connected foreign students with the start-up labour market. With over 140 + participants and 14 start-ups actively recruiting this event was a huge success.
2) L’Afrique numérique We’re immensely proud to have brought the first “Digital Africa: From Opportunity to Action Founder Lounge” to gather, learn and discuss challenges, opportunities and actions to connect Quebecers and the African diaspora to create impactful collaborations between Quebec and Africa. Huge engagement with 120+ active participants.
3) Startup Open House (SOH), was a smashing success with 3,000+ registered participants and over 250 start-ups opening their doors to the public to showcase what working at their start-up looks like. Interestingly, breaking down the profiles of the 250 start-ups showed: 72% were actively recruiting during SOH, the start-ups represented 20+ different industries, 42% of the start-ups had less than 20 employees, 80% participated for networking purposes, 70% participated for visibility and the vast majority of them produced software products.
4) Canada-China Innovation & Entrepreneurship Forum in partnership with RDFI, was an inspiring day-long conference that brought together PhDs, Entrepreneurs, VCs from the Chinese community and other Canadians for learning, sharing, and networking. These 10 fantastic start-ups presented their companies: ORA Graphene Audio, QuindiTech, Boozang, Advertiise, Calvin Payments, 2D-CrystaLab, Eva , COCOU, C2RO Robotics and ArtVenture.
5) 2nd Edition of FormFintech Career Fair, was enormously successful with 185+ participants and 30+ stakeholders: start-ups, and companies recruiting for the top talent in the intersecting fields of finance and technology.
We also supported other developing sectors in Montreal, including fintech, blockchain technology and AI:
6) The Fintech Show — A window into the future, Holt Accelerators inaugural demo day presented sales pitches in a unique and memorable way by combining fintech with entertainment. The Fintech Show was the culmination of a rigorous search for top talent in fintech from all over the world. The result: 13 companies (CommercialPassport, Consilium Crypto, CreditSCRIPT, Curu, FundSeeder, Ivy Lender, KapitalWise, Liquidity Marketplace Ltd., LoanConnect, Owl, PrestaGente, QuantumnSenseand SmartPay) were hand selected from over 400+ applications and numerous rounds of interviews.
7) 1st Ever Montreal AI Week, hosted the world’s largest conference in AI, the NeurIPS. Dozens of independent events, meetups, hackathons, panels, and parties coincided with this global happening.
8) Collaboration Startups & Grandes Entreprises? Opportunités. défis et apprentissages: exemple de la blockchain hosted by Blockhouse.
Our goal to bring more science or evidence-based entrepreneurship (EBE) strives to overcome the divide between knowledge developed in the field of entrepreneurship and its use in practice. In order to bridge the gap between academia and entrepreneurship, we and our partners brought together researchers, scientists, and specialists in various disciplines (AI, health, manufacturing, robotics, quantum computing, etc.) to participate in our demo days and other events including;
9) Conférence Annuelle Économie & Transformation Numérique in partnership with PolyTEA-Jaama bringing Yoshua Bengio — MILA, IVADO, Element AI, and Hugo Larochelle — Google Brain among others.
10) Demonight AI at MTLab collaboration with MTLab, where besides having kick-ass Montreal-based startups such as Luffa, Mindset and Hardbacon, we had Alexandre de Brébisson, Founder of Lyrebird.ai and a PhD student at MILA discussing the progress of his research work on the generation of speech synthesis technologies.
11) Government Investments in Technology — What you need to know in partnership with Queer Tech Montreal
12) Impact Startup Demonight at Cooperathon 2018 with Cooperathon + Desjarding Lab with Yoshua Bengio and Matthew Luhn from Pixar. A lineup of startups with a social impact objective pitched, out of which the following won the competition: Sera Santé Communautaire , QuindiTech, Intelligence Industrielle, HealthBridgeCan, NeuroServo , Perfiqt and Gallea.
13) Impact Startup Tent during Startupfest. We were thrilled to partner with Startupfest to hold an “impact startup contest” where startup’s with a social impact were given the opportunity to pitch their idea in 60 sec’s and receive constructive feedback from investors and the wider startup community. We also teamed up Quartier de l’innovation, Aligo Innovation and Univalor to re-purpose patents to bring awareness of the new technologies available to entrepreneurs to build start-ups.
Although some obstacles in start-up creation are common to all people, some groups face specific obstacles: namely, women, young people, people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, etc. We have collaborated with our partners to promote visibility, engagement and advocacy for these groups including championing, gender equality, queer minorities and the LGBQT tech community.
14) Women in Tech panel in partnership with BDO and BDC highlighted diversity and the importance of the contribution of women in our society.
15) Startup Open House | Diversity In Tech Panel in partnership with Queer Tech Montreal. This panel heard from brilliant underrepresented entrepreneurs and community representatives to highlight the wealth of their experiences, build solidarity, and inspire entrepreneurs and companies alike to do better, no matter where an organization is at on the journey towards inclusion.
16) At PrideHacks 2018, once more we partnered with our friends at Queer Tech Montreal, Montreal Pride and Startup Mosaic during the first weekend of Montreal Pride, whereby leaders from the LGBTQ+ community and their allies presented challenging problems charities face in providing essential services to our most marginalized community members.
17) Queer Tech Demo Night demoing startups founded by entrepreneurs from the LGBT community.
18) Pitch Under the Stars and Fun Networking — we partnered with Queer Tech at Montreal’s outdoor co-working space, Aire Commune and hosted a fun-filled evening, which included a handful of LGBTQ founders that gave 2-minute pitches about their tech startup, followed by Q&A from audience members.
19) AI For Social Good Hackathon, was organized in partnership with OSMO, MILA, DeepMind, McGill University Reasoning Lab, McGill Research and Innovation and supported by many other organizations, including: Element AI, Google, Microsoft, Desjardins Lab, Coopérathon, Dialogue and more.
20) IMPACT STARTUP DEMONIGHT at Cooperathon. We were thrilled to partner with Cooperathon — a 25-day open innovation program where entrepreneurs, experts, professionals and engaged citizens from all horizons met up to develop socially responsible projects. Teams grew thanks to the involvement of community, academic and industrial partners who accompany the participants through the development of their project, from idea to prototype. Imagined by the Mouvement Desjardins, first financial cooperative in Canada, the Cooperathon is a competition for all who wish to explore, experiment and create for their community. We’re excited to share that Cooperathon is expanding to 2 additional countries, 10 cities, and is looking to expand to Latam.
21) Montreal Founder Institute Demo Day, by the Institute which has the same name.
Encouraged Open data through supporting:
23) HackQC 2018 — Open Data Hackathon. We partnered with ETS to bring HackQC218, to invigorate and stimulate more students to enter entrepreneurship. Moving forward in 2019 we hope to work with more universities to expose a larger group of students and get them excited and engaged in entrepreneurship.
24) Lancement Coupe Données / Datacup 2018 with Desjardins. We collaborated with Desjardins to bring you open data hackathon. We look forward to fostering more events like this in 2019 as we believe that open data sharing is crucial for innovation. We’re looking to partner up with big companies, like Desjardins, EY and others to create opportunities for open innovation for entrepreneurs.
25) At the Startup Community Awards, we showed our gratitude and appreciation for all those who work tirelessly throughout the year often without acknowledgment, to support the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
As we reminisce, 2018 is a momentous year as Montreal NewTech turns 10 years old. The end of a decade isn’t just a measure of time; the years encompass Effort, Evolution and Achievement. At Montreal NewTech we’re eternally grateful to those of you who have supported us and continue to support us during this journey. We look forward to inviting YOU all to celebrate this milestone with us! Announcement to follow much later in the year.
The next decade for Montreal NewTech is being redefined as we continue to grow and expand. As 2019 kicks-off we’re looking forward to many more collaborations, partnerships and working closely with the startup community to strengthen the ecosystem for another spectacular year!
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