Media Releases

New Program For Venture Cap Investors in Ontario to Benefit Ventures in University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab

October 24, 2016

Toron­to, ON – For the first time in Cana­da, start-up ven­tures will be per­mit­ted to raise fund­ing from ven­ture cap investors through a two-year pro­gram autho­rized by the Ontario Secu­ri­ties Com­mis­sion. The new pro­gram is part of the OSC Launch­Pad ini­tia­tive, the first inno­va­tion hub intro­duced by a Cana­di­an secu­ri­ties reg­u­la­tor aimed at improv­ing the inte­gra­tion of Fin­tech com­pa­nies enter­ing the reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work.

Begin­ning tomor­row, eli­gi­ble ven­tures in the Cre­ative Destruc­tion Lab at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toronto’s Rot­man School of Man­age­ment as well as ven­tures with NEXT Cana­da, will be able to raise mon­ey through Angel­List, a plat­form for start­up fundrais­ing and hir­ing.

Eli­gi­ble investors will be Ontario investors who meet both the Ontario accred­it­ed investor cri­te­ria and the Angel­List sophis­ti­ca­tion screen­ing. Eli­gi­ble ven­tures must be head­quar­tered in, or have sig­nif­i­cant oper­a­tions in, Cana­da.

“The Cre­ative Destruc­tion Lab works with tech star­tups and inno­v­a­tive busi­ness­es and we are hap­py to see new oppor­tu­ni­ties for these busi­ness­es to raise funds in order to grow. It is good for Cana­di­an inven­tors and entre­pre­neurs,” says Avi Gold­farb, a pro­fes­sor of mar­ket­ing at the Rot­man School and the Lab’s Chief Data Sci­en­tist.

Research on crowd­fund­ing by Prof. Gold­farb with Rot­man col­league Prof. Ajay Agraw­al, the Lab’s founder, and Prof. Chris­t­ian Catal­i­ni of the MIT Sloan School of Man­age­ment, helped inform the OSC on the ini­tia­tive.

“This is great for Cana­di­an inno­va­tion because it allows investors, through “syn­di­cates” to lever­age their knowl­edge of a new ven­ture. In par­tic­u­lar, it aligns the incen­tives of lead investors to con­duct care­ful screen­ing and mon­i­tor progress with those of issuers and fol­low-on investors, which our research demon­strates,” says Prof. Gold­farb.

Found­ed by Prof. Ajay Agraw­al, the Cre­ative Destruc­tion Lab lever­ages the Rot­man School’s lead­ing fac­ul­ty and indus­try net­work as well as its loca­tion in the heart of Canada’s busi­ness cap­i­tal to accel­er­ate mas­sive­ly scal­able, tech­nol­o­gy-based ven­tures that have the poten­tial to trans­form our social, indus­tri­al, and eco­nom­ic land­scape. Each year the Lab accepts ven­tures in two streams– one for tech­nol­o­gy ven­tures and a sec­ond exclu­sive­ly for machine learn­ing and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence ven­tures. The pro­gram admit­ted fifty AI com­pa­nies this year. To our knowl­edge, this rep­re­sents the great­est con­cen­tra­tion of AI com­pa­nies in any pro­gram in the world.  The Lab has helped many nascent star­tups, includ­ing Deep Genomics, Green­lid, Atom­wise, Bridg­it, Min­u­um, Nymi, NVBots, OTI Lumion­ics, PUSH, Thalmic Labs, Vertical.ai, Nev­er­frost, Chargespot, and Vote­Com­pass, among oth­ers. . Since its incep­tion, com­pa­nies who have grad­u­at­ed from the pro­gram have gone on to cre­ate more than $800 mil­lion (CDN) in equi­ty val­ue. For more infor­ma­tion on the Lab, vis­it www.creativedestructionlab.com

The Rot­man School of Man­age­ment is locat­ed in the heart of Canada’s com­mer­cial and cul­tur­al cap­i­tal and is part of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to, one of the world’s top 20 research uni­ver­si­ties. The Rot­man School fos­ters a new way to think that enables our grad­u­ates to tack­le today’s glob­al busi­ness and soci­etal chal­lenges. For more infor­ma­tion, vis­it www.rotman.utoronto.ca.

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For more infor­ma­tion:

Ken McGuf­fin
Man­ag­er, Media Rela­tions
Rot­man School of Man­age­ment
Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to
Tel: 416.946.3818
E‑mail: mcguffin@rotman.utoronto.ca

Fol­low Rot­man on Twit­ter @rotmanschool
Watch Rot­man on You Tube www.youtube.com/rotmanschool