8 Key Startups from Québec City (1)
I started 2 months ago a project whose goal was to highlight cities in Canada; it was to provide at the end a “benchmark” to see how each city was doing and also foster inter and intra-dialogue and finally highlight existing opportunities. Scott Lake, founder of Shopify, did the roundup for Ottawa. Leonard Brody was to do the one for Vancouver, but he was in South Africa at the time, and Victoria Revay, an editor from his startup nowpublic.com, wrote it instead. For Québec city, it’s now Samuel Bouchard, researcher, blogger, and entrepreneur. Now he just published the post on his blog, in French, so here is the post in english (traduced by me).
The magazine Canadian Business named Québec city last year as the first city in Canada to do business in. Does this climate allow innovative tech companies to startup? There was no exhaustive study on the question, but here is anyway today eight companies from Québec city, at various levels in their startup life, that should be watched.
1. Swammer
who? Swammer is a collaboration between Filteris (Jerome Coutard, phd in Litterature from Université Laval) and Compurangers (Stéphane Muller and Andreas Mollman)
What? Many things that are told about a subject finish on the web. By using it as a database, they measure public perception of a product, a company, a concept or someone’s image. The content is analysis on quantity level (sampling, “cutting”, coding, counting) and quality (categorizations, contextualizations, symbolic and structural analysis, intepreted grids…)
Why? First, because online media have more reach every day. Also, because they have already proved their approach. Because they use real-time information, which is faster than polls.
2. TLCL Recherche Optique
Who? Physics Professor Tigran Galstian and his team at Université Laval. There is no website now as the the company is in stealth mode.
What? Development and commercialisation of electrically controlled lenses for automatic focus in cell phone cameras.
Why? Imagine a cell phone camera with an optical zoom. This market is huge. Moreover, their lens are simple and cheap to produce. Their invention is patented in several key countries and the company is heavily funded, mainly by Silicon Valley VCs.
3. Poly9
Who? Greg Sadetsky and Denis Laprise
What? Map mashups. They developed Free Earth, a lightweight and fast Google Earth competitor for browsers
Why? Poly9 is on this list because of the founders, who know what they are doing and because they are passionnate. Also because of the applications made possible thanks to FreeEarth. Finally, because they eliminate two Google Earth problems: the necessity to download a desktop application and the quantity of data that needs to be download each time (a few 100kb of data for FreeEarth instead of several Mb for Google’s product)
4 . iMinR
Who? Stéphane Guérin
What? Web analytics
Why? Because Stéphane Guérin was one of the first entrepreneur to make money on the Internet with the websites he made. He is a quite talented programmer who did Nuouz and Tout le monde en blogue. In summary, he is a web veteran. He competes against Google Analytics and offer more than what’s avalaible with the free offering from the Giant. iMinr is compatible with AJAX websites and works with SSL websites.
5. Puzzr
Who? Carl Guillemette and Jason Simard, 2 entrepreneurs who go to Yulbiz-Québec
What? a website that allows you to browse online news in an intuitive way. The best way to “get it” is to try Puzzr.
Why? Instead of being subscribed to a bunch RSS feeds to follow the news about a given subject, their website allows you to dig through the news by theme and by keyword. You can also subscribe to a theme and a search result by RSS, which makes it very practical. For instance, it can be used to follow news about robotics in media.
6. MonAvis.ca
Who? Philip Boumansour
What? Quebec clone of Yelp.com, where the website’s community rate local businesses
Why? Because it’s a community-based website which can get a business model, as it’s centered around businesses. Their platform will allow to display highly relevant ads.
7. Polyrix
Who? Philippe Lamber, Jean-Daniel Deschenes, Nicolas Martel-Brisson and Christian Dompierre, 4 graduates from the Laboratoire de vision et de systèmes numériques of Université Laval.
What? For now, a company working in 3d recording and visualization. They are also developing an online image treatment tool.
Why? Once again, the company was chosen because of the founders, who were proven to do high-quality work.
8. Waka.ca
Who? Company founded by Samuel Bouchard and his cousin, Jean-Sébastien Bouchard, a programmer
What? A web application which aggregates real estate websites in Canada
Why? Because real estate is huge (Note from Heri: this is an understatement). Because the SIA system which gathered all houses on sale from real-estate agents in the country was failing on every level. The interface is clunky and dated, the big players leave it one after each other and try to push their own system. Waka.ca aims first to gather all the content in the same place, by even including direct sales between individuals. With all the data, one will find value-adding information on a house’s value.
i find swammer very promising, it uses both analytics and data mining. very curious how the back-end was designed.
TLCL Recherche optique is also very promising. I think one key charasteristic of high-tech companies in Québec is that they are closer to fundamental science and research, like Poly9 and Polyrix. Startups in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver are more “practical” and more “applied science”.
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