StartupIndex aims to be the database for Canadian startups and investors (1)
StartupIndex.ca was unveiled this evening at StartupCampToronto. It’s a joint effort by Jevon MacDonald, Jonas Brandon, Ali Asaria and Chris Long, and provides a crowd-sourced database of Canadian startups and investors.
StartupIndex has already in its database most Canadians startups and VC funds, and paints a broad picture of the Internet / ecommerce / web2.0 / media startup landscape. You are also invited to register and contribute if you notice incorrect or missing information.
The website has strong similarities with CrunchBase, a Techcrunch property which does more or less the same thing. In its current state, one can call it a clone of CrunchBase; although this wouldn’t be fair. As Jevon MacDonald writes, their final objective was to provide to the community a useful tool, and get better exposure for startups based in Canada:
By tracking startup activity nationally we can start to build more awareness of which startups are worth watching, we can also quickly find out which Investors are doing deals and which ones are less active. The “Wheat from the Chaff” as they say.
This is also an opportunity to find out the truth about the Canadian Startup community. Is it dead or alive? We can either put grand claims to rest, or we can light a fire under them.
There is a parallel to be made here with StartupNorth. With its focus in Canada, the blog has played a major role in raising the profile of the country, in levels unheard of one year ago, and convinced entrepreneurs that there’s actually a scene and an industry worth staying in Canada. StartupIndex becomes then a natural expansion in StartupNorth’s mission, a tool that will provide valuable information for future and existing entrepreneurs, investors and the media.
If you are an entrepreneur, you can use it for instance to get an initial list of potential investors in your space, or maybe try to connect with startups and work out partnerships. You can also use it to evaluate term sheets and typical VC investments. So it’s definetely a great project that I welcome. Congrats to the team!
Thanks for the kind words Heri. While it is easy to draw a Crunchbase comparison, we really have a single purpose behind this, and it is to open up access to this data for startups.
We also have a lot of plans and hopes for this in the near future, but it is really going to come down to how much we can encourage people to contribute. (which is always the hard part)
Leave a Reply