Montreal Tech Watch

The Blackberry Partners fund was announced in early 2008. With capital totaling $150 million, the fund was to invest in mobile startups. While it was based both in Montréal and in Tornoto, and was to look into the mobile space locally, it also announced it will look at investment opportunities all over the world. It quickly announced bold investments (such as xobni), competing with other VCs like Kleiner Perkins’s ifund. Successful announcements such as the acquisition of SocialDeck by Google demonstrated the fund’s performance.

Yesterday, main investor Research In Motion announced a new fund, entitled BlackBerry Partners Fund II, with a commitment of $150million. While it’s going to operate in the same space, the announcement highlighted essentially the fund’s global ambitions, as opposed to local operations.

The BlacBerry Partners Fund was an opportunity for entrepreneurs in North-East America. In Montréal, Neuralitic raised $3million from BPF, while another Montréal based startup buzzd also received funding, but many other mobile services startups in the US, in China, UK and Israel received funding from BPF. If the new fund clearly puts forward international operations, that means Montreal and Canadian companies will have to compete globally against startups from America, Europe and Asia. Having a validated idea in the local technology community isn’t good enough, you have to reach excellence and global superiority! It’s now time to look at what are the ideas brewing in other markets.