At Entrevestor Live on Thursday, we’re teaming up some of the region’s top founders and their investors to tell about their companies’ stories together.
Entrevestor Live is a half-day conference at Volta that showcases some of the greatest successes in the East Coast startup community. It features fireside chats with co-founders from Sonrai Security, Eyeread/Dreamscape and Milk Moovement. Each session will feature an investor in the company, including one livestreamed from New York and one from San Francisco.
It’s a rare opportunity to gain insights into the investor process and thinking, by backers based inside and far beyond Atlantic Canada.
Here are the three fireside chats, including the investors appearing in each:
Robert Forsythe, CEO, and Jon King, COO
Investor Varun Sridhar, VMG Catalyst
Moderated by Erin O’Keefe Graham, CEO of the Emera IdeaHUB, sponsor of this session
Founded in St. John’s in 2018, Milk Moovement makes supply chain management software for the dairy industry, and its technology is now used by more than 2,500 farms. It closed a US$20 million (C$26 million) funding round this summer.
They’re joined from New York by Varun Sridhar, an investor with San Francisco- and New York-based VMG Catalyst, a VC fund focused entirely on commerce enablement and supply chain innovation. VMG led Milk Moovement’s recent funding round.
Julia Rivard Dexter, CEO
Advisor and investor Lesley Ross, Enjoy The Work
Moderated by Rhiannon Davies, Sandpiper Ventures
Shoelace Learning, a Halifax-area edtech company, has developed a platform that supports the gamification of learning with the goal of improving educational outcomes. Its first game, Dreamscape, is a digital literacy game for players in Grades 2 to 8.
CEO Julia Rivard Dexter will be joined from San Francisco by Lesley Ross, a Shoelace backer and general partner at Enjoy The Work. ETW’s expertise is teaching company-building and helping founders mature into master operators. The discussion will be led by moderator Rhiannon Davies, the Managing Partner of Sandpiper Ventures, which invests in female-led companies.
Sandy Bird, Co-Founder and CTO
Investor Jeff White, New Brunswick Innovation Foundation
Moderated by Sally Ng, CEO of UNB’s Wallace McCain Institute
Session sponsored by University of New Brunswick
Fredericton- and New York-based Sonrai specializes in helping enterprise clients organize and protect their data in the cloud. It captured headlines last year by closing a US$50 million funding round – the third eight-figure round in its three-year history.
Before Sonrai, Bird was a Co-Founder of Q1 Labs, which exited to IBM for a reported price of more than $600 million in 2012. Jeff White served as CFO of Q1 Labs, and his organization NBIF is now an investor in Sonrai.
The program is rounded out with panel discussions on medtech and scaling companies, and features several co-founders who have raised million of dollars in and beyond Atlantic Canada. Much of the discussion at Entrevestor Live will deal with how they have dealt with different types of investors.
