Talking to a few of the teams entered in the Breakthru competition in New Brunswick, it was easy to understand the effect these contests have on the early development of companies.
There are now two big startup competitions in the region that take place on alternating years – Breakthru, organized by the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, and the I-3 Technology Startup Competition, organized by Innovacorp in Nova Scotia.
Breakthru will climax March 19 with announcement of three winners that will divide $750,000 in prizes. I-3 wrapped up ab out a year ago when seven companies shared a total pot of $700,000.
Those amounts are significant because the companies entering these competition are at the level of development in which $100,000 or $200,000 can mean the difference between make and break.
Consider two teams of entrepreneurs I met at the Breakthru Bootcamp in Fredericton. They have these things in common: they both comprise University of New Brunswick students. They’re both developing a countertop appliance for the kitchen. And they could both use the $200K prize to get started.
Christian Grandmaison and Aaron Tabor, for example, are two engineering students who’ve noticed that modern people often dash to work without having a good breakfast.
“Our solution is that people like pancakes, but they’re not always an available option because it takes time and it’s too messy,” said Grandmaison. “So our product is an automatic pancake machine.”
Their company, On Your Plate, is developing a countertop device that takes a single shot of batter and makes a pancake the way a Keurig machine makes a single glass of coffee. It means any one can make a pancake in a few minutes. And people can individualize their pancakes, whether they want chocolate chip or banana or whatever. “Every kid can have what they want,” said Tabor.
It also means people can eat more healthily by making whole wheat pancakes or protein enriched pancakes.
Or consider Catarro, a new company headed by Mike Sherrar and Adam Noade. Catarro is developing a household product that instantly cools drinks – sort of the opposite of a microwave.
New technology known as thermo-electric plates is allowing for the instant cooling of products, and these two students envision using them for a consumer product that cools drink in a snap. So you can arrive home with a bottle of white wine minutes before guests arrive, and have chilled wine when they walk in the door.
So far, the team has a rough prototype and it needs to refine it into a true retail product.
I asked both these pairs a question I asked everyone I met at the bootcamp: what will it mean to your business to win more than $200,000? They all had similar answers. It would mean they’d have the capital or most of the capital they needed to get to the next step.
Two-hundred-thousand dollars is essentially a seed round. Even with some of the booty comprising in-kind services from lawyers, accountants and what have you, the top three teams will have the resources to move their companies forward. An IT company should get to market. A manufacturer should finish initial prototyping. NBIF Chief Executive Calvin Milbury likes to call it a company in a box.
So winning Breakthru isn’t about bragging rights or financing a new car. It’s about having the resources to continue with your business for a year or two.
Entrevestor receives financial support from government agencies that support start-up companies in Atlantic Canada. The sponsoring agencies play no role in determining which companies are featured in this column nor do they have the right to review columns before they are published.
