Data analytics company Search2Go of Saint John is opening a development office in northern New Brunswick, supported by an investment by former premier Frank McKenna’s Miramichi Technology Fund.
Capitalizing on the boom in big data, Search2Go is a vertical search engine that allows users to conduct deep searches of specific information. Using unique markup language, Search2Go mines data from sources all around the world and provides the customer with a simple, filtered set of data that is easy to comprehend.
Founder and CEO Jason Richard began a company several years ago called Prop2Go, which allows landlords and property managers to find tenants for their apartment buildings. A year or two ago, Richard began to enhance the search and analytics functions and apply them to other markets, using data analytics to probe any business with buyers and sellers in a specific geo-graphic location.
Search2Go is now the umbrella company with the http://www.prop2go.com as one of its divisions, said Richard in an interview Friday. Search2Go’s main business is real estate, but as the company completes the validation of its analytics functions, it wants to expand into other markets.
“We’re very excited by our new presence in Miramichi and what this investment will allow us to do here,” said Richard. He added that Prop2Go does “work in 11 countries around the world, and this new development office in Miramichi will allow us to expand and strengthen our services.”
The company has received support from Saint John-based East Valley Ventures, the group of investors and mentors whose best-known member is Gerry Pond. It has also received assistance from such programs as the National Research Council’s Industrial Research Assistance Program.
The Miramichi fund is colloquially known as the Frank Fund because it was established two years ago by a $1-million donation from Frank McKenna and his wife Julie to encourage tech development in the Miramichi area. It did not state how much it is investing in Search2Go, though Richard said it was substantial.
The Search2Go funding is the Miramichi Tech Fund’s second financing, having invested last December in a joint venture between Cube Automation and Sunny Corner Enterprises to develop remote monitoring and automation applications for the mining industry.
Search2Go has already hired three people in its Miramichi office, and has four in Saint John and one in British Columbia.
McKenna, the deputy chairman of the TD Bank Group, set up the fund to make investments over five years with the expectation that it would eventually be self-sustaining. He made the contribution through the University of New Brunswick and the fund is managed by the Wallace McCain Institute.
Search2Go is simply one example of the wave of Big Data startups in Atlantic Canada, that is, companies that use new technologies in data analytics and the vast amount of data now available online to discover information that improves sales and/or efficiency.
Geoff Flood, the CEO of tech consultancy T4G and the co-chairman of the New Brunswick Research and Innovation Council, is working on establishing a Big Data centre of excellence in the region. IBM is setting up an analytics centre in Halifax, and at least two universities, Dalhousie and Acadia, are opening institutes for data analytics.
