The New Brunswick Innovation Foundation invested a total of $4.81 million in 21 startups in New Brunswick in its last fiscal year, according to the organization’s 2020 annual report.
The report, which was recently posted on the NBIF website, shows the foundation invested $3.78 million through its Venture Capital Fund in the fiscal year that ended March 31, 2020. It also invested $1.03 million through its Startup Investment Fund, which backs early-stage companies.
On the surface, the funding totals reflect a drop of 7.7 percent from $5.2 million in the previous fiscal year. However, NBIF also made investments of almost $400,000 through partnerships with Concrete Ventures, Propel and Energia Ventures – partnerships that only came about recently.
The COVID-19 pandemic broke out last March, so most of the fiscal year under consideration happened before the world was consumed by the virus.
“NBIF entered the year with a clear vision for how we support New Brunswick’s entrepreneurs and researchers and the province’s broader innovation agenda,” said CEO Jeff White in the report. “We were agile and decisive, collaborating to form new partnerships and developing new strategies to support venture capital investment and research funding.”
NBIF has a dual function. It invests in and nurtures early-stage innovation companies, and it helps finance research that can help New Brunswick ventures. Its two VC funds nurture startups and it also helps New Brunswick companies fund R&D in the province’s research institutions through its Innovation Voucher and Applied Research programs.
As well as equity investments, the annual report also outlines the Fredericton-based foundation’s contributions to applied research and R&D. It funded $6.4 million in applied research. That’s down from $9.7 million the previous year. And its Innovation Voucher program – in which private companies can work with approved researchers to conduct R&D – received $1.75 million, roughly the same level as the previous year.
NBIF participated in a range of venture capital investments in which other co-investors invested a total of $41.6 million in 2019-20.
NBIF’s Venture Capital Fund, which deals with scaling companies, invested in the following ventures:
Alongside $500,000
Potential Motors $500,000
SomaDetect $500,000
Inversa $300,000
ProcedureFlow $300,000
Eigen $250,000
MESH/diversity $250,000
Kognitiv Spark $200,000
Quber $200,000
Rise $200,000
Stash Energy $200,000
Soricimed $175,000
Patchell Brook $150,000
Canum Nanomaterials $50,000
Total $3.78 million
NBIF said in its report it aims to help portfolio companies raise enough capital to provide a runway of not just 12 months, as is usually the case with VC deals, but as much as 18 months.
“Providing more capital to startups results in fewer yet larger investments,” said the report. “This is evident in our Startup Investment Fund, where four of the seven investments this past year received the program maximum at $200,000 per financing from us.”
The seven companies receiving money from this fund were:
3D Planeta $200,000
eChart Healthcare $200,000
Elandas $200,000
Procedure Accelerator $200,000
Global Intelligence $150,000
Gray Wolf $50,000
SnapAP $25,000
Total $1.03 million
In recent years, NBIF has also invested in companies through new partnerships. In 2019-20, these investments amounted to almost $400,000, including: $79,637 in Halifax-based VC fund Concrete Ventures; $215,000 for companies that excelled in Phase 2 of the Propel accelerator; and $100,000 for companies that went through the University of New Brunswick’s Energia Ventures Accelerator.
Disclosure: NBIF is a client of Entrevestor.
