Silicon Halton Meetup 107 Was Awesome!
Last week’s meetup 107 was a great opportunity to learn about OMERS Ventures from managing partner Jim Orlando. I first connected with Jim in 2014 when I was working on my 7 Question Series ebook on funding advice for tech startups. OMERS Ventures invests in North American technology companies with market disrupting potential. The chart below outlines OMERS Ventures areas of focus.
Source: OMERS Ventures
To date OMERS Ventures have invested $450M in 40 North American companies creating more that 7,500 jobs attracting two billion in capital.
OMERS Ventures, Capital Raised
Some key things I learned at the meetup about OMERS Ventures:
- They’ll invest at any stage in a company! Two founders can get funding even if they’ve not generated revenue yet.
- They receive 1,000 pitches every year; they fund up to four companies.
- Five key trends they have their eyes on include: Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Cybersecurity and Privacy, Quantum Computing and Synthetic Biology (think Crispr)
A special thank you to Lou Schizas for his continued support of Silicon Halton and our members. Listen to his coverage on 640AM.
The Network You Didn’t Know About
On Friday, Silicon Halton member Sam Reid from QuaeNet Inc., presented at Silicon Halton’s IoT Peer2Peer on LoRaWAN™, a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWan) protocol. The room was packed! The IoT stack includes communications and in order for some IoT solutions to be financially viable they need low cost yet reliable connectivity delivered via LPWan networks.
Learning about LoRaWan at the @SiliconHalton IoT peer2peer with Sam Reid from Quanet pic.twitter.com/OD70rHWfTq
— Silicon Halton (@SiliconHalton) September 14, 2018
As some of you know I’m advocating that local municipalities become more engaged with the local tech community especially in the area of smart cities technologies such as smart parking. It was good to see a couple of folks from the Town of Oakvile.
What’s Next in Our Community?
I’m looking forward to tonight’s Software Peer2Peer on Machine Learning with ML.NET and this weekend the TU20 team have their inaugural C3 Conference on Saturday. I’ll be attending both. Hope to see you around the community this week!