BC Business
We took a look at three of them that could have the potential to make some noise
Green Mountain is hoping to blow away the cannabis market
If developing a genuinely good vegan burger wasn’t groundbreaking enough, Victoria-based Very Good Butchers achieved another first last month, when it became the first company listed on equity crowdfunding platform FrontFundr to go public.
Very Good hit the Canadian Stock Exchange (under the apt CNSX: VERY handle) with more than 2 million trades on its first day.
It raises the question: What other Canadian ventures might ride Vancouver’s FrontFundr to some public success?
We ran through the company’s roster to identify three (one current and two past) ventures that caught our eye.
OK, we hear you: the Canadian cannabis market is more crowded than a bathroom hotboxing session. But Okanagan-based Green Mountain is still heating up.
The company, which bills itself as a “large-scale, low-cost cannabis producer” and focuses on high-quality medicinal marijuana, was co-founded by longtime investment executive Wade Atwood.
Its FrontFundr campaign was successful—to say the least—raising some $1.3 million, about 269 percent of the $500,000 goal, from 176 investors.
A public offering might be a bit of a stretch right now for Vancouver-based Riipen, given that the firm, which connects companies with postsecondary schools for real-world projects, is still a relative newbie to the province’s tech scene.
Maybe not for long, though. After raising more than $175,000 from 40 FrontFundr investors, Riipen and CEO Dana Stephenson secured $1.8 million during their first official financing round in 2017 and followed that up with a 2019 round of $5 million, led by California-headquartered Reach Capital.
So far, the Riipen platform has facilitated connections between some 5,000 employers and 40,000 students at 150 postsecondary institutions.
We’ve arrived at something you can actually invest in. And although we’ll wholeheartedly and completely deny ever telling you this if it doesn’t work out, Toronto’s Amuka Esports sounds like a worthwhile venture.
After all, your annoying cousin keeps telling you how massive eSports is. Might be fun to one-up him, wouldn’t it?
Amuka, which builds eSports hubs in communities across North America—including Canada’s largest, in Toronto—has raised just over $335,000 of its $500,000 goal from 44 investors, with 18 days to go. The $250 minimum investment isn’t too prohibitive, either.
And while “hubs” of any kind are a little scary in a post-COVID world, eSports might prove to be the only type of professional competition that can weather the storm. Besides its Toronto location, the company has opened a second in Windsor and has immediate plans for seven more, including U.S. cities such as Chicago and Atlanta.