GrowLab Reveals Fall 2013 Cohort

GrowLab | BCBusiness
The seven selected companies will participate in an intensive three-month program.

Startup accelerator GrowLab picks seven companies for its Fall 2013 incubation program

The three-month program connects young local tech companies with seed funding, mentorship and a collaborative workspace to help selectees scale up.

Well into its third year, the Vancouver-based startup accelerator has helped over fifteen companies raise $6 million in funding, including local success stories ePact Network and CineCoup.

The program has helped solidify Vancouver’s reputation abroad as a startup hotbed. This year 40 per cent of the applicants and three of the chosen companies were from outside of Canada.

“Entrepreneurs everywhere have begun to see Vancouver as a great place to build their businesses,” said GrowLab executive director Mike Edwards in the announcement. “It’s great to see talent from around the world wanting to be part of GrowLab.”

Among the 400 applicants, five startups were selected to participate for the full program:

• Cognilab: an online laboratory for creating, crowdsourcing and sharing psychology experiments and winner of Launch Academy’s 2013 student startup challenge.
• Farm At Hand: a cloud-based farm management platform that allows agribusinesses (think organic farms) to plan, consult and exchange real-time information with their customers.
• Retsly: a platform that takes real estate listing data from multiple sources and siphons it through a real time API accessible to developers.
• Skift: a travel “intelligence” company that offers news, data and services to travel industry professionals.
• Zeetl: a Ukrainian social messaging venture that draws contact info from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

And two companies made the part-time “farm team” roster:

• SMART Pics: a marketing platform that uses photo-booth technology to help brands reach out to consumers.
• JustParts: a patented e-commerce platform for auto parts and accessories.