seems to think Canada is on track to produce a lot of unicorns in the next few years. Seems like pretty good work for a country 1/10th the size of the US.
Chinook Therapeutics
Element AI
Repare Therapeutics
Enerkem
DalCor Pharmaceuticals
Verafin
Fusion Pharmaceuticals
Stormfiser Biogas
Hootsuite
North
Element AI was acquired by ServiceNow, North was acquired by Google. Both were widely seen to be overhyped underperformers. Element was acquired for roughly the $200M it raised in financing. North also raised about $200M over its lifetime and was reportedly acquired for around $180M. Not really value creation.
Chinook Therapeutics merged with Aduro Biotech and is now headquartered in Seattle. It's publicly traded as KDNY and is worth ~831M CAD.
Hootsuite is kind of stagnant. It has been on and off being close to being worth $1B since 2014, hardly a growth story.
Verafin was purchased by NASDAQ for $2.75B. A good exit, though it took nearly 20 years to get there and now it's just another Canadian office of a US tech company.
I don't know enough about the cleantech/pharmaceutical angle, but if this list is the best we can come up with, it's far from cause for the software industry to celebrate. My feeling on articles like the one you posted is they're mostly superficial cheerleading.
Despite investing the second most into venture capital amongst all OECD countries, Canada is producing the least amount of unicorns. Not only that, of the unicorns it produces, valuation are also the lowest amongst the group (to be fair, the sample size is tiny. Plus, Canada’s unicorns are generally really new compared to that of other countries, which may have opted to stay private for a variety of reasons). For an ecosystem that is by most metrics, really well funded and really strong, the number of narwhals and unicorns that it produces is disappointing. In terms of creating billion dollars startups, Canada is ruthlessly inefficient compared to the likes of Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
seems to think Canada is on track to produce a lot of unicorns in the next few years. Seems like pretty good work for a country 1/10th the size of the US.