Posted by John McCulloch @ MaRS, March 17th, 2010
More money for tenants
Receptor Therapeutics Inc. – a MaRS tenant – has raised $500,000 from the OICR’s IPDC Program via its OncoTek Drug Delivery Inc. subsidiary.
The funds will be used to drive the preclinical development of the company’s PoLi-PTX technology – a drug delivery system for intraperitoneal ovarian cancer. PoLi-PTX is intended to permit effective localized cancer therapy without the associated side-effects of traditional chemotherapy.
Read the news release here (PDF).
Congratulations!
Posted by Keri @ MaRS, March 15th, 2010
Don't drink the Kool-Aid
Last week’s CIBC Presents Entrepreneurship 101 featured a funny, often brutally honest panel of VCs discussing how entrepreneurs can get money from VCs. Peter Tolnai (Founder and President of the Orchard Capital Group) moderated a panel with two entrepreneurs-turned-VCs including Bryan Kerdman (Partner at EdgeStone Capital Partners) and Rick Segal (who was formerly a VC with JL Albright and the BlackBerry Partners Fund but has since returned to being an entrepreneur with his start-up Fixmo). I loved hearing from those who have lived both sides of the VC-entrepreneur coin.
Posted by John McCulloch @ MaRS, March 8th, 2010
Celebrate good times, c'mon!
To shed further light on Kerri Golden’s excellent recent post, the stumbling block that has been removed in this case is the Section 116 – a series of tax requirements that imposed onerous restrictions on foreign investors in Canadian firms.
Faced with an undercapitalized Canadian VC sector and the Section 116 restrictions, our emerging companies were either forced into premature public listings (often via a CPC mechanism) or had to concede that it made no sense to develop a knowledge economy-oriented enterprise here.
Posted by Kerri Golden, March 5th, 2010
Canadian investment borders become friendlier
In yesterday’s federal budget, the Harper government announced significant changes in tax legislation that will make it much easier for US and other international venture capital investors to fund Canada’s most promising start-up companies.
These changes come at a most opportune time as the CVCA, Canada’s Venture Capital and Private Equity Industry Association, and their research partner Thomson Reuters recently reported that venture capital investment in 2009 reached its lowest level in thirteen years.
Posted by Joseph Wilson, March 5th, 2010
Donate your small change
How do you finance an idea? Or that gadget you’ve just invented in your garage? It used to be that you needed to convince someone with a lot of money that your project deserved to see the light of day. These days, instead of romancing a Silicon Valley backer, all you need is a laptop and an internet connection.
Peter Sunde, best known for his infamous Pirate Bay website, recently announced a new online financing service called Flattr. At
flattr.com, users pay a self-determined monthly contribution. When they find content online they like, they tag the site. At the end of the month, their monthly contribution is divided up evenly between the people that were tagged.
