A not-for-profit organization that facilitates investments in startup Canadian companies has formed a partnership with Farm Credit Canada (FCC).
Jesse Wiebe, Community Develop Lead with Startup TNT, made the announcement at the Launch Pad at Canada’s Farm Show Tuesday afternoon. He says FCC will support their Agri-Food programming with the goal of raising $500-thousand for start up companies across Canada. The Agri-Food program encourages investors to “increase the pool of early-stage capital for Canadian agri-food startups”, noted a news release from Startup TNT.
The Edmonton-based organization also says FCC’s support will allow them to scale up its efforts nationally and “double the number of Agri-Food Summits each year and introduce new initiatives to grow investment in the sector.”
Wiebe says FCC has supported the Agri-Food program before as a “Best Friends Forever” level of sponsor, but in the last two years have been “making a big push on doing more to support the innovation economy.” He adds FCC identified Startup TNT as a group that can bridge the gap for investment in startup companies.
“The number of investors that are willing to cut a check at those earliest stages has been dwindling within Canada over the past several years,” Wiebe says, “The amount of investment flowing into the (agri-food) sector has been steadily declining. FCC has obviously been pumping a lot of money into the sector further down the line, we’ve identified that without this critical gap where companies are kind of getting off the granting side and try to move more to private capital, you need people who are willing to take the risk and the best people to do that are people who actually understand the industry – farmers, ag business professionals, people who own ag businesses as well to invest in those companies.”
Details of how much money Farm Credit Canada is supporting Startup TNT were not disclosed. However, Wiebe says the partnership also gives them access to FCC’s network within the “innovation ecosystem”.
“There’s been amazing work being done on smart farms, on various academic institutions across the country, creating those startups. We’re going to step in and help fund those startups, get to the next level, and then again – as (FCC) mentioned on stage earlier – they’ve got a network there as well to catch us on the other side in the sense of their fund-to-fund approach and their direct investment, so as we move companies through the earlier stages of growth with our private capital, we’ll be able to leverage their network to help continue to support those companies so they can grow in scale and ideally, one day, become really big, important parts of the Canadian economy.” he said.
To date, Startup TNT has helped raise over $17 million for over 100 companies from nearly 500 individual investors.