Ottawa Grants $52.4 Million to a New Scale-Up Program

MaRS Discovery District (“MaRS”), Invest Ottawa, and Communitech are coming together to help Canadian tech companies scale up. The three organizations will pool their resources to implement the Scale-Up Platform (the “Platform”), which will use federal investments to assist some of Canada’s most promising companies to grow their revenue. Ottawa announced that over a five-year period, it will invest $52.4 million in the Platform, to be divided amongst MaRS, Invest Ottawa and Communitech. This investment is part of Canada’s Innovation and Skills Plan, which aims to build innovation ecosystems in Canada.

At the moment, the Platform’s aim is to help 30 as of yet unspecified Ontario companies to scale up, with the goal of helping each company to achieve $100 million or more in annual revenue by 2024.

Ottawa has predicted that the Scale-Up Platform will create 18,000 jobs, $11 billion in revenue, and $4 billion in investment.

Author: Hassan Rasmi, 2018/2019 Articling Student-at-law