About Paper.co

About the Canadian Startup Pipeline

Once upon a time, I was part of a start-up in Toronto. I experienced, first-hand, what I would describe as "the (un)official Canadian Startup Pipeline." That happens when a start-up company applies for certain key innovation programs, usually offered or backed by the government or non-profit organizations or a partnership of both. I speak about 5 of these programs below.

And once you get approved to join one of these programs, the good folks that accepted you start to introduce you to all their friends! There are a myriad of organizations that work together in Canada to nurture and promote promising startups. For my analyst report, I was curious to find companies that were currently in the rosters of these organizations or that had "graduated" from early start-ups into full-fledged companies.

In my personal experience, in Ontario specifically, the "start-up pipeline" went like this:

1) CBYF > 2) BDC > 3) MaRS > 4) NRC-IRAP > 5) CRA-SR&ED

1. Companies started by founders under the age of 35 could apply for a $15,000 start-up business loan from from Futurpreneur (then CYBF, the Canadian Youth Business Foundation, backed by CIBC). (This is how the venture I was in got started).

2. The most promising ventures accepted to Futurpreneur (usually in Tech or Medical) would then receive a matching loan from Business Development Canada (BDC) for a total $30,000 in starting venture debt.

3. After being vetted by CYBF and BDC, companies would then be introduced to the MaRS Discovery District and invited to endless rounds of drinks and networking sessions with Venture Capitalists (VCs) and Angel Investors. Here, early companies try to move out of the "minor leagues" raising tens of thousands in seed money, to the "major leagues" where they may raise from a couple hundred thousand to low millions.

4. Gaining membership in the organizations above (Futurpreneur, BDC, MaRS) included lots of mentorship and workshops, including access to SMEs that provided information about rebates and grants from NRC-IRAP, the National Research Council's Industrial Research Assistance Program.

5. If the start-up company could get funding for NRC-IRAP, it usually meant the product or service would also be eligible for tax incentives from the Canada Revenue Services-Scientific Research & Experimental Development (CRA-SR&ED) funding, known in the industry as "Shred".

For my analysis, I wanted to find a company that may have been through a start-up pipeline similar to the one I experienced.

Finding Paper.Co

I went back digging into the vault of these Toronto start-up news, and this is how I came upon Paper.Co (formerly GradeSlam). I found an older article from a popular publication called StartUP Here which often featured the companies that were being developed by the programs mentioned above. Below is the article that prompted my research into Paper.Co (Seale, 2017):

I was curious to find out, was Paper.Co one of these companies that had been through the (unofficial) Canadian Start-Up Pipeline?