Startup

Entrepreneurship Hatchery

Health Innovation Hub

Rotman School of Management

BenchSci, a ��Ƶ startup that uses artificial intelligence to accelerate the process of drug development, is “changing the tech world” according to Report on Business Magazine.

Founded in 2015 by Liran Belenzon, who studied business at the Rotman School of Management, Thomas Leung, who was working on his PhD at U of T in epigenetics, and Elvis Wianda, the startup received early support from the Creative Destruction Lab, the Entrepreneurship Hatchery and Health Innovation Hub (H2i). Today, it has raised nearly $100 million from investors and employs 400 people.

BenchSci’s platform can filter through more than 14 million scientific papers and 64 million products, allowing scientists to assembling a “knowledge graph of who’s done what and with what level of success,” the magazine says – and now helps some 50,000 researchers worldwide.

“While the pharmaceutical companies pay to use the software,” Belenzon tells the magazine, “scientists and students use the platform for free.”

Startups Erthos and Genecis on meeting the challenge of the single-use plastic ban: Toronto Star

lanthierj — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 15:36:23 +0000

Startups Erthos and Genecis on meeting the challenge of the single-use plastic ban: Toronto Star

lanthierj Thu, 12/15/2022 - 10:36

Cutline

Kritika Tyagi (L) and Nuha Siddiqui (photo courtesy of Erthos)

Christina Lam

Alumni

U of T Scarborough

Young, growing companies are working to meet the challenge of the single-use plastic ban, the Toronto Star reports, and ��Ƶ-accelerated startups Erthos and Genecis are among those leading the way.

Starting Dec. 20, making or importing a range plastic items – from single-use shopping bags to straws – for sale in Canada will be prohibited. Erthos, formerly known as EcoPackers, and founded by alumnae Nuha Siddiqui and Kritika Tyagi, offers fully biodegradable plant-based material as replacement for single-use plastics.

“We are working with the government of Canada on understanding how we can label and certify compostable plastics to allow them to be sorted according to their end of life,” Tyagi told the Star.

Founded by alumna Luna Yu, cleantech company Genecis Bioindustries converts organic waste into bioplastic using bacteria cultures. In a recent pilot project with Sodexo-Campbell, the maker of Campbell Soup, Genecis helped divert 1,430 kg of organic waste from landfills at its Toronto facility and create enough bioplastic for 6,332 spoons, the Star reported.

“There’s a huge upside in developing a material that does not produce microplastics and will break down on human time frames,” spokesperson Robert Celik told the Star.

Read the Toronto Star article

Queen’s University joins U of T’s ONRamp entrepreneurship network

noreen.rasbach — Thu, 28 Feb 2019 05:00:00 +0000

Queen’s University joins U of T’s ONRamp entrepreneurship network

noreen.rasbach Thu, 02/28/2019 - 00:00

Cutline

U of T's ONRamp, a co-working and collaboration space, is designed to facilitate connections between researchers, entrepreneurs, investors and other members of the innovation community (photo by Chris Sorensen)

Chris Sorensen

Topic

Our Community

ONRamp

ThisIsThePlace

The ��Ƶ has enlisted a new post-secondary partner in its effort to help young entrepreneurs build the companies and jobs of the future.

Queen’s University this week became the fourth university in Ontario to join U of T’s ONRamp initiative – a 15,000-square-foot collaboration and co-working space for startups located on U of T’s downtown Toronto campus.

Members of the Queen’s startup community will have access to the facility to work on their ideas, host pitch competitions and networking events and meet with Toronto-based investors and customers.

“We’re thrilled to have Queen’s join the ONRamp entrepreneurship community,” said Derek Newton, U of T’s assistant vice-president of innovation, partnerships and entrepreneurship.

“U of T is committed to supporting Ontario entrepreneurs and their businesses and believes it can have the greatest impact by collaborating with post-secondary partners along the Toronto-Waterloo corridor and beyond.”

Launched by U of T in 2017, ONRamp boasts three floors of flexible, daily-use co-working spaces, meeting rooms, boardrooms and event spaces, including the RBC Innovation Hub. There’s also a kitchen and lounge area.

In addition to U of T, partner universities currently include Hamilton’s McMaster University, London’s Western University and the University of Waterloo.

More than just temporary office space, ONRamp is designed to facilitate connections between researchers, entrepreneurs, investors and other members of the innovation community. It’s a focal point for entrepreneurs working with U of T’s nine on-campus accelerators and is located directly across the street from the MaRS Innovation District, which also houses the JLABS life sciences incubator.

Toronto’s hospital and financial districts, meanwhile, are just a short walk or subway ride away.

“ONRamp provides physical space where Queen’s or Kingston-based entrepreneurs may access resources and connect with a broader network of entrepreneurs in order to grow their businesses,” said Kimberly Woodhouse, the vice-principal of research at Queen’s.

At last count, the ONRamp community boasted 50 startups and 600 active users. Events that have taken place at ONRamp over the past 18 months range from an education session for medical startups to a talk by Israeli tech guru and former Intel Corp. executive Mooly Eden.

Chuang Li, who attended the University of Waterloo, took advantage of his school’s connection to ONRamp last fall when he was looking for a space to demo his startup’s product to Toronto-area customers.

Li’s startup, Mirage VR, makes an immersive, multiplayer virtual reality system that allows up to five people to move freely around a nine-square-metre room and interact with one another inside the game.

“As you can imagine, it’s hard to find a 30-foot-by-30-foot space in downtown Toronto,” said Li, who is affiliated with the University of Waterloo’s Velocity incubator.

“ONRamp was really clutch in helping us find that space and, as a result, we ended up closing two deals.”

He added that ONRamp’s focus on collaboration across the Ontario post-secondary sector sets it apart from other co-working spaces.

“This type of relationship between the schools, because it’s such a tight-knit community, I feel like they are really working in the entrepreneur’s best interest,” he said.

“Having this network and people who were able to make introductions really helped us a lot.”

U of T researcher's open science drug discovery model expands to neurodegenerative diseases

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 16:03:04 +0000

U of T researcher's open science drug discovery model expands to neurodegenerative diseases

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 02/15/2019 - 11:03

Cutline

With the help of a $1.5-million grant, U of T's Aled Edwards (right) and business partner Owen Roberts (left) will forgo patents and profits to tackle diseases like Parkinson's and ALS (photo by Chris Sorensen)

Topic

Research & Innovation

Parkinson’s disease and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS, are the newest frontiers for open science drug discovery, a global movement led by ��Ƶ researchers that puts knowledge sharing and medication affordability ahead of patents and profits.

Thanks to $1.5 million from Toronto’s Krembil Foundation, Medicines 4 Neurodegenerative Diseases, also known as M4ND Pharma, will pursue promising new genetic drug targets for these intractable nervous system disorders.

It will be the world’s second drug discovery company committed to open science after Medicines 4 Kids, or M4K Pharma, which was launched by U of T's Aled Edwards and business partner Owen Roberts in 2017 to develop a novel drug for an uncommon but fatal childhood brain cancer.

“When we started M4K, many people thought an open approach to late-stage drug development might only be applicable to rare or neglected diseases, if at all,” says Edwards, a professor of molecular genetics in U of T's Faculty of Medicine. “But we’re getting unexpected funding and scientific contributions from industry, academic and clinical sources, and slowly but surely we’re advancing a medicine through the pipeline.

“It’s time to move the goal posts again on what’s possible with open science.”

Open science is a way for researchers to speed up scientific discovery by sharing data and knowledge quickly and publicly, unencumbered by patents and the peer review publishing process. The movement gathered force in the life sciences in the 1990s with the Human Genome Project, and spread to protein structures and then early-stage drug discovery through the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), which Edwards co-founded and now leads as director.

The non-profit SGC has generated considerable private and public investment and several spin-out companies, but there remains a gap in late-stage drug development.

Like M4K, M4ND will not seek patents on its findings. It will instead rely on regulatory protections available in several countries, including data exclusivity for drug sponsors to prevent generic competition, and orphan drug exclusivity for rare diseases. These and other existing protections, says Edwards, are likely sufficient to attract commercial partners willing to manufacture, distribute and sell medications at reasonable prices.

As well, M4ND will also be owned by the Agora Open Science Trust, a Canadian charity that supports open science for the public good. M4ND will donate any proceeds generated through commercial partnerships back to the charity.

The researchers will share their progress with the scientific community through regular online meetings that are open to all and posted on YouTube. They will also make data widely available – for example through the SGC’s open lab notebooks initiative.

“Every player in the system appreciates the idea of affordable medicines faster, but it’s been incredibly challenging to make it happen because the system is complicated,” says Edwards.

“The key was to invent a different business model, and we’re extraordinarily happy that industry, academia and others have been delighted to contribute.”

With a file by Heidi Singer

U of T startup Blue J Legal raises US$7 million, plans cross-border expansion

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 29 Nov 2018 19:23:18 +0000

U of T startup Blue J Legal raises US$7 million, plans cross-border expansion

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 11/29/2018 - 14:23

Cutline

Benjamin Alarie of U of T's Faculty of Law co-founded Blue J Legal three years ago. The startup uses AI algorithms to predict the outcome of employment and tax law cases (photo by Lisa Sakulensky)

Chris Sorensen

Topic

Our Community

Artificial Intelligence

Faculty of Law

ThisIsThePlace

UTEST

A ��Ƶ legal startup that uses artificial intelligence to predict the outcomes of tax and employment law cases has raised US$7 million in financing – money that will be used to fund a U.S. expansion.

Co-founded by three members of U of T’s Faculty of Law, Blue J Legal said today the financing round will allow the company to “establish a foothold” in the huge U.S. legal market while enhancing its existing products and growing its 30-person team.

The financing was led by Toronto’s Relay Ventures and included participation from Silicon Valley's LDV Partners. Existing investors Mistral Venture Partners and BDC Capital were also part of the financing round.

“We’re looking to launch our U.S. Tax Foresight product by the middle of the year – the end of the second quarter,” said Blue J CEO Benjamin Alarie in an interview with U of T News.

Alarie co-founded Blue J in 2015 alongside fellow Faculty of Law members Albert Yoon and Anthony Niblett, as well as former IBM enterprise software developer Brett Janssen. Alarie came up with the idea after being asked to judge an IBM Watson competition at U of T, which, incidentally, helped launch another U of T legal search startup called ROSS Intelligence.

Blue J’s machine learning algorithms are used to scan thousands of judicial decisions in search of patterns that can help predict the outcome of future cases. The findings are then presented to lawyers along with the relevant case law, saving time and money. The startup received support from the Creative Destruction Lab and UTEST, two of U of T's nine on-campus entrepreneurship hubs.

While Blue J initially focused on tax law in Canada – Alarie’s area of expertise – the startup launched an employment law tool in Canada last year in response to demand from clients.

Alarie said the plan is for Blue J to eventually expand its platform into other areas of the U.S. legal field.

“Our long-term vision is to have foresight for every major area of legal research – insurance, bankruptcy, contracts, personal injury and so on.”

U of T students create app for carpooling

noreen.rasbach — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 16:55:22 +0000

U of T students create app for carpooling

noreen.rasbach Mon, 10/29/2018 - 12:55

Cutline

Seven U of T Scarborough students are working to change the way people in the GTA carpool with a new app (photo by Antony Xia)

Topic

Subheadline

“Weav” aims to match riders with drivers to make carpooling easier

During his first year as a student at ��Ƶ Scarborough, Peter Meng regularly spent $40 on gas to visit his girlfriend in Waterloo, Ont.

Frustrated with the high cost, he looked for an alternative and discovered Facebook groups where thousands of university students co-ordinate carpooling.

“My immediate question,” says Meng, “is why there wasn’t anything specializing in this?”

The Facebook groups didn’t eliminate what Meng saw as the main problems with carpooling: co-ordinating rides is tedious and there are too many drivers with no incentive to become riders.

So last summer Meng began developing Weav, an app to take the pain out of carpooling.

He soon entered The Hub, U of T Scarborough’s entrepreneurship incubator, where he connected with six other students and worked with director Gray Graffam to bring Weav to life. “I think they can actually hit this out of the park,” says Graffam. “This is a wonderful service for people.”

Meng’s team moved temporarily to the Hatchery, a U of T incubator with an engineering focus, where they spent this past summer developing a unique algorithm. (U of T has nine incubators across its three campuses for companies at various stages of development.)

The team’s goal was to make the app as simple as possible. To find a driver or rider, Weav users input their destination and preferred time of travel. The app sends an update when a match is made. Users can view information on the driver or rider and accept or decline the ride with a tap.

“There’s a beauty in the simplicity of the algorithm,” says Sean van Wyk, a third-year student in computer science and Weav’s project manager. “The matching process is really the core of the app.”

Matches are not dependent on the same start or end location – the app recognizes when riders are on a driver’s route. If there are too many drivers taking the same route, the app encourages drivers to become riders instead.

“Our vision for the Toronto area would be to fill every empty seat on the road,” says Brady Vallbacka, a fourth-year student in management and information technology, and Weav’s marketing operations specialist. “If we could do that, we could solve a lot of traffic problems.”

Weav tracks users’ locations, then sends payment through the app once riders and drivers reach their destination. Drivers set the fee, but Weav encourages them to charge only enough to cover expenses such as gas and insurance.

Location tracking is part of the app’s safety features, along with tools that allow users to report terms-of-use violations such as damaging a car.

The name Weav is a play on the idea of weaving through traffic and a reference to bringing people together. Imagine, van Wyk says, several people who meet through Weav because they are going to the same hockey game. “It provides a lot of value and a lot of ways for people to actually connect.”

While the team members initially targeted long-distance journeys, they began looking at commuting after Vallbacka learned that many U of T co-op students won’t travel between east and west campuses, even if it means having a greater number of placements to choose from.

“I guarantee there’s one student doing that commute every day and they probably have four empty seats,” he says. “If they could get connected easily, they’d have more job opportunities.”

Weav created a “scheduled commute” feature to help connect these students and other regular travellers. The team is working to release a prototype of the app by early next year.

U of T-founded Creative Destruction Lab receives $25 million from Canadian government

lanthierj — Tue, 09 Oct 2018 18:52:43 +0000

U of T-founded Creative Destruction Lab receives $25 million from Canadian government

lanthierj Tue, 10/09/2018 - 14:52

Cutline

Navdeep Bains, Canada's minister of innovation, science and economic development poses for photographs with Sonia Sennik, the executive director of the Creative Destruction Lab (photo by Eugene Grichko)

Topic

Global Lens

Rotman School of Management

Entrepreneneurship

Government

Research & Innovation

Faculty of Arts & Science

The federal government is investing $25 million in the Creative Destruction Lab, a seed-stage startup program first launched at the ��Ƶ.

The investment, announced today at U of T's Rotman School of Management, will spur research and development into science-based startups, attract investment in Canadian companies and encourage more young women to pursue opportunities in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathmatics) fields.

“Creative Destruction Lab's exciting project promises to unleash a new wave of startup innovation across Canada, creating thousands of middle-class jobs and further securing Canada's position as a world leader in the AI field,” said Navdeep Bains, Canada's minister of innovation, science and economic development.

“Our government is proud to make investments that will help turn hundreds of innovative ideas into the good jobs and companies of tomorrow.”

The investment, by the government’s Strategic Innovation Fund, will flow over four years, helping CDL back a number of upcoming initiatives. They include scaling up more than 1,300 science-based startups across the country – a move expected to create up to 22,000 jobs. CDL will also launch a new program aimed at encouraging young women to pursue STEM fields, opening up spots at future CDL sessions for up to 1,500 female high school students.

“This is a tremendous moment,” said Professor Tiff Macklem, who is Rotman's dean. “Thank you Minister Bains, the Government of Canada and everyone that saw the vision and the opportunity of the Creative Destruction Lab.”

Founded in 2012 at Rotman School by Professor Ajay Agrawal, CDL focuses on building science-based companies. Over the years, it has helped grow more than 500 science-based ventures through mentorship and access to entrepreneurs and angel investors who help founders set measurable, focused objectives. CDL itself has also expanded significantly and now operates out of five universities across Canada, as well as New York University.

“First-time founders of science-based companies, while fully committed to the success of their venture and possessing deep knowledge in their technical domain, often lack the business judgment required to prioritize among the almost infinite list of to-dos required to successfully build and scale their business. Our structured and rigorous program helps them with that prioritization process,” said CDL executive director Sonia Sennik. “While we fully leverage market forces to provide prioritization guidance from individuals who themselves have built successfully scaled businesses, the coordination of those market forces requires non-market support.

“That is why we are so grateful to the Government of Canada for supporting our mission that will drive economic impact and create jobs, learning opportunities, and global leadership for deep-tech and science-based companies across Canada.”

Vivek Goel, U of T's vice-president of research and innovation, said CDL itself is an example of a startup that's now scaling globally (photo by Eugene Grichko)

CDL supports ventures that specialize in artificial intelligence, blockchain, cities, energy, health, quantum machine learning and more. Companies that have participated in CDL have created more than $3 billion in equity value to date. Alumni of the program include Thalmic Labs (Waterloo), Atomwise (San Francisco), Deep Genomics (Toronto) and Kyndi (Palo Alto).

Earlier this year, CDL launched a new stream designed for supporting entrepreneurs interested in breaking into space-related markets.

The new investment “will not only help the Creative Destruction Lab continue to do business here in Toronto, but at its sites across the country and around the world,” said Professor Vivek Goel, U of T’s vice-president of research and innovation.

“The Creative Destruction Lab is an example of a startup that is now scaling globally.”

McLean Award given to professor developing eco-friendly batteries

noreen.rasbach — Fri, 20 Jul 2018 18:46:21 +0000

McLean Award given to professor developing eco-friendly batteries

noreen.rasbach Fri, 07/20/2018 - 14:46

Cutline

Dwight Seferos is this year's recipient of the $125,000 McLean Award. “No-strings-attached awards like the McLean are unique and very crucial,” he says (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

Topic

Graduate Students

Hatchery

Research & Innovation

Connaught Global Challenge

UTEST

Nature knows best, but sometimes a tweak here and there can make things even better, says ��Ƶ chemistry professor Dwight Seferos.

Together with his team of graduate and postdoctoral researchers, Seferos is at the forefront of using modified natural compounds – like a vitamin found in leaves – to make high-tech items such as eco-friendly batteries and potentially clothing that can act as the wearer’s personal cooling system.

“We’re trying to take inspiration from nature,” said Seferos. “You can modify natural compounds to make them better. That’s been done in the drug industry, but not so much in the high-tech materials industry.”

Seferos is this year’s recipient of the $125,000 McLean Award, which he will use to delve deeper into developing new biodegradable polymers or plastics that can store energy from solar, wind and tidal power.

The importance of the research is not just about energy storage, he said. Used on a large scale, it could also mean a substantially reduced carbon footprint, a decrease in extractive mining fossil fuel usage, as well as less waste in landfills and oceans.

The McLean Award is jointly funded by the university’s Connaught Fund and the McLean endowment, the latter of which is the result of a $1-million gift to the university from alumnus William F. McLean over two decades ago. The award is designed to support the basic research of an outstanding early career researcher in physics, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, engineering sciences, or the theory and methods of statistics. The funds help the recipient attract and support graduate students and post-doctoral researchers of great promise.

“Congratulations to Dwight Seferos on receiving this year’s McLean Award for his impressive and cutting-edge work in eco-friendly batteries,” said Vivek Goel, U of T’s vice-president of research and innovation and the chair of the Connaught Committee.

“No-strings-attached awards like the McLean are unique and very crucial,” said Seferos.

This is “an award that allows you to form new ideas, to do things that you normally wouldn’t be able to do – to take risks – which I think is extremely important for researchers at a university.”

Freedom to do basic, or fundamental, research is where everything starts, said Seferos, who is also the co-founder of Pliant Power Devices, a startup formed with his former student Tyler Schon out of his PhD research and the help of U of T entrepreneurship hubs UTEST and the Hatchery.

“We did not start this project thinking we were going to make a battery company or anything like that,” said Seferos. “We were developing new concepts in chemistry and engineering [and] those turned out to be fruitful – and we went from there.”

Their vitamin B2 polymer, which is made from leaves and other organic materials, is a relatively simple compound to make that’s just “a few steps from natural compounds,” he said.

“We’re just modifying it enough that it serves what we want it to do. It’s a very eco-friendly and renewable resource. You can scale it up and make kilograms of this compound. It stores a great deal of energy.”

It’s also printable and flexible, offering virtually limitless potential applications. Large-scale production of the B2 polymer batteries is not far off – within a year or two, he added.

“We’ve been out front of the polymer space in energy storage for a number of years,” said Seferos.

His group is also highly interested in thermoelectrics, and is collaborating with groups in the United States and China to use soft materials made from their polymers to recycle heat and turn it into electricity and the growing field of personalized cooling.

In a developed country like Canada, he said, many people have air conditioning in their car, in their home and in their office – which leaves a huge carbon footprint.

By making clothing that can cool people, “they won’t need the huge AC unit in their home or their car,” he said.

“As professors, we’re not trained as businesspeople but our students can certainly acquire those skills,” he said. “When they develop new technology during the course of their PhD, they become such great champions of that technology that they’re the natural leaders for spinning it out.

“I am supportive of that.”

The application deadline for the next round of funding for the McLean Award is Jan. 15.

Education in innovation: U of T grad's startup experience gives him leg up during job hunt

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 19 Jun 2018 14:57:22 +0000

Education in innovation: U of T grad's startup experience gives him leg up during job hunt

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 06/19/2018 - 10:57

Cutline

Anston Emmanuel says his startup experience helped him clinch a coveted engineering job at General Motors, one of several multinational companies keen to boost innovation in its ranks (photo by Chris Sorensen)

Chris Sorensen

Topic

City & Culture

Convocation 2018

Convocation

Entrepreneurship Hatchery

Entrepreneurship

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Faculty of Medicine

Graduate Students

Health Innovation Hub

Impact Centre

Rotman School of Management