2017-04-05
Congratulations to the Laureates of the Emerging Entrepreneurs Contest

This initiative recognizes and rewards Québec entrepreneurs who make a contribution to the evolution of business by demonstrating remarkably dynamic creativity and innovation. The Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Family Foundation is sponsoring 25 emerging entrepreneurs who will participate in all activities in the C2 Montréal 2017 international business conference, May 24-26. The winners will benefit from a custom-made program, meet renowned speakers and take part in discussions and workshops, rubbing shoulders with leading figures in commerce and creativity.



Agendrix

Sébastien Charland, Partner and Sales Manager

Agendrix was founded in Sherbrooke, QC to develop and commercialize a web-based employee scheduling application. Officially launched in 2015, the business operates under a ?Software as a Service? model. Today, the app counts hundreds of paying customers and thousands of users with a global reach given that 20% of its revenues are derived from the U.S., the U.K., France, Switzerland and Belgium. The solution helps managers plan the schedule of their teams in an optimal fashion, while encouraging collaboration between employees. They have access to native iPhone and Android apps enabling them to consult their schedule, communicate with their manager and indicate their availabilities, among other features. The centralization of all this information gives several advantages to the users, notably significant time saving and a lower risk of error, in turn allowing them to focus on their core business instead of scheduling.



Hope for Dementia

Parsa Famili, Founder, Executive Director

Hope for Dementia is a federal non-profit charitable organization working to support the safeguarding of healthy brains in our aging population. Hope for Dementia is dedicated to supporting the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of dementia and other cognitive disorders.



Audax Lawyers

Teodora Niculae, Co-Founder and Partner

Audax Lawyers challenges the status quo in a conservative field by reinventing the delivery of professional services. They have won a bursary for their innovation and have been featured in the media to this effect. The two young female co-founders of Audax, which means ?bold? in Latin, take pride in offering creative legal services in a daring and innovative structure. With alternative billing as well as mobile and virtual services, Audax accompanies entrepreneurs from an idea to an empire in all their needs in terms of business, technology, seed funding and marketing. Located in a co-working space in the Mile-Ex neighbourhood, Audax is not only an open-space and paperless practice, but operates similarly to an e-commerce business using strong content marketing and SEO strategies. Being innovative is not only about doing business at the office: the two are constantly on the go organizing creative entrepreneurship panels, tech events and free workshops to inspire and inform their community.



Audible Reality

Matthew Boerum, CEO

Audible Reality will change the future of audio. Audible Reality?s revolutionary 3D audio technology grew from the pursuit of beauty. Music industry veterans Matthew Boerum and Bryan Martin found themselves as McGill PhDs bound together in a quest to expand the boundaries of music perception and presentation. What resulted was an audio technology that can suspend belief and transport the listener into a virtual experience indistinguishable from the reality.

The addition of founder Julien Lacheré defined the company as a technology innovator grounded in the creation of strategic intellectual property rights for the future of audio. The trio was pulled into the Centech Accelerator in 2016 where they graduated into the Incubator. The Centech education helped a powerful, raw startup evolve into a well-rounded tech company. The addition of Lindsay Hoover as Director for Finance and Business Development brings a deep understanding of the confluence of corporate finance, commercialization and marketing.



POPS ART

Catherine Bégin, President, Founder

POPS ART specializes in fun and healthy snacks. Frozen fruit bars (pops!) that are 100% natural, no sugar added, and popcorn without GMO ingredients all work in a healthy way. Our gourmet products are small pleasures that can be eaten guilt-free. POPS ART distinguishes itself through a desire to offer a healthy, natural and delicious option to a clientele looking for a genuine taste but without the feeling of being deprived.



Covera

Scott Loong, Co-Founder and CEO

Covera is a totally new kind of insurance broker. Over 80% of insurance customers allow their home and automobile policies to automatically renew when they expire. These customers do not renew because they are satisfied, rather, they renew because they are trapped by the paper and snail-mail based renewal process imposed by insurance companies. Covera provides a fully digital solution to break customers out of this captive cycle by making it easier for customers to find the right coverage, year-after-year. Customers register in minutes and when their insurance policies come to term, Covera presents a small number of curated options that can be purchased in just a few clicks. To deliver this service, Covera is building cutting edge UI/UX and a highly flexible back end CRM that allows for business process automations, chat bot integrations, and AIaaS capabilities. Take insurance renewals off your to-do list. Forever.



deiNERI

Nancy Lahaie, Co-President

Marie-Claude Marchand and Nancy Lahaie founded deiNERI, an innovative company whose mission is to beautify living spaces through art and design. It was by helping an artist friend that they observed that the boundaries between indoor and outdoor spaces no longer exist in contemporary residential living. Therefore, open living spaces and the lack of walls become a challenge to display art and personalize a space. To address this problem, deiNERI developed a very unique solution: stand’ART. The unique, patent pending, deiNERI stand?ART takes two-dimensional paintings, photographs and visual art totally off the wall and into the garden for the very first time. It offers new design possibilities as practical solutions to the challenges of privacy, separating spaces and managing flow, as well as contributing to the aesthetic and emotional expression of any space. stand’ART is designed and manufactured in Québec and is distributed throughout North America and Europe.



Dialogue

Alexis Smirnov, Co-Founder and CTO

Founded in 2016, Dialogue’s vision is to improve access to great care. Our first offering is a solution to improve health and wellness of employees and their families. We started in Quebec, expanded to Ontario, then Nova Scotia and are growing quickly across Canada.

Dialogue offers employees and their families fast and secure access to the best team of healthcare professionals. Using a mobile app that includes messaging and live video, members access a complete Care Team composed of nurses, family doctors, psychiatrists, pediatricians, dermatologists, nutritionists and many other health and wellness specialists. If a prescription is necessary, the service works any pharmacy and can even deliver the medications to the patient’s home or office. Dialogue keeps employees at their best, without wasting time waiting for the right care. Businesses adopt Dialogue’s health benefit as a great way to reduce absenteeism, increase employee satisfaction and attract the best talent.



Eatizz

Steven William, President and Founder

Launched in February 2016, Eatizz is a free mobile app which deals with the issue of food waste. The way it works is simple: our business partners put food reaching its “sell-by” date onto the app with a discount. The system allows the app users to make the most out of discounts on a variety of fresh and consumable products (fruits and vegetables, meat, bread, pastry, etc.).

Businesses manage their discounts by themselves, whenever they want, via their secure spaces on Eatizz’s website. Consumers can geo-locate the deals they’re interested in with their mobile phone, and by customizing the app according to their diet, favourite shops and personal addresses, they can receive real-time notifications suited to their likes.



ÉAU

Emilie Nollet, Co-Founder and Co-CEO

ÉAU (pronounced Eh-Oh) is a precision agriculture company dedicated to the development and realization of green-technologies. At ÉAU, we ?rethink waste? through the design of recirculating aquaculture systems that reduce energy consumption and reuse water resources. We also recycle nutrients through the utilization of vertical hydroponic production practices that require no pesticides or herbicides, are energy-and-space efficient, environmentally sustainable and highly-productive, a technology called aquaponics. The development of this controlled environment agriculture has allowed for food production systems to be built anywhere and operated at any time.

ÉAU is devoted to ensuring food security in communities confronted by the unrelenting challenges of food insecurity. Each community is comprised by a distinctive ecosystem of individuals living together and communicating unique identifiable necessities and aspirations. At ÉAU, we endeavour to understand the unique circumstances confronted within individual communities and we work with civic leaders to develop a proposition of attainment regarding the fulfillment of societal nourishment.



Ferst Digital

Eytan Bensoussan, Co-Founder and CEO

Ferst Digital is building a mobile-first banking platform that helps startups and small businesses bank, manage their finances and integrate all of their financial products and services right from their bank account. To do so, we’re partnering up with a fully-licensed deposit-taking institution in order to create a new business banking option for Canadian businesses.

Our team is anchored around a common purpose: making Canadian startups and small businesses more successful. We want to eliminate the busywork and pain that Canadian small business owners are burdened with through their banking and financial management. We are doing this so that they can get back to doing what they love ? building their businesses



Hyasynth Bio

Kevin Chen, CEO and Co-Founder

Life can be designed and controlled to treat more diseases, grow more food and create new industries. Hyasynth is focused on producing cannabinoids using genetically engineered yeast. Cannabinoids, which are commonly known as the active compounds from cannabis, are found in nutritional, medical, recreational and veterinary products. Despite the immense market growth, there are still problems of quality and scale in this industry. Hyasynth’s yeast strains can produce these natural products much faster and cheaper than plants, and they can make them more effective at treating disease. Hyasynth is contributing to the creation of the cannabinoid industry and making medicine better.



Ideal Protech

David Bambuck, Chief Innovation Officer

Ideal Protech is a startup that provides energy efficiency to help savings and improve comfort in any type of building, e.g., commercial buildings, office buildings and even family homes. Inaugurated in 2016, Ideal Protech is a young, dynamic and innovative enterprise. Our products increase the energy coefficient of existing windows with the aim of improving the insulation of buildings while being invisible and approved by Health Canada standards. We work to offer our customers the best nanotechnology solutions to improve comfort while offering savings, both at work and at home.



Les productions Voilà Voilà inc.

Michel Olivier, President

Operated by Voilà Voilà Productions, VoilàCasting.com is a voice-over directory powered by an efficient and unique search engine that allows users to filter demos with optimal precision. The site houses thousands of demos, all available for free and immediate listening. Saving and sharing functions have made it a must for the Québec advertising industry and all users searching for voice-over talent.
In only two years, VoilàCasting has become the best platform in the Québec industry. Thanks to that success, the road to new markets has already been laid out for VoilàCasting. And the future looks and sounds very promising.



Les Technologie FarmAnywhere

Gabriel Zarafonitis, President

We are a Quebec startup that grows fruits and vegetables in shipping containers. Farming hasn?t seen many sustainable innovations, thus causing significant environmental, health and supply issues. FarmAnywhere is developing a solution that solves and/or mitigates these issues. With this technology, we can provide a new approach for farmers, restaurants, grocery stores, remote communities, governmental and humanitarian response organizations through the use of the Internet of Things, the cloud and proprietary growing techniques related to the enclosed environment a shipping container provides. We were able to develop a cutting-edge way to eliminate the needs for GMO ingredients, fertilizers and pesticides. Additionally, containers provide the ability to grow inside cities while also vertically stacking them to save space. We see a future where sustainable urban farming will provide fresh healthy organic food only a few kilometres from where they are consumed. Our goal is to be a part of the solution to the food crisis at home and abroad.



Lockit City

Benoit Cloutier, Founder

You may be familiar with the following companies: car2Go, Bixi and Breather. These companies based on the sharing economy allow the reservation of a car, a bike and even a work space directly from a mobile app. The sharing economy is a phenomenon in full expansion. Lockit City capitalizes on this growing trend, manufacturing and operating smart lockers that allow you to move easily and safely in the city. With Lockit City you can dispose of your personal belongings anywhere so you can have a great time freely!

It was after working one year in Japan that the idea of Lockit City was born. An engineer by training, and passionate about security and urban logistics, it was after completing my MBA that I realized I had all the skills to begin this entrepreneurship journey. Lockit City is currently incubated in District 3 at Concordia University and has strong growth potential.



Motorleaf

Alastair Monk, CEO

Gardeners, coders, new product specialists, geeks and old timers ? we?re a mixed bag here at Motorleaf! But what we share is a clear understanding of what our technology allows people all over the world to achieve, which is as epic in scale as it is important: grow more produce within a community with less waste and better yields.

We connect growers to their plants, and to each other. Motorleaf is committed to a future where what crops and their environment communicate (data) will dictate how the grow equipment reacts and adjusts. Not only can Motorleaf software/hardware advise on best settings for a wide variety of crop types, but through machine learning and artificial intelligence we will predict problems and adjust accordingly, helping any indoor grower sleep well (while they grow well)!



Oatbox

Sophie Roy, VP Marketing and Business Development

Oatbox is a leading breakfast company founded in November of 2014 and offering a selection of healthful breakfast products delivered to subscribers across North America, free of charge. Made strictly of the highest-grade ingredients, each product is crafted with care, freshly prepared in Montréal and delivered monthly in a convenient box to help people eat a nutritious whole-grain breakfast every day. Oatbox delivers and offers two new granola mixes every month with seasonal ingredients, most of which are also organic, and plant-based protein vegan breakfast bars, which are also gluten-free, lactose-free and nut-free. Oatbox is currently unrolling its enterprise solution ? Oatbox for Business, a turnkey breakfast service ? to help companies be leading forces of workplace culture.



Ooly123 Inc.

Etienne Fiset, Co-Founder

Ooly, the first product launched by Ooly123, helps parents and children have longer, more restorative nights and naps. Ooly is the world’s first app-connected sleep training companion that helps children understand when it?s time to get up or go to bed. It has been designed in collaboration with five child sleep experts, and is based on research by NASA, Harvard Medical School and National Institutes of Health.



ORA Sound

Ari Pinkas, Co-Founder

ORA is a Montréal-based startup working with advanced nano-materials to produce unparalleled audio experiences. Our team of engineers, chemists and material scientists are currently working with the exciting properties of graphene (the strongest and lightest material known to man) to deliver smaller/lighter, more energy-efficient speakers ? all while improving sound quality drastically. Our technology has caught the attention of the largest OEMs from an array of industries, many already evaluating ORA?s proprietary materials inside TVs, home audio, wireless audio, hearing aids, cellphones, laptops/tablets and automobiles. ORA’s technology is poised to disrupt a ubiquitous technology that has seen little innovation since its invention in 1921: speakers!



PopupCamp

Geneviève Bégin, Co-Founder

Founded in 2015 by Geneviève Bégin and Melyan Vézina, PopupCamp offers a turnkey mobile daycare solution to companies and event organizers. We take care of everything: registration, security, insurance and space. The day?s activities are specially crafted to fit your event?s theme for groups of children aged 1 to 10.

PopupCamp strives to close the gap between the childcare, event management and education industries through this highly flexible, socially innovative service.

Our satisfied customers include the City of Montréal, Evenko, Attraction Média, Cominar, Professionals? Financial and HEC Montreal. Looking to bring our essential service to every corner of the province, PopupCamp?s team of 22 experienced and professional educators have run more than 85 events across Québec.

We are proud to host a daycare at this year?s C2 Montréal. Don?t hesitate to bring your kids! With PopupCamp, it?s family-friendly.



Pyrocycle

Mohamed Khalil, Founder

Pyrocycle has developed a novel, efficient, non-polluting and cost-effective technology for recycling electrical and electronic waste, which not only prevents environmental pollution, but also helps to develop a circular economy and to recover resources that may have a considerable potential for improving the environment and human life.



Roadbudee

Patrick Dubois, President, Founder, CEO

Roadbudee is more than just an app. It?s a novel automobile information technology platform integrating and regulating all aspects of mobile communication, messaging and texting while driving. Globally, the main market is composed of millions of automobiles and hundreds of applications where human intervention must be regulated to avoid unsafe mobile communication, messaging and texting. The patented Roadbudee technology will allow safe communication and information to reach automobile drivers while regulating unsafe messaging and texting using appropriate temporary blackout features.



Soul.City

Annick Charbonneau, CEO

Soul.City is an app that allows you to discover a city based on how you feel and the time you have. You find yourself in Montréal, Paris or Strasbourg? Do you feel? romantic? Adventurous? Hungry? How much time do you have? Two hours? Four? Six? Soul.City takes you on a journey of discovery of the city?s sights? and soul! Available for free on the Apple App Store and Google Play, the app boasts thousands of users on both sides of the Atlantic. The startup?s 2017 objective: deploy across 10 cities worldwide.



Think Again Team

Patrice César, Vice President

Today, 75M children are illiterate and two thirds are girls, which makes gender equality complex. Think Again curates simple and low-tech content and experiences to promote literacy. We imagine cities as positive learning environments, where improving literacy and education is of urgency. It?s essential to music, movies, reading, coding, designing or building. We see intelligence and literacy as something that goes beyond the classroom. Real learning and creativity is born out of being curious mixed with a little bit of hustle. Everything we curate is culturally relevant and accessible.

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