Part of the discussion at the Friday afternoon club revolved around the differences between Ontario and Quebec in terms of early stage seed funding. Quebec seems to have a tremendous understanding and great policy framework related to early stage businesses.
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The bells in Québec are indeed ringing in joyful tunes for start-ups. The government’s 2009 budget under Jacque Bernier brought in a new $700M fund for start-ups and more mature companies in clean tech, Life Sciences and IT. The really good news is that $200M of this is specifically targeted at IT. But wait … it gets even better … Three seed funds of $42M each are being established by Investment Quebec and could be online as early as Q1 2010. These are regionally based funds that are managed by private sector fund managers and although heavily weighted toward Montreal could potentially invest just North of Ottawa in Gatineau.
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I am continually impressed with how entrepreneurial the Quebec Government is toward Start-ups. Almost every item on my early stage seed fund wish list has been met and I expect we will see some tangible results in the next 2 – 5 years.
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Quebec … gets IT.
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Ian Graham

Filed under: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Start-up by Ian
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