The annual Bootstrap Awards were held Tuesday to recognize entrepreneurs in the National Capital Region that have “bootstrapped” the growth of their company and achieved commercial success. The awards are presented by The Ottawa Network.
The winners demonstrate innovation and creativity in growing their self-funded startups and early-stage companies in a variety of industries. Each winner is an entrepreneur or company from the National Capital Region that has been in business for less than seven years without having received more than $750,000 in outside funding.
Innovation Award: BioThera Solutions
BioThera Solutions is an Ottawa-based biotech company focused on scalable biomanufacturing of medicinal plant-derived extracellular vesicles. BioThera’s first commercial product is an anti-aging skincare serum, currently under clinical validation with dermatology clinics. The same biomanufacturing foundation is designed to be redeployed for future applications in regenerative medicine and oncology.
AI in Action Award: Vigilant AI
Auditors spend 60 per cent of their time manually reviewing documents, yet miss major risks due to massive data volumes. Vigilant AI’s platform builds a specialized AI model for each document type, achieving over 99 per cent accuracy. The result is rapid transaction confirmations, automated audit workflows and hallucination-free AI reports.
Marketing Award: Rep Jump
Rep Jump is a software platform that helps businesses strengthen their online reputation and local search presence. Using automated SMS follow-up, Rep Jump gives customers a simple way to share feedback after an experience with a business. By automating a process that many teams struggle to manage consistently, Rep Jump helps businesses reduce manual follow-up and improve customer communication.
Capital Award: Loon Inc.
Loon solves one of health care’s most complex problems: helping new therapies reach the patients who need them. The Loon AI platform automates clinical evidence and drug coverage analysis that shapes reimbursement and access decisions. Loon has grown from a startup into a scientifically validated global platform trusted by Fortune 10 clients, top pharmaceutical companies and national health systems.
Disruptor Award: Scatterlink Corp.
Scatterlink transforms mining inventory management with real-time IoT and RFID technology built for extreme environments. Scatterlink digitizes and tracks physical assets on surface and underground in real time, including remote, offline environments, reducing hours of work to minutes. It has deployed across two mines in northern Canada, helping frontline teams operate faster.
Community Impact Award: Twish Cart
Twish Cart is a food-tech group buying platform that helps families access more affordable groceries by transforming individual shopping needs into pooled purchasing power. Through collective buying, families benefit from better pricing on everyday essentials, while grocers and food suppliers gain a scalable channel to move inventory faster and increase sales.
Founder of the Year Award: Evan Zeglinski Spinney, Sielo Robotics
Sielo Robotics is building assistive robotic devices so the 140 million people who need physical care due to injury, aging or disability can live on their own. Its first product is a robotic arm that mounts to a power wheelchair and lets the user handle daily tasks without a caregiver. It has letters of intent for 22 units, clinical partnerships with CHEO and The Ottawa Hospital, and is shipping its first units this year.
The Ottawa Network is a not-for-profit, member-driven organization that connects entrepreneurs, students, academics, industry professionals and government agencies to grow innovative businesses in the Ottawa region.
