It was time for L-Spark to show off a little earlier this week when its second cohort of companies graduated at its Best in SaaS Showcase.
Together, the nine incubator and four accelerator graduates have generated more than $1 million in investment. In the facility’s 18 months of existence, L-Spark companies have brought in more than $5 million.
The sold-out event Wednesday night at the Great Canadian Theatre Company saw the graduates showcase their progress to mentors, advisers, investors and corporate partners. All proceeds from the event went to Technovation, a program that challenges high school girls to build an app to solve a community problem.
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Three of the nine L-Spark incubator companies are run by women, with Jane Wang leading health platform Optimity, Lindy Ledohowski at the helm of essay-writing tool EssayJack and Yulia Vasilyeva running Intelocate, a cloud-based platform that centralizes retail supply chain management.
Accelerator companies CareerJSM and Cliniconex each recently closed seed rounds. CareerJSM’s job search management tool has already been deployed to 70,000 registered students across Ontario, and Cliniconex’s appointment reminder solution is already helping more than 1,000 doctors boost revenues by mitigating cancelled or forgotten medical appointments.
The other two accelerator companies also had their share of success while in the program, with FileFacets seeing its recurring monthly revenue jump from $7,000 to $100,000. The company’s tool allows users to classify and structure large amounts of data.
And ZINation, an application that allows e-commerce stores to make online catalogues, has seen a significant increase in the number of Shopify merchants using its services since it secured a partnership with the e-commerce juggernaut.
Celebrations aside, the work continues at L-Spark, which is now accepting applications for its next accelerator cohort until July 24. It will accept up to six companies to begin the program in the fall.
