What you Need to Know about Building Health Tech Startups in Calgary 🧪
A recap from last week's Tech Thursday
This recap is brought to you by TKS, the world’s top innovation program for students ages 13-17. The program was developed with top CEOs and global leaders, modelled after curriculums from Harvard, Stanford, and MIT, and designed to train young people to make a dent in the universe.
Calgary Economic Development has partnered with TKS to provide scholarships for accepted students. TKS is selecting 80 students to join the 2024-2025 Calgary program.
Last Thursday, we spoke with 3 incredible Calgary-based founders in the Health Tech space to discuss their experience building their companies here in Calgary.
Sabina Bruehlmann, CEO at Nimble Science
Abdullah Sarhan, Co-Founder and CEO at RetinaLogik
Julian Mulia, MEng., COO and Co-Founder at NanoTess
Moderated by: Amit Patel, Director Western Canada at HaloHealth
This is my recap of the event’s top ideas and insights.
What supports and gaps exist in the Calgary ecosystem?
The strength of Calgary’s ecosystem is its people. Even when compared to Boston or San Francisco, the people here make it a world-class tech community. When you’re evaluating a program to join you should be looking at the people they’re going to expose to you.
Platform Calgary and Alberta Innovates are critical at different stages. They have great networks they can connect to when you need it.
Creative Destruction Labs introduces Nimble to a room full of investors. It’s where they got their first investors and it snowballed from there.
RetinaLogik used competitions at the early stages. By pitching at competitions, they were able to secure talent and investors.
Plug and Play, has been useful, not only their Calgary accelerator but being involved in their other accelerators can get you access to different markets.
Gaps that exist in Calgary:
Don’t lose track of going outside of this ecosystem. Your company can be based here – but you’ll need to reach markets around the world.
There’s limited access to quality assurance and regulatory talent. These roles are often more of an art than a science. You need to have seen a lot of volume, if you’re too Alberta specific you won’t have seen it all.
Quality Management Systems, you have to go outside of Canada to build it from scratch, but once you have built it, this can be your competitive advantage when compared to HealthTech Startups elsewhere in the world.
(From Left) Amit Patel, Abdullah Sarhan, Sabina Bruehlmann, and Julian Mulia
What Insights do you have on Raising VC funds in Calgary? Â
Raising money is a relationship. Fundraising often moves at the speed of trust.
Refine your pitch constantly. Sometimes twice a day if you’re pitching often.
Angel investors should be well-connected and aligned to your values. How they behave in pre-seed and seed is indicative of how they’ll behave in future rounds.
Your investors shouldn’t just be from funds. For NanoTess, they heal severe chronic wounds from diabetes, so they focused on finding wealth individuals who have diabetes – this is a much more compelling pitch then to a fund in SF.
The more successful you are, the less money you raise.
Strategic Investors are really important, think someone who works at a company that might acquire you down the road.
New investors will speak to your previous investors. Important you hit your milestones.
Do you have kids ages 13-17? We're very excited to share this opportunity with you.
Program Overview
TKS is a 10-month in-person program with interactive sessions every weekend. Throughout the program, students learn about frontier industries, build projects, receive personalized coaching, and work with innovative companies on real-world problems.
Duration: September 2024 to June 2025.
Sessions: Once/week on Saturday or Sunday.
Location: Platform Calgary, 407 9 Ave SE, Calgary.
See program page for more details.
Topics
The program exposes students to 50+ frontier sciences and technologies, including artificial intelligence, space tech, brain-computer interfaces, gene editing, robotics, cellular agriculture, and much more.
Outcomes
TKS alumni have achieved exceptional outcomes, including:
Attending top universities including Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley, Oxford, Waterloo, UBC, Yale, Carnegie Mellon and more - many have received full-ride scholarships.
Being amongst the youngest employees at SpaceX, NASA, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, IBM, Neuralink, Shopify, and OpenAI.
Working at top research labs in areas including genetic engineering, cancer research, artificial intelligence, and space exploration.
What to expect
By the end of the 10-month program, students will:
Be mentored by industry professionals, including mentors from Microsoft, Stanford, Uber, Apple, SpaceX and more. TKS has the largest mentor network in the world for teens.
Gain real-world work experience with organizations like Google, Meta, Microsoft, the United Nations and World Economic Forum.
Develop a portfolio of projects that can be used to stand out in university applications, scholarships, and internships.
Be future-ready with a deep understanding of frontier industries and careers of the future.
Learn the mindsets, confidence, and problem-solving abilities needed to be a leader.
How to apply
Click here to apply. Applications are due August 11, 2024.
If you have any questions, please email Azar Chatur - azar@tks.world
TKS is also hosting a free AI & Pizza workshop on August 10th @ 10am, which you can sign up for here.
Your top piece of advice for teams looking to build a HealthTech startup?
Luck is preparation meets opportunity. All you can do as an entrepreneur is to make yourself a really big target for luck.
Before joining an accelerator, you should know a fair bit about your business, otherwise they can led you astray and waster your time.
Just do it – it’s the only way your going to learn
Just do it, carefully – make sure it’s because you’re passionate about the problem you’re solving. It’s a lot of work, it’ not easy as it sounds, surround yourself with a team that shares your vision and values.
TL;DR
It’s Calgary people that make this such a valuable ecosystem to be a part of
Raising money is a relationship, build trust over time
Pick your angels carefully, ensure they’re well connected and align with your values