Wave hello to the 26 teams joining Venture Founder this Fall
Meet our 44th cohort of CORE and Lab2Launch
entrepreneurship@UBC is driven by our mission to fuel the next generation of UBC entrepreneurs and their transformative innovations through startup creation. As the embedded incubator and accelerator at one of the top 40 research universities worldwide, the entrepreneurs that undertake the entrepreneurship@UBC journey bring with them incredible ideas and scientific discoveries that will shift industries and make meaningful, global impact.
The ventures in our newest Venture Founder cohort are poised to do just that.
Venture Founder supports teams across two streams, CORE and Lab2Launch, that are ready to propel their innovations out into the world. The goal of Venture Founder is to help startups validate their business model and begin to build traction, leveraging our made-at-e@UBC, for e@UBC 4Ts methodology (Team, Tech, Traction and Treasury ) rooted in a venture-centric approach that meets venture teams where they are at in their journey.
This new cohort of 26 teams are creating solutions for some of the world’s most persistent challenges, addressing such varied issues as the financial literacy gap, education, AI and plant-based biotechnologies. They come from across our UBC community, including the faculties of Land and Food Systems, Applied Science, Forestry, Sauder, Medicine and more.
We are excited to introduce you to them!
Meet the 26 teams:
CORE
For ventures driving innovative solutions that challenge the status quo through disruptive technologies, ideas and trends. Learn more
Alberni Yachts
The yachting industry is failing to capture the interest of the next generation. Alberni Yachts offers a zero-emissions aluminum exploration sailing yacht allowing for safe and responsible exploration of the world's oceans. They are made of recyclable aluminum, are cost-effective and are built on the BC coast.
Faculty affiliation: Applied Science
Batour Organic Dried Fruits
Afghanistan's women and children encounter severe starvation due to a lack of employment opportunities under the Taliban regime. The consumption of dried fruits in Canada is increasing to more than 24 billion dollars in 2026, but there are not adequate organic varieties of dried fruit that can satisfy the market needs. Batour Organic will tackle the problem by importing organic dried fruits and saffron from local farms in Afghanistan to create jobs for women and farmers and satisfy Canadians with a variety of organic products. Batour promotes women empowerment by creating jobs, sustainability, and organic, affordable products that help everyone to have convenient access while supporting a social change in the world.
Faculty affiliation: Arts and Sauder School of Business
Eat n' Log
People often take photos to record their food experiences, but once the photo is taken it becomes nothing more than another picture buried in an album: the food experience is thus forgotten. Eat n' Log has designed a one-stop, user-centric food experience recording app tailored for food lovers. They provide a streamlined logging experience and intuitive and aesthetically pleasing presentation that fully captures users’ meaningful food experiences.
Faculty affiliation: Arts and Sauder School of Business
Faicery Intl Corp
There are producers around the world with high-quality products that want to serve new markets, but they don't have the technology and the logistics to do it. Currently producers are price takers and are keeping the least margin in the supply chain and there is no interface solution to connect the producer and consumer. Faicery is building a platform to serve producers to connect direct-to-consumer so both get better prices. The producer will get a tool for pricing, digitalization in sales, market intelligence and logistics and consumers will buy it locally, and with international backups that will have more products and better availability.
Faculty affiliation: Land and Food Systems
For Good Tunes
Independent musicians are struggling to make ends meet. For Good Tunes is empowering indie musicians to create communities around their music through a platform of collaboration and co-creation. Their thesis: fans want to participate, not to just sit and listen, and the For Good Tunes platform creates an ecosystem where derivative works are desirable and generate new revenue streams.
Faculty affiliation: Education
Hangeh Labs
High-rise residential buildings aren't designed for social interactions and have a huge untapped economic opportunity. Hangeh Labs is creating a social marketplace for urban high-rise buildings, making it easy for residents to have meaningful social (events, interest groups) and economic (services, rentals, buy/sell) interactions with their neighbours.
Faculty affiliation: Sauder School of Business
I ADAPT YOU Academy Inc
Women in Canada are expected to accumulate almost half of all financial wealth in Canada, worth $900 billion, by 2026. Despite this empowering number, there’s still a lack of education. Only 31% of women consider themselves to be financially knowledgeable, which contributes to the fact that women invest less than men, unintentionally hindering their journey to financial independence. I ADAPT YOU is solving this problem by providing women with a social e-learning platform that offers educational courses, expert coaching and financial planning algorithms, all while accounting for the unique realities women face, such as pay gaps, career breaks, and longer life spans.
Faculty affiliation: Arts and Sauder School of Business
Newsly
Audio listeners don’t have content that is both topical and personalized to listen to: they have personalized content (like podcasts), and topical content (like radio), but they don’t have a way to listen to content that is both topical and personalized for them. Newsly addresses this problem by scanning the web for topical content that users define, whether your interest is Bitcoin or the Kardashians, bringing the most trending content about those subjects in a democratic way, while reading it well in a human sounding voice. Some Newsly competitors have content aggregation capabilities and some have audio capabilities, but Newsly stands alone in the ability to both identify specific trending content and read it aloud well from anywhere on the web.
Faculty affiliation: Applied Science
Next1
Next1 is a poverty intervention initiative that addresses the issue of primary school and high school dropouts for financial reasons across the globe. It solves the problem as the world’s first person-to-person scholarship platform that directly connects scholarship funders from across the globe to child laborers and marginalized communities for them to pursue technical education. Next1 connects humans with humans making it different from all other available programs and initiatives.
Faculty affiliation: Arts and Vancouver School of Economics
Orca
Global water security is one of the defining challenges of our generation, with nearly 67% of the world's population experiencing water scarcity already. The USA and Canada rank #1 and #2 in per capita water consumption and the future has never been more at risk. Orca Water is tackling this problem by creating a device and a platform that empowers the world to radically change how people value, conserve and use water. Their solution starts as the only whole home water monitoring system that prioritizes cost savings and conservation awareness, and furthermore serves as a platform that educates, motivates, and advocates for communities, municipalities and utilities to change behaviors and sponsor initiatives that drive conservation and awareness.
Faculty affiliation: Arts and Sauder School of Business
Screen.io
Each year companies generate more than 100 million minutes of video recordings and users have no path to search and filter through them without having to watch every second of the video, which leads to more than 20% of working time spent gathering information from video content/recordings. Screen.io is solving this problem by providing knowledge workers a cloud platform to house content and automatically find transcripts and important moments within video calls and recordings.
Faculty affiliation: Applied Science
SPARK Foundation
Public education institutions are currently overwhelmed with the amount of base material to cover, and lack of resources to give individualized attention to students. SPARK works to provide quality life education to the next generation of leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs, filling the gaps of the public system. They offer accessible programming focused on youths' interest and incorporate UN SDGs 4,11,13, and 17 in order to expand on youths' current education and encourage educational curiosity.
Faculty affiliation: Arts
Wiseadmit
Students seek help from local service providers for studying abroad. Yet the majority of them end up in unsuitable programs or destinations, leading to financial difficulties, and psychological stress. Wiseadmit is addressing this issue by removing guesswork, wasted time, and wasted application fees. Wiseadmit assesses students' academic and cognitive abilities and matches them with best-fit programs worldwide.
Faculty affiliation: Sauder School of Business
YAMOoA
Animation and VFX studios are finding it hard to recruit workers because of increased complexity of job requirements, increased competition, and decreased candidate pools (due to various tax incentives). YAMOoA (You Are Missing Out on Animation) is building a one-stop-shop SaaS platform which will make recruiting a breeze. It features a database of workers along with recruiting specific industry reports like average salaries and DEI data (to help with tax credits). Other recruiting platforms like LinkedIn lack data quality and quantity. YAMOoA will retrieve data directly from studios (instead of candidates) under a multi-stakeholder co-op model. Platform co-ops have the ability to create a more equal world. YAMOoA’s hope is to build a blueprint for future software platform co-ops.
Faculty affiliation: Sauder School of Business
Lab2Launch
For UBC researchers and scientists building startups around innovations that will solve critical issues in the world today. Learn more
360 Health and Hygiene
The current pandemic and ever-emerging SARS variants necessitate having a technology to deliver pathogen-free air, providing a safe environment for everyday activities as restrictions and lockdowns proved to financially burden societies and impact mental health. 360 Health and Hygiene will offer an effective solution for the current and future pandemics and endemics that happen due to airborne pathogen transmissions.
Faculty affiliation: Applied Science
360 Health and Hygiene is founded by Dr. Leili Abkar, a member of the Sustainable Water Innovation and Research Laboratory (SWIRL), led by Dr. Madjid Mohseni.
4PM
The late stage of esophageal cancer detection, financial barriers to screening the wider at-risk population and a lack of effective therapeutics underlies the shockingly poor survival outcomes of 12-14% at 5 yrs. 4PM has defined diagnostic markers of early treatable esophageal tumor formation, where outcomes can be as high as 70% at 5 yrs. Their approach is amenable to simple cost-effective non-specialist and non-endoscopic surveillance of the wider 15% of North Americans at elevated risk, thus significantly improving outcomes through guided clinical management and reducing health burdens in non-privatized medical systems.
Faculty affiliation: Medicine
4PM is founded by Dr. Shane Duggan, a Research Associate in UBC’s Faculty of Medicine working with Dr. Dermot Kelleher, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Vice-President, Health.
AI 3d FAB
Although additive manufacturing will save significant time and money by rendering designs into tangible prototypes, it is mainly used for prototyping and is not considered a serious manufacturing tool for end-user products nor has it been feasible for large-scale production. AI 3D FAB creates new possibilities for the future of production by combining multiple Ai-enabled robotic arms with 3D printing capabilities in a large format temperature controlled chamber. They save money and time for customers by being 50 times faster and fully automated.
Faculty affiliation: Applied Science
Amitis
Amitis is here to solve one of the biggest environmental problems of the decade; the problem of PFAS, also known as forever chemicals. These toxic chemicals are everywhere including in drinking water and are accumulating inside people’s bodies. No water treatment utility is able to treat it and the whole world is struggling with PFAS issue. Amitis has a solution that no one has discovered: a simple and robust technology invented at UBC which can address the global PFAS issue.
Faculty affiliation: Applied Science
Amitis is founded by Ehsan Banayan Esfahani, a member of the Sustainable Water Innovation and Research Laboratory (SWIRL), led by Dr. Madjid Mohseni.
BryoSphere Biotechnologies
Many plant-derived antioxidant compounds have shown great promise as active ingredients in skincare and pharmaceuticals, however, because of their high cost, many companies have not been able to include these compounds in their formulations. BryoSphere will use genetically modified moss cultures to produce specialty antioxidants. By doing this, they can offer expensive compounds to businesses at affordable prices and use an environmentally sustainable manufacturing method.
Faculty affiliation: Forestry, Medicine and Science
Coolares
Farmers don’t have an efficient way to cool down the surface temperatures of crops, which is costing North American farmers over $841M annually. This is only expected to increase as temperatures rise. Coolares is solving this problem by providing farmers with a decision-making machine learning software that integrates into existing cooling systems. They provide real-time data that automatically turns on cooling systems where and when they are needed to save water, reduce labor and protect yield.
Faculty affiliation: Applied Science and Sauder School of Business
Echoscope
Adults with incontinence have much more diminished quality of life than those with diabetes even though incontinence is a non-life threatening condition. People with incontinence do not have tools to understand their symptoms in the first place. Echoscope is providing patients with the necessary metrics and trends of their incontinence symptoms to help measure and manage incontinence.
Faculty affiliation: Extended Learning
MyCircle
People with disabilities and long-term health conditions commonly experience loneliness, low perceived social support, and high rates of social isolation. MyCircle offers a secure platform to connect patients with the supervision of clinicians in a one-on-one or group formats. MyCircle provides a safe environment for patients to share their stories without being worried they will be judged or abused.
Faculty affiliation: Medicine
Open Writing Evaluation
Technology is applied to all aspects of foreign language learning and teaching, including assessments, and among these technologies, there has been an increase in the use of automated writing evaluation (AWE) for writing assessment. Open Writing Evaluation offers a state-of-the-art deep-learning AWE system to provide language learners with automated corrective feedback and more accurate and objective scoring. Because automated scoring is faster and more cost-effective, it is used to help language teachers easily assess endless essays. The ultimate goal is not just to make learning a new language easier, but also to make teaching a new language much easier.
Faculty affiliation: Arts
Open Writing Evaluation is founded by UBC faculty member Dr. Jungyeul Park, a lecturer in linguistics in the Faculty of Arts.
SavvyCare
Continence care for the world's growing population of seniors is broken. Current approaches lead to health complications, loss of dignity, wasted resources and unnecessary physical and mental strain on busy care providers. SavvyCare is solving this problem by providing seniors and their caregivers an intelligent and connected continence management system that enables proactive toileting and optimal care.
Faculty affiliation: Pharmaceutical Sciences and Sauder School of Business
SBInnovations
The use of plastic has a set end in Canada — 2030. By then, every piece of single-use plastic will have to be removed. For instance, plastic films used to protect fruits and vegetables for a long shelf life will no longer be permitted. SBInnovations is developing edible and biodegradable biofilms made from blueberries, produced in British Columbia, or from other local veggies. They make packages made from fruits or veggies for fruits or vegetable primary packaging.
Faculty affiliation: Forestry and Land and Food Systems
SBInnovations is founded by Dr. Alberto Baldelli, a member of the Food Process Engineering Laboratory (FPEL) led by Dr. Anubhav Pratap-Singh.
SeraGene Therapeutics
For patients with coagulation disorders, therapeutics lag decades behind science. Small-molecule and protein-based therapies are short-lived, putting patients at risk of pathological events if taxing dosing regimens are not followed, and creating a burden for patients and health care professionals if they are. Additionally, many groups of patients are not eligible for current therapies, for instance women with bleeding disorders. SeraGene is leveraging their network of thought leaders, clinicians, and scientists, and recent advances in nanomedicine, to create RNA-based therapeutics that provide long-lasting protection from disease, without the limitations of current products.
Faculty affiliation: Medicine and Science
SeraGene is founded by Amy Wong Strilchuk and Lih Jiin Juang, graduate students and members of the Kastrup Lab, as well as Dr. Christian Kastrup of the Kastrup Lab and Dr. Pieter Cullis, Professor, UBC Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, UBC and Founding Scientific Director of the NanoMedicines Innovation Network.
Welcome to the new teams!
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