The Business Development Bank of Canada is a Crown corporation and national development bank wholly owned by the Government of Canada, mandated to help create and develop Canadian businesses through financing, growth and transition capital, venture capital and advisory services, with a focus on small and medium-sized enterprises.
Funding is the act of providing resources to finance a need, program, or project. While this is usually in the form of money, it can also take the form of effort or time from an organization or company. Generally, this word is used when a firm uses its internal reserves to satisfy its necessity for cash, while the term financing is used when the firm acquires capital from external sources.
Asurion, LLC is a privately held company based in Nashville, Tennessee, that provides insurance for smartphones, tablets, consumer electronics, appliances, satellite receivers and jewelry. In 2014, the company operated in 14 countries and had 49 offices with 19,000 employees serving 280 million consumers.
Larry Johnson is an American futurist, author, and educator. Currently, Johnson serves as the Founder and CEO of EdFutures.org, an international think tank, and as a Senior Fellow of the Center for Digital Education. From 2001-2016, he served as Chief Executive Officer of the New Media Consortium an international consortium of hundreds of universities, colleges, museums, research centers, and technology companies.
Babbel GmbH, operating as Babbel, is a German subscription-based language learning software and e-learning platform, available in various languages since January 2008.
SoundHound AI, Inc. is a voice AI and speech recognition company founded in 2005. It develops speech recognition, natural language understanding, sound recognition and search technologies. Its featured products include a voice AI developer platform, SoundHound Chat AI, a voice-enabled digital assistant, and music recognition mobile app SoundHound. Key vertical industries include the automotive, IoT devices, restaurant and customer service industries. The company’s headquarters are in Santa Clara, California.
The Mind Trust is a non-profit organization based in Indianapolis whose mission is to “dramatically improve public education for underserved students by empowering education entrepreneurs to develop or expand transformative education initiatives.”
Nirvanix is an American-based provider of business phone systems, VoIP services, hosted PBX, SIP Trunks, and cloud storage services headquartered in San Diego, California, United States. The company offers a variety of business phone solutions for small, medium as well as enterprise businesses. It also has a strong presence in public, hybrid and private cloud storage services with usage-based pricing. Based on previous service companies founded in 1998, Nirvanix shut down in October 2013. In July 2021 Nirvanix re-entered the business with $12 million funding.
Until 27 November 2018 Seatwave was an online ticket marketplace for buying and selling tickets to music, sporting and cultural events. Seatwave was founded in May 2006. Ticket sellers used to be able to list their tickets on Seatwave and specify what price they would be willing to sell them for. Buyers could browse the site, compare ticket prices and could then purchase the ticket they feel was the best deal.
Aquamarine Power was a wave energy company, founded in 2005 to commercialise the Oyster wave energy converter, a device to capture energy from near-shore waves. The company's head offices were in Edinburgh, Scotland. The company ceased to trade on 20 November 2015.
Figure Eight was a human-in-the-loop machine learning and artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco.
Bluefin Labs was a Cambridge, MA-based social TV analytics company that used publicly available social media commentary from Twitter, Facebook and blogs to measure viewer engagement with television shows and ads at scale – historically a costly and complex problem for TV and marketing industries to solve.
Coursera Inc. is a for-profit U.S.-based massive open online course provider founded in 2012 by Stanford University computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. Coursera works with universities and other organizations to offer online courses, certifications, and degrees in a variety of subjects.
iwoca Ltd. is an online Fintech company based in London. It offers credit facilities to small businesses trading in the UK and Germany via an automated lending platform. CEO Christoph Rieche and CTO James Dear founded iwoca in October 2011 and the company started trading in March 2012. They aimed to offer custom-built loans to small businesses, who usually struggled with fair access to finance from big banks. To start with, these were exclusively e-commerce businesses, but in April 2014, iwoca began lending to all types of small businesses. By July 2015, it was reported to have seen 250% year-on-year growth in issuance.
Databricks, Inc. is an American software company founded by the original creators of Apache Spark. Databricks develops a web-based platform for working with Spark, that provides automated cluster management and IPython-style notebooks. The company develops Delta Lake, an open-source project to bring reliability to data lakes for machine learning and other data science use cases.
Marina Tognetti is an Italian entrepreneur and business executive based in Amsterdam. She is the founder and CEO of Myngle, an online platform that offers live language education through video conferencing in 45 different languages.
Funding Societies is a Southeast Asia’s digital financing platform for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), headquartered in Singapore. It was the first such platform in Singapore to engage an escrow agency to independently and safely manage investors’ funds. In Indonesia it is known as Modalku. Since its launch, it has disbursed more than US$2.6 billion in business financing to MSMEs through more than 5.1 million loan transactions.
Open English is an online English-language learning platform, primarily serving users in Latin America and Hispanic Americans in the United States. In recent years, the company has also expanded its offering into Europe, Middle East, and Asia. The platform currently operates in more than 30 countries worldwide. Since its inception, it has enrolled over 2 million students in its courses.
Biz2Credit is an online financing platform for small businesses. The company provides direct funding to small businesses across the United States. The company is known for its financing products, educational resources for business such as the BizAnalyzer, and research that it publishes periodically, including the Small Business Lending Index, and its subsidiary SaaS business lending platform Biz2X.
Utah-based Lendio, founded in 2011 by Brock Blake and Trent Miskin, is a free online loan marketplace in the U.S. targeting small business owners.
