Global tech accelerator Plug and Play announces headquarters in Calgary – Calgary Herald

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Global business accelerator Plug and Play announced a new headquarters in Calgary as the city’s $100-million investment fund pledged to support their efforts to connect local tech startups to international corporations.

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The Opportunity Calgary Investment Fund (OCIF) announced a $7 million investment to Plug and Play Alberta to support Calgary-based startups in the program over five years.

In return, Plug and Play will open a new headquarters in the city to deliver accelerator programs in digital health, sustainable clean resources, and AI to connect local startups to corporate partners.

“This is an outcome that will have lasting impacts on the City of Calgary,” said Mark Blackwell, executive chair with OCIF, during a news conference in the city’s southwest.

“Quite frankly, we’re too small of a city too small of a province for us to go alone. And we have to do this to attract the best in the world to Calgary and Alberta.”

Headquartered in Silicon Valley, the global tech investor and accelerator firm has a network of more than 500 corporations and 30,000 startups, as well as hundreds of venture capital firms, universities, and government agencies.

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“We want to be the bridge between Calgary, Edmonton and Silicon Valley to connect the dots,” said Saeed Amidi, CEO and founder of Plug and Play.

“If we utilize the connectivity with that database, we could make Calgary and Alberta, the centre of innovation for digital health, remote health. It really could create magic.”

Corporations including Walmart, Cargill, Mercedes, Ford and McDonalds look to Plug and Play for emerging digital technologies, explained Amidi. In Calgary, Plug and Play will focus on clean resources, digital health and general acceleration for AI.

But startups are the real bread and butter of the global tech accelerator. Plug and Play invests in more than 200 startups per year globally, Amidi said, with plans to invest in 80 startups per year in Calgary.

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“Forty of those 80 startups will get additional funding and they will have clients through our corporate partners,” Amidi explained.

In the health tech sector alone, Plug and Play is connected to around 40 pharmaceutical companies and hospital groups who look to them to find diagnostic technology, he said.

“We’re going to show them a lot of great startups from Calgary.”

Plug and Play will provide services in the province with support of a funding consortium led by Alberta Innovates, an Alberta government crown corporation.

Three orders of government are investing approximately $35 million for the Alberta Scaleup and Growth Accelerator program , which aims to create 20,000 jobs and $5 billion in technology firm revenue by 2030.

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This includes funding from the Alberta Ministry of Jobs, Economy and Innovation to Alberta Innovates to manage the program, and the federal government through Prairies Economic Development Canada (PrairiesCan) to expand funds available to not-for-profit business accelerators. The initiative also includes Innovate Edmonton and the OCIF at the municipal level.

Downtown Calgary was photographed on Wednesday, October 27, 2021. Photo by Azin Ghaffari/Postmedia

Major indicators of growth

Minister of Jobs and Economy Doug Schweitzer said Plug and Play’s presence in Alberta will fast-track the province’s “emerging and maturing technology sector.”

More than 3,000 tech companies are now located in the province, up from 1,200 companies in 2018, Schweitzer said.

“We’re even having companies get to that unicorn status here recently with Benevity,” he said, referring to the Calgary-based software company’s $1.1-billion deal with British-based Hg Capital LLP last December.

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Other major indicators of growth were seen as recently as this week.

On Monday, Amazon Web Services announced a new cloud computing hub in Calgary, bringing more than $4 billion in investment with it over time — and creating more than 950 full-time jobs across Canada.

Then back in July, RBC announced plans for 300 tech hires over the next three years at the company’s new Calgary Innovation Hub.

“It’s encouraging to see where this industry is growing in our province, and I think it’s another indication that Alberta is on the rebound and has a very bright future ahead,” Schweitzer said.

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Plug and Play Alberta was selected for OCIF support after putting out a request for proposals (RFP) for business incubators in March to address a ‘scale-up gap’ for local tech companies in Calgary.

According to Alberta Innovates, half of all startups in the province survive over five years, but only 0.1 per cent of small firms become mid-sized. Only two per cent of mid-sized firms grow to become large companies.

The OCIF was launched by the City of Calgary in 2018 to support investments that spur growth and create jobs in strategic sectors. Plug and Play is the 17th organization to be approved for funding.

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Twitter: @BrittGervaisAB