Methodology

We acknowledge that tech vs tech-enabled is a hard line to define. We only store deals for companies that are building Technology or Science/Medical products (eg. FinTech, BioTech, SaaS, MedTech, Hardware, NanoTech, etc.). We do not include deals for online brands, DTC companies, retail companies selling online, traditional oil and gas companies, consulting agencies, mining companies, etc. These type of companies may be tech-enabled and are important in our ecosystems, but they are not building/selling tech as core to their product. For certain companies, where the line is blurry, we will make a judgement call on a case-by-case basis. In these cases we will tag the company and deal as "misc".
We classify a Canadian tech company as one that is Headquartered in Canada OR is dual-headquartered in Canada and one other location OR was founded in Canada by Canadian citizens and has significant amount of team members in Canada.
When there is doubt, we use our network and/or ask the founders in order to make the final determination. (eg. In some cases announcments may state that a company is based in Toronto but their HQ is actually Waterloo or Vancouver).
We track Pre-Seed, Seed, Series A/B/C/D+ and Convertable Note deals (debt that converts to equity). We do not track debt only deals, PE deals or IPOs. Sometimes a deal contains both debt and equity without a breakdown %, in that case we add the full deal amount.
We use the publicly announced date or the date when we get confirmation from the founder that the deal occurred. We convert all USD amounts to Canadian dollars, so sometimes you will see a difference between our data and the amount posted in a news article. On occasion an older deal is disclosed as part of a new deal announcement, in this case we add that older deal to the database using its specified closed date.
We get data from founders who submit their deal information to us, so we can help them spread the good news. We also get data from online, public sources. In most cases you will see an accompanying article or post for a company's funding round. In cases where there is no article/post we reach out to the founders and our network for confirmation.
We are Canada's only public, independent system of record dedicated to Canadian technology startups and venture capital. Our numbers may be different from other reports because we have a much more strict definition of a tech company, more accurate information on the city location of the company, we use the announced date, and we classify Canadian companies in a way that aligns more with the ethos of the tech ecosystems in Canada. You should note that no system has 100% of the data, and insights from any platform should be used as a barometer, not as an exact measure.

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