Seven months after graduating arguably the toughest entrepreneurship training in Canada, several Montreal startups are making big strides.

What started as 51 aspiring entrepreneurs in the Founder Institute’s second cohort, back in July, 2015, was whittled down to just 14 by graduation. Today, those graduates have made some serious progress and secured significant funding.

One of them is currently at the Y Combinator accelerator program in Mountain View, California. Another has raised more than US $600,000 in their pre-seed round. The rest of the cohort has raised between $50-$150,000 in pre-seed rounds.

Amélie Morency, CEO of Montreal rental kitchen/culinary workspace startup, The Food Room, didn’t come from a technical background; but her experience as a nationally competitive swimmer was perhaps even more useful in preparing her for the experience.

“I wasn’t expecting to get in. I had no idea what it was before [an info session]. But it appealed because they said ‘you’re gonna want to die and keep doing it’. And I knew that feeling from swimming,” said Morency.

Sergio Escobar, co-director of the Founder Institute’s Montreal Chapter and Global Facilitator for Startup Weekend and Techstars-backed Startup NEXT, said he was even tougher on participants this year than he was last year.

“We want to have the best companies,” Escobar told Techvibes’ Jacob Serebrin at the time. “I want them to say Montreal compares to Silicon Valley.”

Participants were competing in teams this year rather than being alone, and that constant competitiveness, as well as having a system of people both supporting and relying on you, was part of what made the program true to the real world.

“You end up being really hard on yourself. You’re never comfortable, which is a good thing. Every week you have be ready to pitch,” said Morency. “But on a personal level, it’s great having someone understand what you’re going through. Having people around you who ‘get it’ is really helpful. You know you’re not alone, and the network that opens up to you after is astounding.”

Marc Boscher, founder and CEO of Unito, a project-management app integrator, and fellow cohort graduate, agrees that the networking gained from the program is one of the biggest benefits. He said that meeting Founder Institute’s headquarters people led to investors for them, as well as their first American investor.

And despite the increasingly impressive Canadian startup scene, making connections and finding investors south of the border is still extremely important for raising necessary funds. Escobar told MTLinTech that most of their founders have had clients in the US from Day one, without the help of several investors within the city.

“Despite suffering a complete lack of funding support from Canadian funds like Investment Quebec and BDC Capital, which invest in other incubators, our entrepreneurs have managed to raise significant amounts of funding to launch commercial products to international markets like the US.”

As well, he said that more and more Canadian founders are forced to move to the US, either permanently or partially, due to a lack of venture capital funding at pre-seed and seed stages, or funding offers with valuations as low as 50 per cent under US standards.

It seems that the tougher practices implemented with the second cohort, as well as the competitive nature fostered between the teams, produced graduates even more prepared than their counterparts the year before.

Graduation itself took the form of a pitch-off, something the entrepreneurial teams had been preparing for throughout the entire four month process.

Unito, which took first place in the Founder Institute’s graduation, currently stand at six full time employees and have plans to double that number within the next few months.

The Food Room came in second, and is hoping to be up and running by April of this year. “I can’t stress enough how valuable for life the Founder Institute was, whether you start a business or not. It was much more mental, much like a race: an art,” said Morency.

Main photo by Pablo A. Ortiz / Grupo NM.