Montreal’s Medteq Invest gives funding to three Canadian tech companies


Medteq Invest, a Montreal medical technology fund, is investing in three companies across Canada.

We know who two of them are, while the third remains unnamed until a future date. The two named companies are Vancouver’s Ayogo Health and Toronto’s MIMOSA Diagnostics. The announcement now puts Medteq’s portfolio at 13 companies in British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec.

RELATED: $200K Pitch Competition for HealthTech This Winter

In a release Medteq wrote that the companies range from “SaaS products to risky medical devices, to diagnostics – addressing health conditions ranging from mental health to cancer.”

Ayogo Health says it employs validated measures of perceived self-efficacy and other psychosocial factors to better understand what is important to people in the context of their real lives. “This enables timely, personalized and relevant interventions aimed at enhancing self-management and improving health outcomes,” the company says.

Meanwhile, Mimosa Diagnostics offers a mobile health platform using near-infrared light to non-invasively asses tissue health. The goal is to make daily foot monitoring both accurate and accessible to everyone. Their solutions revolve around diabetes patients.

Most people think diabetes is a mild disease that can be controlled by watching sugar intake or with medication. While this can be true, if diabetes is left untreated or isn’t properly managed it can lead to serious health complications like heart disease and nerve damage, writes the company.

Because of these complications, diabetics often lose feeling in their feet, and can develop deep open wounds (called “ulcers”) from a sock that rubs them the wrong way or a shoe that does not fit properly.

Medteq launched its $14 million “Invest” fund in July 2018. Headquartered in Montreal, it co-invests up to $1 million in “exceptional Canadian teams committed to developing and scaling health technology solutions, benefiting Canadian patients and citizens.” The firm’s money pool partly comes from Investissement Quebec, the government of Canada, through the Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research (CECR) the private sector and other partners.

“The first half of our 5-year active investment period was designed to build the foundations needed and expand our visibility. We have strengthened our bonds with corporate and national VCs, as well as regional VCs such as Innovacorp in Nova Scotia, allowing us to co-invest in disruptive start-ups and foster collaboration,” said Medteq’s Frederic Boucher.

“As we are now beginning the second half of our investment window, we are well-positioned to accelerate numerous Canadian start-ups.”

At the fund’s recent Innovation Summit in January, tech startups pitched at the first Medtech Invest pitch competition, attracting more than 50 applications from 7 Canadian regions. Five finalists were given the opportunity to pitch to a seed-stage investor panel.

PwC MoneyTree recently called MEDTEQ one of the five most active investors at the early stage level in 2019, while White Star Capital noted that MEDTEQ Invest was one of the five most active Canadian public financial institutions. The firm also recently invested in Theodorus IV, an international seed-stage venture capital fund, as a limited partner.

MEDTEQ Invest leverages its strong consortium of hospitals, service providers and multinationals to ensure that growing companies not only have capital but also the clinical or market expertise needed to drive adoption.

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