The GTA has always had investors ready to put their money behind local startups, but that community has never been more organized, more communicative, or more active, says Bryan J. Watson, executive director of the
National Angel Capital Organization (NACO).
NACO recently released the results of a national survey it conducted to assess the level of activity among angel investors in Canada; they found that a whopping 80 per cent of all investments made in 2011 across the country were made in Ontario, with a large percentage of that activity taking place in the Toronto region. (NACO won't provide city-by-city breakdowns due to privacy concerns; the value of some specific deals might be identifiable if they did so.)
This is a marked increase over 2010, when 62 per cent of investments were made in Ontario.
"The biggest difference," Watson says, "is that the GTA [investment] community is much more organized say four years ago—even a year ago." It's only in the last year that angel investment "has gone from an activity that was one promoted... to one that started to occur naturally." (The full study results are available online [
PDF].)
The most attractive area for investment, unsurprisingly, is in the information and communications technology sector, which Watson says continues to be "pretty hot." Following on Ontario's green energy push there is "still a lot of interest in clean tech—often with enabling technology, often with a little bit of web and control systems."
The technological theme emerged again in the third sector Watson cited as being attractive for those looking to invest GTA startups: medical technology: "Specficially the devices and diagnostics side of things." Toronto investors are also expressing "a lot of interest in web-enabled technology or big data tecnology—using online infrastructure and analytics" to develop new tools and platforms.
Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Bryan J. Watson, Executive Director,
National Angel Capital Organization