Fundraising and recruiting top talent are critical to a startup’s success, and the Start Alberta database is designed to help.
Join more than 2,800 Alberta startups and scaleups in the Start Alberta database who are using it to increase the visibility of their startup, find the right investors and recruit top-tier talent.
Did you know? Significant views on the Start Alberta database reach across Canada and the world, including the US, India, the UK, the Netherlands, France and Germany.
If you’re an Alberta tech founder or startup team who hasn’t used Start Alberta yet, here are three ways to get immediate value from the database.
1. Get found by investors and job seekers
Increase your startup’s visibility to both prospective investors and talent with a complete company profile.
Investors are already using Start Alberta to discover and track promising companies, filtering by their search criteria by industry, technologies, or founder experience. And job seekers continue to use our free Job Board to find new roles in Alberta tech.
Make a positive impression with a complete profile that includes your business model, income streams, industries, and technologies. Monark does a great job of providing full descriptive information on its profile. Some other great examples include Aurora Hydrogen, Ontopical, Team CarePal and Syantra.
To edit your profile, you’ll need to login into the Start Alberta database, search for your company and click the pencil icon on the top right. If you still need to claim your company profile, see this blog post for help.
Improve your company profile with this checklist:
- Under “Info”: add a Tagline and a Long Description. Be sure to consider relevant keywords as you best position your company for investors and/or job seekers.
- Under “Tags”: complete the following fields that investors use to discover new companies:
- Business Model (eg. Manufacturing, Marketplace & e-commerce or Saas)
- Industries (eg. energy, health, space, etc)
- Sub-industries (medical device, water, energy efficiency, etc)
- Technologies (eg. deep tech, AI, mobile app, etc.).
- Under “Analytics and Links”: ensure your website url is correct and add relevant social profile links.
- Under “Funding Rounds”: ensure all of your financing rounds are accurate and accounted for.
- Under “Team”: ensure all founders and leadership team members have been added. Consider self-identifying gender or ethnicity as it can help your startup get found by investors who are specifically seeking to invest in companies with diverse founders and co-founders.
- Click “Apply” to save your changes.
With a complete company profile, you’ll not only be more discoverable by investors and talent, you’ll also help ensure transparency and real-time visibility into our province’s growing tech ecosystem.
2. Search for best-fit investors
Find the most relevant investors for your business out of a roster with AB locations.
Search the Start Alberta directory of investors to get a head start on finding a best-fit investor who could back your business.
You can narrow down your investor search by investor type (eg. angel, venture capital, private equity), preferred round (eg. Seed, Series A, Late VC), industry experience (eg. health, energy, enterprise software), portfolio size (eg. 2-10 investments, over 50 investments) and more.
For example, say you are looking for the most active seed-stage investors in fintech.
- Go to the Investor tab in the Start Alberta database and click on the “Advanced Filters” button.
- Filter for the following: “preferred round: seed”, “industry experience: fintech” and “portfolio size: 11-50 investments; >50 investments”.
- Click apply and review your results.
- To save the list to view later or to export the list as an Excel spreadsheet, click the “Save & Export” button.
3. Stand out to investors and job seekers
Use the database to signal to prospective investors that you’re actively fundraising or to job seekers that you’re actively hiring.
Adding a personalized note to your company profile to give prospective investors or job seekers a reason to get in touch. Also consider adding key business milestones to your profile such as adding relevant company news or articles to the “News Links” in your company profile.
To add a custom pitch or note to your company profile:
- Click on the Notes button
- Click the + sign above “Attach a deck or share your fundraising pitch”
- In the drop down menu, choose to create a Business Pitch, Fundraising Pitch, Hiring Pitch, Interview Pitch, Public or Private Note
- Customize your pitch or note by providing a title, description, image, YouTube URL or PDF to provide additional information. You can opt to add the target round size, round type and close date. Click “Save”.
- Now, investors or job seekers can see your personalized note on your company profile! You can edit and update your note as often as you’d like.
How do you create a pitch that stands out? Consider adding:
- Title: announcing the round (eg. Our company is Series A round open)
- Media type: share a mixed content of image and videos
- Descriptor: shares all the key info: what the company does, the market creation potential, traction, numbers, team and future plans.
Find investors and attract talent with Start Alberta
Put your best face forward to investors and job seekers with the help of Start Alberta. The first step is to sign up for a free account and claim your company profile.
If you haven’t created an account, it only takes a few minutes.
- Step 1: Go to ecosystem.startalberta.ca and click on the ‘signup’ button.
- Step 2: Enter your business email address and set a password. Or choose to sign up with your LinkedIn account. A verification email will be sent to your registered email address. Open the verification email and click on the link.
- Step 3: Complete your profile data including social links, location, education and more.
If you need assistance, reach out to our team info@startalberta.ca. We’re always happy to help!
And be sure to follow Start Alberta on LinkedIn and Instagram where we share tips and tricks to use the database along with data-driven insights as well as spotlight innovating Alberta tech companies.