Fundraising and recruiting top talent are critical to a startup’s success, and the Start Alberta database is designed to help.
Join more than 1,500 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, the Netherlands, the UK, France, Spain, and Japan.
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 the database to discover and track promising companies, filtering by their investment criteria such as 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.
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.
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 Filter” 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. Save or export the list as an Excel spreadsheet. You can also save your top picks into a private list to view later.
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.
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 pitch 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 signal to investors you’re actively fundraising:
- Go to your company profile, and in the Notes section click on “Add your note”
- Select “My Pitch is for Fundraising” in the drop down menu
- Then provide a headline, description, image, YouTube URL or PDF to provide additional information. Click Save pitch.
- Now, investors can see your personalized pitch on your company profile! You can edit and update your pitch note as often as you’d like.
How do you create a pitch that stands out? Consider this example from a gaming studio in the British Virgin Islands, Magic Craft.
Some notable items they included:
- Headline: announcing the round
- Media type: mixed content, image and videos
- Descriptor: shares all the key info: what we do, market creation potential, traction, numbers, team and future plans.
You can also use the Pitch feature to let job seekers know you’re actively hiring. Add a note and select “My pitch is for Recruitment”. Tailor this note for a specific role or showcase reasons to work for your company.
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 in the top right corner.
- 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.