Canada’s Start-Up Visa: What is a Business Incubator? – Canada Immigration News

Canada immigration news: Business incubators can give applicants for permanent residence under the Start-Up Visa program the support they need to qualify to immigrate and start their businesses.

By nurturing start-ups and helping them navigate the myriad of challenges to get the financial, human, and physical resources they need to survive and thrive over a period of months – and in many cases years – business incubators are key players in Canada’s economic development sector.

These business incubators help entrepreneurs right from the earliest stages, when the business is still only an idea, and provide office space, administrative support, mentorship and training, and access to investors and capital.

Run as either non-profits or businesses themselves, business incubators help entrepreneurs:

develop relationships with financial partners, business consultants, management-level execs;
find office space and business hardware and software, and;
access research through relationships with universities and governmental agencies.

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Under the Start-Up Visa program, budding entrepreneurs hoping to gain permanent residence in Canada need to get the support of either a venture capital fund, angel investor group, or a business incubator.

These organizations choose which business proposals to review and each has its own intake process for proposals and criteria used to assess them.

If that organization gives the Start-Up Visa program applicant’s proposal the green light, it will provide a letter of support, allowing the prospective immigrant to continue with the process.

Business incubators that have been approved by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to support immigrants through the Start-Up Visa program are the following 35 organizations:

Alacrity Foundation
Alberta Agriculture and Forestry
Agrivalue Processing Business Incubator
Food Processing Development Centre
Biomedical Commercialization Canada Inc. (operating as Manitoba Technology Accelerator)
Creative Destruction Lab
Empowered Startups Ltd.
Extreme Innovations
Genesis Centre
Highline BETA Inc.
Innovacorp
Innovation Cluster – Peterborough and the Kawarthas
Interactive Niagara Media Cluster o/a Innovate Niagara
Invest Ottawa
Knowledge Park o/a Planet Hatch
LatAm Startups
Launch Academy – Vancouver
LaunchPad PEI Inc.
Millworks Centre for Entrepreneurship
NEXT Canada
North Forge East Ltd.
North Forge Technology Exchange
Platform Calgary
Pycap Inc (o/a Pycap Venture Partners)
Real Investment Fund III L.P. o/a FounderFuel
Ryerson Futures Inc.
Spark Commercialization and Innovation Centre
Spring Activator
The DMZ at Ryerson University
Toronto Business Development Centre (TBDC)
TSRV Canada Inc. (operating as Techstars Canada)
University of Toronto Entrepreneurship Hatchery
VIATEC
Waterloo Accelerator Centre
York Entrepreneurship Development Institute

Colin Singer

Colin Singer is an international acclaimed Canadian immigration lawyer and founder of immigration.ca featured on Wikipedia. Colin Singer is also founding director of the Canadian Citizenship & Immigration Resource Center (CCIRC) Inc. He served as an Associate Editor of ‘Immigration Law Reporter’, the pre-eminent immigration law publication in Canada. He previously served as an executive member of the Canadian Bar Association’s Quebec and National Immigration Law Sections and is currently a member of the Canadian Chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Colin has twice appeared as an expert witness before Canada’s House of Commons Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration. He is frequently recognized as a recommended authority at national conferences sponsored by government and non-government organizations on matters affecting Canada’s immigration and human resource industries. Since 2009, Colin has been a Governor of the Quebec Bar Foundation a non-profit organization committed to the advancement of the profession, and became a lifetime member in 2018.