Two Canadian Startups, Bionym and Finmaven, Officially Launch at C100’s accelerateTO
Two Toronto-based startups took the stage yesterday at C100’s accelerateTO to officially launch their companies in front of a sold out crowd of 750 people.
Karl Martin, founder of Bionym, and Dmitiry Mitchev of Finmaven were each given five minutes to formally introduce their company to the crowd and the world for that matter. Their launch announcements acted as the perfect first course before the main event, an interview with Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey.
Biometric and authentication technology company Bionym is the creator of the Nymi, a heart beat authentication bracelet. Techvibes covered the launch of the Nymi earlier this month when Bionym opened up pre-orders for the device. The Nymi is set to disrupt the digital security space by allowing users to unlock any connected device without passwords, pins or even keys.
The Nymi recognizes your personal electrocardiogram (ECG) using sensors in the wearable tech created by the company. Bionym believes that authenticating with your ECG is much more secure than other common methods including retina scans, facial scans and even a fingerprint scanning – the latter a jab at Apple’s new addition to the iPhone 5C.
The Nymi left quite an impression on the accelerateTO crowd. The Twitter feed on the event jumbotron was flooded with tweets of attendees. Many were pre-orders for the device.
In August of this year, Bionym closed $1.4 million in seed financing with the majority investment from Creative Destruction Lab’s Group of Seven Fellows (“G7”). At the time of this article Bionym had sold just over 4,000 Nymi’s which retail for $79 out of their 25,000 original run.
Finmaven was the second startup to officially launch at the event. Also based in Toronto, Finmaven’s mission is help the investment community turn social noise into social intelligence. Their analytics platform has been under development for about 10 months now. The four-person team has been working with beta testers to refine the platform to get it ready for launch.
Founder Dmitriy Mitchev told Techvibes that he started this company out of seeing an opportunity to use social data to gain insights for the investment community. Finmaven’s niched set of tools hones in on the needs of institutional investors, traders, investment advisors and financial news professionals. It is this specialty that Mitchev says sets Finmaven apart from the likes of Radian6 or Hootsuite.
Mitchev confirmed that Finmaven recently closed a seed fund round two weeks ago but did not disclose the amount.