Toronto University has generated 11 new startups in its business incubator, Creative Destruction Lab, from 15 teams that joined last autumn. Combined with the ventures who graduated in the Lab’s first cohort in June 2013, they have generated a total of $130m in equity value.
Ventures spend eight months in the incubator, where they regularly meet with a group of nine entrepreneurs who successfully created and grew scalable, technology-based businesses. During these meetings, the ventures set specific milestones – business and technical. The aim is to efficiently reduce risk and maximise equity value as quickly as possible.
Among the new companies are Lumotune, a system that electrically tunes the transparency of windows for privacy and energy-saving purposes, T-Bot, which has developed an automated loose-leaf tea vending machine, and Instant Chemistry, which uses genetics-based algorithms to assess human compatibility.
The Creative Destruction Lab was founded in 2012 by professor Ajay Agrawal at the university’s Rotman School of Management. The incubator aims to leverage both faculty and industry networks, inventions and talent from technology-oriented faculties at the university as well as its location in Toronto, Canada’s largest financial centre.
The incubator is now accepting applications for its third cohort.
Jesse Rodgers, director of the Creative Destruction Lab, said: “We are excited to see how much the second cohort of ventures has grown since they first applied back in September 2013. We had an increase in both the overall quality and quantity of applications this year, and it was really great to see 11 ventures successfully complete the program.”
