I found lots of ambition when I wasn’t looking for it.

I was doing some research on the six Canadian companies that scored an average $18 million in Series A funding in the last two months and found the following three companies included in the group:

• Planetary raised $11.4 million to produce clean hydrogen and capture atmospheric carbon through ocean alkalinity enhancement.
• Synex raised $21.8 million to develop non-invasive blood testing technology.
• Radiant Biotherapeutics raised $35 million to develop and commercialize a revolutionary antibody platform leading the new frontier of multi-valent, multi-specific therapeutics to deliver transformative therapies for patients. (Don’t ask me what this means as I don’t understand it either.

I was looking for stats on raises but was frankly impressed by the businesses these three firms have started. No lack of ambition here. These sound like tough challenges in huge markets, exactly the type of companies that should be raising significant Series A Rounds.

Another thing I found was lots of support from Canadian venture capitalists. These three had multiple Canadian investors including Amplify Capital , Evok Innovations , BDC , Creative Destruction Lab , Radical Ventures , Amplitude Ventures , FACIT , TIAP - Toronto Innovation Acceleration Partners , and the SickKids Foundation . They also had investments from firms in the US, the UK and the UAE including Khosla Ventures , Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. , and the Gates Foundation .

I saw two founders with US experience in their resumes, three companies which had employees based in the US to some degree, one who had already hired an American as CEO. The one concern I have is that only one of these companies has someone with significant commercialization experience.

These three represent a formula that can work in Canada. Take a local idea that can serve a big market, add some foreign experience, raise lots of capital on both sides of the border and use that to propel the company to great success. The question is how can we promote this formula widely?