June 14, 2013
The Connaught Start-Up Seed Fund has announced $125,000 in funding for ChipCare, a start-up co-founded by professor Stewart Aitchison and PhD candidate James Dou of The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering.
ChipCare designs and develops handheld cell analyzer systems to provide point-of-care testing solutions for global health applications. Dou is the company’s president, Aitchison its chief scientific officer, and 
U of T’s Connaught Fund aims to strengthen the university’s ability to share researchers’ innovations with global society.
The Connaught Start-up Seed Fund (CSSF)—launched as a pilot program earlier this year—is targeted at investing in research that is moving into the marketplace by way of start-up companies. This is its first funding competition.
Connaught also announced $75,000 in funding to MyVoice Inc., the first assistive and augmentative communication device to introduce location-aware vocabulary that suggests useful words and phrases based on a user’s location. Alex Levy of the Department of Computer Science and TagLab is the company’s chief executive officer, and ECE master’s candidate Aakash Sahney is its chief technical officer.
Crowdmark Inc. is the third start-up receiving funding, headed by Professor James Colliander of the Department of Mathematics. It will receive $100,000.
U of T is the Canadian leader in the university start-up company sector. In each of 2010 and 2011, for example, the university formed more than 20 companies. But each new start-up company faces a major challenge – money – which the fledging businesses need to get off the ground in the areas of hiring employees and funding prototypes, product development, marketing and sales.
“U of T has an impressive record of creating knowledge that has transformative effects around the world,” says Judith Chadwick, assistant vice president, research services. “An important part of making that impact is through start-up companies formed by our research. The Connaught Committee realized the Connaught Fund could make an impact in helping to enable start-up companies overcome the challenges they face in getting going as businesses.”
The Connaught Start-up Seed Fund is a pilot program. The Connaught Committee will be assessing its programs in the coming months and determining priorities for the future. This first competition attracted 20 full applications, which Chadwick feels is a strong indicator of interest in this kind of support.
The discovery of insulin by U of T’s Fredrick Banting and Charles Best in 1921 led to the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories – the first lab to produce insulin commercially and the University’s first start-up company. The Connaught Fund was created from the 1972 sale of Connaught Laboratories and today invests close to $4 million annually in emerging and established scholars at U of T, continuing the University’s legacy of knowledge creation and dissemination.
With files from Paul Fraumeni
Media contact:
Marit Mitchell
Senior Communications Officer
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department
of Electrical & Computer Engineering
416-978-7997; marit.mitchell@utoronto.ca