BC TECH
DIGITAL TWINS MODELS ARE HELPING YVR AND FRASER HEALTH
AI GOVERNANCE HOW TECH CAN ENABLE PUBLIC-SECTOR EFFICIENCY
2024 TIAS THIS YEAR’S TECHNOLOGY IMPACT AWARD WINNERS
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Adam Campbell, Glen Korstrom, Brigitte Petersen
DIGITALLY TWINNING
Capital-heavy organizations are unlocking value and opportunity with 3D renderings, embedded data and simulations
BY GLEN KORSTROM
When people hear the words “digital twin,” they might envision videogame-like representations of built spaces, renderings of planned buildings or virtual versions of equipment.
Digital twins are much more than that.
Indeed, 3D imaging has existed for decades.
What is new with digital twins is how the graphic representations contain data to better equip executives to maintain assets and to run artificial intelligence (AI) simulations.
Those executives can then see what could happen to their buildings or equipment in disaster scenarios, as well as to understand how to operate more sustainably and efficiently.
Executives can, for example, click on a digital representation of a transit-line track within their digital twin. A text box might then pop up that includes information about what materials were used to create the track, when the track was last maintained and what the
expected lifespan is for that section of track.
Digital twins vary in size and scope but are pricy enough that it is usually larger organizations that create them to oversee airports, transportation networks or hospitals.
Mapping entire neighbourhoods or cities in digital twins is possible.
The regional Metro Vancouver government held a request for information that closed in October for third parties to help it to potentially create a digital twin to track water and liquid-waste services so it can make better decisions on how to operate and maintain infrastructure.
Some First Nations have created digital twins to map resources and assets in their traditional territories.
A frame from a video showcasing YVR’s digital twin • VANCOUVER AIRPORT AUTHORITY
The entry-level cost to create a digital twin is about $50,000 but costs can easily soar into the tens of millions of dollars, says LlamaZoo CEO Charles Lavigne.
“Not all digital twins are created the same,” he says. “A $50,000 digital twin does not have predictive maintenance. That’s a unique use case, or integration point, that needs to be built.”
Organizations create digital twins when specific purposes are in mind because that is the way that they create value for owners, he adds.
“One example of a use case would be predictive analysis, or maintenance or operational automation,” Lavigne says. “Building a digital twin that does operational automation probably costs $12 million.”
By operational automation, he means tracking how products might be made at a large assembly plant and move from one area to another, or tracking how customers move throughout a store or facility.
Digital twins are most valuable when the cost of the physical buildings and equipment is high, such as in the billions of dollars.
Lavigne’s clients include large mining companies, such as Teck Resources. Junior mining companies and exploration companies, he says, tend not to create digital twins because they do not get value from them as they do not have large operational assets.
In 2020, Lavigne’s company helped the Mowachaht-Muchalaht First Nation on Vancouver Island become the first in Canada to create a digital twin to better map and manage resources across more than 350,000 hectares of unceded territory, he says.
Those who view that digital twin can control visuals to get the sensation of flying down to the ground to see individual trees or specific buildings, and then up to the sky to see rivers, lakes, mountains, roads and communities, says Lavigne.
Mixed in with the 3D visuals of those features is cultural knowledge and data from timber operations during the past century, he added.
While the digital twin may look like a video game, its essence is data-analysis technology.
He estimated that the First Nation has about 76,000 timber cutblocks and around 87 million trees.
“‘Cutblocks’ is industry jargon for when a block of trees are being cut,” he says. “They can say, ‘Hey, Forestry Co. A is proposing to do some logging here. What is that going to look like in five years? Or, if this hill is going to be clear cut, how can we minimize the impact? Or, do we approve that or not?’”
The ongoing project with the Mowachaht-Muchalaht could provide in future new elements to manage fish stocks or determine how water flows.
Lavigne says his company usually builds digital twins for customers, and the timeline can vary from weeks to months to ongoing projects that take years.
LlamaZoo has a new product that enables customers to use the company’s technology to create their own simple digital twins in hours, he says.
DIGITAL-TWIN TECHNOLOGY CAN BE USEFUL FOR HEALTH-CARE ORGANIZATIONS
Workers broke ground last year on a new Surrey hospital and BC Cancer Centre.
Unfortunately, the architectural design was complete long before Fraser Health last year became the first health authority in Canada to have a digital twin, says Jennifer MacGregor, the organization’s vice-president of digital patient and provider experience.
Digital twin insights, however, will help her health authority’s executives determine how to arrange clinical-services departments in the new hospital, how big to make them and how long operating
Gerri Sinclair is newly the Vancouver Airport Authority’s chief planning, prioritization and performance-optimization o cer • ROB KRUYT
Shabnam Mirseraji-Flann oversees digital twin development at ProTrans BC, which is the AtkinsRealis subsidiary that operates the Canada Line • ROB KRUYT
hours need to be.
The placing of the departments will be based on how patients usually manoeuvre through facilities, she says.
Digital twin data will also help determine how many staff Fraser Health needs for departments such as inpatient care, neurology or physiotherapy, for example, she says.
The health region will also use data from its digital twin, developed by Toronto-based Verto Health, to determine where to put urgent primary care centres (UPCCs,) she says.
“We will constantly be adding more UPCCs as demographics and the population require,” she says.
METRO VANCOUVER TRANSIT LINE HAS A DIGITAL TWIN
TransLink has yet to create a system-wide digital twin for its entire transportation network, although its partner, which operates the Canada Line, has had a digital twin for nearly three years.
AtkinsRealis—the company formerly known as SNC Lavalin—owns the Canada Line operator ProTrans BC.
“It’s not like a video-game scenario,” Shabnam Mirseraji-Flann says of the company’s digital twin.
She is AtkinsRealis’ Canada Line director of systems assurance, sustainability, innovation capital, operations and maintenance.
The point of the digital twin is to help ensure trains run on time and workers perform maintenance when needed.
The digital twin is more a collection of data than it is a 3D rendering, she says.
“If you click on a module, you’ll see tables, graphs and analytics tied into data and some AI-driven work orders that have been created,” she says.
“You can click on a track map, click a section of the track and it will show you all the data with colour codes.”
Workers can see, review and quickly take action to fix track defects, she adds.
ProTrans BC used what is commonly known as LiDAR (light, detection and ranging) as well as ultrasonic and other sensors to create the data that is fed into its digital twin.
The digital twin uses as a data repository each section of track, every switch, signal and siding.
When users select an element, they can see the materials from which it is made, its specifications and tolerances, details of when it was last maintained and data to show its importance to operations.
Some switches are vital to ensuring trains run on time and that has been ProTrans BC’s priority, Mirseraji-Flann says.
While the line can run simulations to ensure trains run on time, it has not yet produced modules to enable it to run simulations for how the line would fare were there to be an earthquake or terrorist attack, she says.
Time will tell when or if Metro Vancouver’s other SkyTrain lines get digital twins.
“BCRTC [British Columbia Rapid Transit Co.], which operates the Expo and Millennium Lines, recently made an investment in modern asset-management tools that serves its current needs,” TransLink spokeswoman Tina Lovgreen tells BIV
“TransLink and BCRTC will continue monitoring digital twinning developments to see whether the technology will add value to future practices.”
VANCOUVER AIRPORT AUTHORITY EVOLVES ITS DIGITAL TWIN
Vancouver Airport Authority (VAA) CEO Tamara Vrooman in 2021 joked to BIV that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”
Her authority, which operates Vancouver International Airport (YVR) had started making virtual-reality videos that involved filming the airport’s interior and exterior in granular detail. Helicopters conducted overhead flights while carrying equipment that recorded extremely high-resolution images, she said at the time.
“Tamara had prescience,” says Gerri Sinclair, the VAA’s new chief planning, prioritization and performance-optimization officer.
Air traffic had ground to an almost complete stop. The airfield was empty and it was a great time to digitally capture the airport authority’s assets, Sinclair says.
The VAA worked with the global giant Unity Labs and Vancouver companies GeoSim Cities and Thinkly to produce that original digital twin.
Sinclair says that first digital twin was a “a closed system and it was very difficult to integrate all the use-cases and the data streams that we wanted to be included.”
That prompted the VAA to leave the Unity Labs platform and build a 2D model based on what Sinclair calls open systems.
The 3D visuals of the original digital twin are still available on YouTube, but the practical digital twin is in 2D, she says.
That new technology enables the airport authority to model aircraft movements and activity on the airfield to reduce GHG emissions.
The technology also alerts staff when delays prevent luggage from quickly getting to baggage carousels, Sinclair says.
Executives can click links in their smartphone browsers to access specific parts of the digital twin that they are authorized to view, she adds.
The plan is to eventually allow the public to view parts of the digital twin, so they can better plan their arrival at the airport and see in real time whether the customs or security areas are busy, for example.
Other potential future simulations could relate to how the airport can better function in snowy weather or after a bad earthquake, says Sinclair.
“Suddenly everybody wants something,” she adds. “Our website people want to have access to it. Our operations team now wants more information, more data sources. HR would like us to do training modules on it, which we are. So, we have a huge amount of development work. We’re choosing and prioritizing.” ç
Fraser Health’s vice-president of digital patient and provider experience Jennifer MacGregor says her organization’s digital twin will help it design future hospitals • CHUNG CHOW
The innovation economy is an opportunity B.C. must
BY JILL TIPPING
With B.C.’s tech sector growing three times faster than the rest of the economy, technology occupations offer opportunities for all British Columbians. Today, there are 242,100 people employed in tech roles in the province, both in the sector itself and in technology roles in nontech companies.
Within the sector we project a further 80,000 jobs will be created in the next five years, with wages exceeding the provincial average by 75 per cent. And, contrary to the common misperception that tech employment opportunities are confined to large unban centres, 12 per cent of B.C.’s tech roles are actually located in non-urban areas.
Over the last few months, BC Tech has been consulting members on their future expectations for industry growth, the supply of tech talent and what training qualifications they look for.
The good news is that industry growth and demand for talent is expected to remain high.
Today’s tech talent market is more balanced with the extreme salary inflation we saw a couple of years ago abating. But job growth remains strong. Only two per cent of tech employers expect to shrink their workforces going forward and overall the industry expects 23 per cent growth over the next two years. That amounts to 11 per cent annual growth, in line with Statistics Canada data that the sector grew by 34 per cent from 2020 to 2022. And, contrary to scare stories about AI, members told us that rapidly evolving technologies, such as artificial intelligence, are opportunities to scale their operations and expand their workforce.
The bad news is that talent supply is not keeping up with demand.
Talent is the raw material of the tech sector. Without sufficient, sustained investment in talent development we risk slowing a vital economic engine for the province.
The B.C. government’s Labour Market Outlook projects industry growth of only 2.6 per cent each year for the next decade—a projection that needs to be updated to ensure we are planning and investing at the right scale for more British Columbians to secure these sustainable, secure, well-paid jobs.
Training capacity for traditional four-year degree programs in B.C. is above 90 per cent, indicating popularity but also saturation and limited capacity to grow. The 10 per cent growth potential of post-secondary institutions in the next five years is far less than the 54 per cent growth in demand for qualified talent. Four-year post-secondary degrees continue to be highly valued by the tech
industry and are a critically important source for the most technical roles so it is clear that there is a need for further investment in post-secondary capacity.
This said, there is more good news. And that is that employers are open to new talent pathways and qualifications.
Adding post-secondary seats is not the only way to increase talent supply. Our members are also open to micro credentials and other non-traditional routes and are keen to emphasize the key importance of work-integrated learning rather than a degree alone.
Increasingly, tech employers look not only to new graduates as potential hires but also to experienced talent transitioning from other industries. Such transitioning workers may not be able to afford the cost and time of a four-year program but high-quality micro credential courses offer a mechanism to rapidly reskill with job ready skills. BC Tech has been testing this approach by offering subsidized three-month, full-time technical courses and our results show over 92 per cent of job seeking individuals are employed within six months of course graduation.
There is growing acceptance of these micro-credential courses especially as most of our members incorporate (gender-blind) technical assessments prior to interview.
With all the right ingredients in place, now is the time to invest in the talent pathways to jobs in technology and capitalize on this economic opportunity for B.C. The innovation economy offers not only economic benefit to the province, but a bright future for all British Columbians.
Jill Tipping is president and CEO of BC TECH.
AI-POWERED GOVERNANCE
Arti cial intelligence technologies have the potential to improve public services and bring e ciency to the public sector
governments
and
BY NELSON BENNETT
If
there is one area that’s ripe for AI disruption, it’s government and the many critical services provided by governments in Canada.
Various types of artificial intelligence and machine learning could reduce red tape, make citizen services easier and more accessible, improve outcomes in health care and public transit, detect fraud and assist in everything from predicting wildfire patterns to helping people do their taxes.
“Generative AI will transform how the public sector operates and the nature of employees’ tasks and activities, driving impactful improvements in service delivery, operational efficiency, and citizen engagement,” the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) says in a recent report on AI in public services. “By 2033, potential productivity improvements from GenAI could be worth $1.75 trillion per year globally across all levels of government.”
Public health in particular could benefit from AI.
“AI has the potential to create new efficiencies in administrative
processes and provide a precise and faster diagnosis and treatment plan for each patient, resulting in reduced length of stay, fewer subsequent readmissions, and reduced costs,” says Deloitte Insights.
Some national governments are further ahead than others in adopting AI strategies for public service. Singapore launched its National AI strategy in 2019, with the goal of implementing AI in five key sectors: Health care, transportation, education, smart cities and public safety.
Canada also has a strategy for implementing AI into the public service. On April 24, 2024, Canada’s Treasury Board launched an AI strategy for the public service, with $2.4 billion earmarked in the 2024 budget for investments in AI.
“Artificial intelligence has been used in the government for decades, but with recent rapid advancements in technology, including
Will
embrace AI
other technologies to address critical challenges? • PROVINCE OF BC/FLICKR
the growing use of generative AI, the Government of Canada must remain a leader in its innovation,” Treasury Board president Anita Anand said in May during a roundtable with AI experts to discuss the development of an AI strategy for Canada’s public service.
“To do so, we must explore further practical possibilities associated with artificial intelligence to advance its adoption across the federal public sector for the benefit of our productivity and service delivery.”
The B.C. government appears to have no similar strategy for using AI in public services, though some ministries and quasi-government organizations have begun using various types of AI and machine learning.
The B.C. Wildfire Service, for example, has been experimenting with predictive technology to better understand forest fire risks and patterns. Earlier this year, the service introduced technology intended to make real-time wildfire behaviour predictions. Wildfire growth modelling uses weather data, topography and fuel maps to try to predict potential fire behaviour.
Any area involving large amounts of data and defined rules are areas where AI may have applications, says BC Tech president and CEO Jill Tipping.
“Where there’s data and you’ve got rules—so you can feed in some clear guardrails—then having an AI application recommend areas to look at, or areas not to be concerned about, would be, I think, quite productive,” she says.
AI could be particularly useful in reducing workloads for public servants and addressing worker shortages.
“Anytime you have a shortage of labour or backlogs or bottlenecks, that is a clue that AI or software generally could be helpful to you,” Tipping says.
Interacting with government agencies or municipal governments can be time and labour intensive. AI chatbots can assume a lot of the mundane grunt work of answering questions—anytime of the day. BC Tech runs peer-to-peer forums, and its CTO group recently discussed the successes they have been seeing with AI chatbots in customer service.
“They were finding 40 per cent of the questions could actually be resolved through an AI chatbot, rather than having to involve human interaction at all,” Tipping says. “It just seems to me, if that’s useful for industry, it would also have quite a lot of applications for governments.”
One area where predictive and generative AI shows promise is in insurance claims processing and fraud detection.
“The application of Gen AI and machine learning in claims processing enables insurers to proactively detect suspicious claims and fraudulent behavior,” the Info-Tech Research Group said in report earlier this year.
Whether the Insurance Corp. of British Columbia (ICBC) is using or planning to use AI for things like claims processing and fraud detection is unknown. A spokesperson for ICBC said that, because it is a Crown corporation, it was limited in what it could say because B.C. was in an election campaign—when this magazine was going to press. Likewise the B.C. government’s chief information officer was also unable to discuss potential uses of AI in B.C. government services, due to the provincial election.
One area where AI is useful is in analyzing large amounts of real-time and historical data and then making predictions, including predicting traffic patterns. TransLink has been using AI for some time now for its Next Bus app.
“Next Bus uses machine learning for bus departure predictions,” says TransLink spokesperson Tina Lovgreen. “When buses are running on the road, it periodically sends us their GPS location … and based on that and other information provided, it helps estimate when the bus will arrive at a certain location.”
Another area where AI is already in use is public health care. Fraser Health has been deploying AI in a variety of ways. The health authority uses AI programs to help it understand work flows and trends to plan better for staffing, for example.
“We look at a positive outcome as how accurate the model is,” says Jennifer MacGregor, vice-president of digital patient and provider ex-
Jennifer MacGregor is vice-president of digital patient and provider experience at Fraser Health • ROB KRUYT
perience. “So if the model predicts that next week we need X number of providers for X number of shifts, and we meet that, and then we go through the next week and we prove it out, that’s success for these models. It’s about accuracy.”
Fraser Health also has an AI chatbot, called Fraser, for engaging with patients, and another chatbot that is a virtual assistant and virtual trainer for Fraser Health’s frontline staff.
Fraser Health is also using AI in diagnostics and disease detection. It uses a tool called GI Genius used in colonoscopies for colon cancer screening.
“These technologies—machine learning technologies—are really good at pattern recognition, really good at looking at images, and so it is an augmentation, a tool to support our clinicians when they’re performing these colonoscopies to detect potential adenoma (non-cancerous tumours),” MacGregor says. “It’s like a second set of eyes for our clinician, and it has been demonstrating some great outcomes.”
And because AI is good at is analyzing large data sets and making predictions, Fraser Health also uses it to analyze the health region’s demographics.
“This gives an opportunity for us to look at the population and aggregate and do big data analytics to predict, let’s say, what could happen in our particular population around chronic disease,” MacGregor says. “It gives us an opportunity to identify cohorts of the population that are at increased risk for a particular disease, and then it can inform us on how we want to do health promotion campaigns.” ç
The processing of taxes and detection of tax fraud are some potential uses of AI in government and public services • SUBMITTED
TAKING FLIGHT
British Columbia is becoming a leader in electric aviation, despite the challenges that come with innovating in a heavily regulated industry
BY ADAM CAMPBELL
Anew era of sustainable ight is taking o in British Columbians’ very own backyard.
In recent years, the province has emerged as a hub for electric aviation, with local companies such as Sealand Flight and Harbour Air leading the adoption of these technologies.
BIV spoke with both companies about the current state of electric aviation in the province.
THE FIRST ELECTRIC ‘COMMERCIAL’ FLIGHT IN CANADA Sealand Flight is Canada’s first flight school implementing a fully electric airplane into their operations—a Slovenian-made two-seater Pipistrel Velis Electro.
Established in 2014 and based out of Campbell River, the school provides lessons and programs geared toward private and commercial pilot licences.
In 2023, the school was selected by Transport Canada to participate in a trial program that evaluated the effectiveness of electric planes for training purposes.
The school purchased the plane, with partial funding from the province’s Clean Vehicle program, on February 18 of this year, and subsequently carried out Canada’s first commercial electric flight with a student on June 14.
Harbour Air’s eBeaver at the 2024 Everything Electric Canada show • HARBOUR AIR PHOTO
Students flying the Velis Electro are able to complete almost half of their training in the plane before being moved to an internal combustion aircraft, something Sealand Flight spokesperson Mike Andrews says is partly due to its range.
“Its sole use is to train the fundamentals of flight to new pilots,” he says. “It doesn’t yet have the range and capabilities to be a major cross country machine or anything like that.… Until we have the charging infrastructure to take those trips.”
Although its weight capacity and range are limited, its primary advantage lies in its ease of operation in comparison to a conventional aircraft, something crucial for student training.
“It’s really unique. In fact, I would say it’s simpler,” Andrews says.
“When it comes to [conventional] airplanes, there’s a little bit more engine management. You have fuel and carburetor controls, … and all these things. There’s a little bit more going on in the cockpit, and especially for new pilots, it can be a little bit overwhelming.”
“In the electric airplane, there’s one digital instrument that shows you where the battery levels are, what power setting the motors are in, and there’s one power lever to control it.”
Aerodynamically, the plane handles just like a traditional airplane, but the major difference is understanding how the systems work together in the electric aircraft. This is why the school also offers transition training to licensed pilots who want to gain experience in this new environment.
The electric aviation industry is still in its early stages, and like with electric cars, industry leaders say it will take a few years to develop and establish the infrastructure necessary to support it.
One important aspect to consider for the pace of development is the heavy regulation of the aviation industry. Further leaps forward are expected in the next decade or so, Andrews says.
The prospect of a future greener aviation industry is an encouraging one, with Sealand Flight choosing to partake in this trial program not only to lower emissions, but also to change the framework allowing more commercial aircraft to take off.
“It’s tangible, it’s here, it’s possible,” says Andrews. “To start
training the next generation of pilots on the next generation of aircraft. We’re not set up yet to make a major shift, but that’s where we want to be headed.”
So why is the province emerging as a hub for electric aviation?
Andrews says this can be partly attributed to the provincial government’s investment and adoption of green technologies and infrastructure.
“There’s the B.C. government, which is highly supportive of this; we have provincial funding, as well as support from BC Hydro, who have given us an electrical engineer to help us engineer charging infrastructure at other airports as well.”
Another group supporting greener aviation initiatives is the Canadian Advances Air Mobility, a Vancouver-based consortium that groups innovators in the industry and acts as a catalyst for the advancement of sustainable flight.
THE WORLD’S FIRST AIRLINE FLYING AN ELECTRIC AIRCRAFT
Another leader in the electric aviation realm is Harbour Air, North America’s largest commercial seaplane airline with over 40 planes in their fleet, serving 500,000 passengers a year across 12 destinations in British Columbia.
Harbour Air was also the first in the world to fly a prototype electric aircraft: A retrofitted DHC-2 de Havilland Beaver known as the eBeaver.
The plane first took flight in 2019, and is powered by a 750-horsepower all-electric motor from magniX USA Inc., an electric aircraft engine manufacturer based in Everett, Wash.
This new engine adds 300 horsepower to the base model’s 450 horsepower.
Committed to building the world’s first all-electric commercial airline, Harbour Air signed a letter of intent with magniX for the supply of 50 magni650 engines in early 2024.
All the work on the electric water plane was performed at the Harbour Air Aerospace Services main hangar in Richmond, with
conversion work planned to be made at the same location in the future.
This further solidifies the region’s reputation as an innovation leader, with plans to mass produce and commercialize the plane currently underway, according to communications co-ordinator David Evans, speaking on behalf of the eBeaver team via email.
“Absolutely, we want to share this technology with any and all owners and operators who are interested,” he said. “We have already signed letters of intent with multiple customers, and will continue to convert and sell the aircraft as long as there is demand.”
Plans to convert bigger planes in the future like the Twin Otter are also in the works, but Evans says the fleet will have to “decarbonize one aircraft type at a time.”
While not all aircraft might be able to be fully electric, the company is looking at decarbonizing as much as technology will allow, creating technologies that can be scaled up into larger aircraft. Benefits of an electric engine include greater efficiency, less noise pollution and a significantly reduced carbon footprint compared to a fuel-powered engine.
In a standard seaplane piston engine, 80 per cent of the fuel turns into rejected heat, but for an electric motor only about seven to 12 per cent is lost.
There is also a considerable improvement in the performance of the eBeaver due to a reduction in drag, allowing for faster takeoffs, a greater climb gradient and a reduction in power required to maintain level flight, according to Evans.
However, the fundamental disadvantage of the airplane is the loss of range and endurance. Although most of the company’s destinations fall within these parameters, fully electric flight is not yet viable for longer flights, including trips to Seattle. Technology to
support these routes is expected to be available in the early 2030s. Another challenge is charging and short turnarounds, something Harbour Air plans on solving by improving their infrastructure.
“We are looking at installing 150kW chargers,” says Evans. “Those will allow for a recharge time of approximately 30 minutes, which is close to our turnaround time.”
According to Harbour Air specifications, the eBeaver’s standard range with six passengers and a total payload of 552 kilograms is 82 kilometres, with an endurance of 60 minutes and a cruising speed of 233 kilometres per hour.
In its extended range configuration of four passengers and a maximum payload of 425 kilograms, the plane could travel as far as 130 kilometres for 75 minutes. Cruising speeds would remain the same.
Harbour Air is currently working on obtaining full certification with the relevant government agencies by 2027 as part of its next electrification phase, with the ultimate goal of reducing its carbon footprint and helping develop technologies that can be scaled for use in larger aircraft, added Evans.
“The goal is to have a fleet operating on sustainable aviation technologies in whatever format that presents,” he says. “For the smaller aircraft that could be fully electric, for the larger aircraft that could be hybrid or hydrogen technologies.”
“All technological advancements have to start somewhere, and the best way to get this technology into market is to install it on the smaller, known aircraft platforms,” he added.
While the prospect of electrifying widebody planes seems distant, the company said it hopes to chart a path towards decarbonizing the industry alongside players like Sealand Flight, further establishing the region as one of the world’s hubs for electric aviation. ç
Aerial picture of Sealand Flight’s Velis Electro • SEALAND FLIGHT PHOTO
HOW TECH POWERS B.C.
DESPITE CHALLENGES, THE SECTOR
SUPPORTS THE PROVINCIAL ECONOMY
BY BRIGITTE PETERSEN
The B.C. technology sector growing its gross domestic product contribution nearly three times faster than the entire provincial economy in 2023 is indicative of how innovation and industry continue to serve as a major economic driver for the province.
The sector’s history is filled with groundbreaking innovations. Key milestones include the founding of Stemcell Technologies in 1993 and Avigilon in 2004; Electronic Arts creating 2016’s biggest game
of the year with FIFA 17; Aspect Biosystems’ founding in 2013; and AbCellera filing its patent in 2020 for the world’s first COVID-19 antibody therapy to reach human testing.
Judi Hess is vice-chair of Copperleaf • SUBMITTED
BC Tech Hall-Of-Famer Judi Hess, vice-chair of Copperleaf’s board of directors, says B.C.’s tech sector has experienced “massive change” and diversified the province’s economy over the past four decades.
Hess, Copperleaf’s CEO until 2023, began her career as a software engineer in the 1980s at MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA). She later became the president of Creo until Eastman Kodak bought it in 2005 for almost US$1 billion. At Copperleaf, she took the firm from a fledgling company in 2009 to an IPO in 2021, making Hess one of two women in the history to take a tech company public on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
“When I started here 40 years ago, there were three tech companies and now there are over 10,000,” says Hess. “That means hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs have been created here in B.C. through the tech sector.”
For Hess, one of the key milestones was the launch of MDA— founded by John MacDonald and Vern Dettwiler in 1969. The space technology company, now headquartered in Brampton, develops industry-leading robotics, satellite systems and other products for the Canadian Space Agency, NASA and the International Space Station.
“You have to give it to John and Vern, UBC pioneers in space and technology,” says Hess. “It was an international success story and spawned so many more companies that grew the tech sector in B.C., like Creo. After that, tech started to take-off here. More companies just created more companies.”
Hess says the Premier’s Technology Council—set up to advise the province to help drive the adoption and growth of technology in B.C.—also helped shape provincial policy.
“That had an impact too and meant that the B.C. government cared about technology to diversify our primary-industry economy,” she says.
THE SECTOR TODAY
B.C. has about 242,100 technology jobs across the province and another 80,000 will be created in the next five years, according to BC Tech. Today’s sector includes everything from cybersecurity to agri-tech companies and life sciences—largely powered by data analytics and AI.
BC Tech’s president and CEO Jill Tipping says while technology continues to evolve, the common theme of “purpose-driven founders looking to change the world with built-in-B.C. innovation deployed to global customers” remains unchanged.
“We’ve seen huge growth over the years—and most notably a real acceleration in that growth in the past five years,” says Tipping. “The areas of focus have changed over the years from advanced manufacturing and telecoms to biotech and gaming, and now cleantech, enterprise software and AI.”
According to Statistics Canada, 75 per cent of B.C.’s GDP, 80 per cent of its jobs and more than half of its exports come from the services sector, and Tipping says technology continues to play an
oversized role in bolstering B.C.’s economy.
“Over the past three decades, a massive shift has occurred as we’ve rapidly become a knowledge and service-driven economy,” explains Tipping. “And yet our economic-narrative remains grounded in the 20th-century idea of B.C. as primarily an exporter of natural resources.”
One of the sector’s key challenges is ensuring a talent supply that keeps up with industry demand, according to BC Tech’s recently released publication BC Tech Talent 2024.
Hess agrees that attracting talent continues to be an issue, but says the sector is strongly supported by universities, immigration policies, diversity and B.C.’s landscape—all key to attracting staff.
“Talent is the key to success in this sector, and that is how we will be able to continue to fuel our growth,” she says. “We have great people, and we always need more.”
While B.C. continues to be an attractive place to live, the cost of living and housing continue to be a challenge.
“How can we attract the right people and build the ecosystem here with those challenges?” asks Hess. “Of course, remote work has helped alleviate this a bit and allowed people to continue to work from lower cost centres in B.C. and elsewhere,” citing the need to enable people to stay and raise families as key to the sector’s future.
Hess says another challenge is securing Canadian anchor companies headquartered in B.C., mentioning biotech company Kardium as an example of local innovation for pioneering the Globe Pulsed Field System for treatment of atrial fibrillation.
“It’s hard to scale up and create those giants—they often get sold before they reach that point,” she says. “This has been a long-held problem here and I know people are working on it. We need to think bigger, take more risk, and have access to large amounts of capital to drive that engine. It all comes down to people in the end. That’s what tech is about.”
MOVING FORWARD
Using technology to deliver better customer service and drive supply chain efficiencies is essential to growth and profitability in every industry, according to Tipping.
“Today, every company is a tech company,” she says. “Tech-savvy workers are in demand in every business, not just tech companies, which is why we advocate that tech skills training is the number one priority for B.C.’s economy.
Tipping says while she sees more companies scaling up into anchor companies with global reach, more scaleups are needed to provide high-paying jobs, attract investment capital, and contribute to the economy.
“While we’re proud of how the sector has grown, at BC Tech we don’t believe we have yet met our potential for scaleups and anchors,” she says.
B.C. could become the leading jurisdiction in Canada for homegrown tech and global companies, according to Tipping.
“The future for tech in B.C. is limited only by our ambition,” she says. “We just need to ensure that the policy, tax, and—above all— talent infrastructure is in place to support our full potential.”
As B.C.’s creative technology industry association, DigiBC promotes, supports, and accelerates the growth of video game, animation, visual effects, XR and virtual production companies.
Loc Dao, DigiBC’s executive director and co-founder of the annual Signals Creative Tech Expo, says creative technology is thriving.
“I think a big part of our strength is in our creative tech sector,” says Dao. “You just have to visit Science World’s Creative Technology Gallery to get a snapshot of our past, current and future in
one place. It features movies, animation and video games made right here in B.C.”
Dao says the sector’s key strengths are its talented people who form a community.
“We’re always looking for ways to create opportunities for people to connect with each other,” he says, mentioning the Beta Lounge: Interactive Digital Media Conference — a business-to-business networking opportunity for indie video game and XR/VR publishers at the Signals event.
“We’re also — much like everyone else — learning about the evolving role that AI plays in our world,” says Dao.ç
IT ALL COMES DOWN TO PEOPLE IN THE END. THAT’S WHAT TECH IS ABOUT
Judi Hess Vice-chair, Copperleaf
BC Tech is honoured to have played a part in the journey of many BC success stories and we are proud to highlight BC’s incredible tech community at our annual Technology Impact Awards. None of this would be possible without the support of our generous partners. Our special thanks to ...
Presenting Partners
Award Partners
Supporting Partners
Company of the Year Startup
Presented in partnership with Electronic Arts
Daanaa addresses a critical issue in the power transaction landscape, where fragmentation and system complexity hinder efficiency and innovation. Conventional power electronics manufacturers offer specialized solutions, leading to disjointed value chains and varied customer experiences. To tackle this, Daanaa developed a Power Transaction Unit (PTU), an integrated circuit-based system that consolidates and streamlines energy transaction functions into one, programmable module.
Pilot exists to enable people everywhere to discover and share experiences together. We believe that social technologies should exist to enable real life experiences, not impersonate them. So, we’re helping to create a world where people feel fulfilled by their connections and experiences. That’s why our ambition is to become the hub of global travel experience, starting with our social trip planner, to help you make the most of every trip. Discover, plan, and share trips with friends your way. Pilot adapts to you.
Workforce Wellness is a groundbreaking solution that addresses a critical and rapidly growing problem in the healthcare industry. We are unique in our comprehensive approach that leverages cutting-edge technologies to deliver personalized well-being support at scale. Our people management platform drives enterprise growth by enabling leadership teams to create dynamic organizations where employees are engaged, energized and empowered.
Company of the Year Growth
Presented in partnership with Osler
Apera AI helps manufacturers make their factories more flexible and productive. Robots enhanced with Apera’s Vue software have 4D Vision—the ability to see and handle objects with human-like capability. Challenging applications such as bin picking, sorting, packaging, and assembly are now open to fast, precise and reliable automation. Apera AI is led by an experienced team from high-growth companies focused on robotics, artificial intelligence, and advanced manufacturing. The company’s customers include the world’s leading automakers, including Ford, Stellantis and Magna International.
an environmentally and economically sustainable way. Our disruptive closed-loop process applies organic, inorganic, and electrochemistry to reduce the environmental impact of the mining and recycling critical metals processes. This process enables efficient metal extraction which are uneconomical or infeasible by current pyro or hydro metallurgy approaches, leaving high-quality metal products, including Platinum group metals (PGM), Copper, Nickel, Cobalt, etc. The high-grade alloys produced by the pH7 closed-loop process will then be refined by industrial customers.
Browse AI is the first no-code web automation SaaS allowing non-technical users to train custom AI robots that turn any website into a spreadsheet or data pipeline in minutes. In just 2.5 years since launch, 400,000 individuals, including teams at 50 Fortune500 companies, have used Browse AI to extract and monitor data from 90,000 websites. Browse AI has been recognized by G2 as the top trending Data Extraction software globally in spring of 2024. Browse AI’s mission is to democratize access to information on the internet, giving every individual and business equal opportunity to benefit from information on the web.
pH7 has created an innovative process for extracting and refining critical metals that will enable the transition to renewable energy in
VodaSafe has revolutionized water rescue and recovery globally with the development and delivery of its flagship product, AquaEye, the world’s first hand-held intelligent sonar device. Combining sonar and artificial intelligence technologies specifically designed to identify humans, AquaEye can search nearly an acre of water in one minute. Born at the intersection of engineering and lifesaving on the West Coast of Canada, VodaSafe is committed to enabling search and rescue, emergency responders, public safety divers, law enforcement and lifeguards to execute faster, safer and more effective water rescue and victim recovery.
VoxCell has created the first vascularized tissue models with Canada's highest-resolution 3D bioprinter, proprietary bioinks, and trade vascularization software, addressing the 95% drug development failure rate, costing $60B USD annually. Our technology mimics human tissue, allowing early identification of unviable drug candidates, saving time and resources. Notable highlights include the commercialization of our Breast Cancer Universal Bioink, adaptable to any bioprinter. These milestones showcase VoxCell's commitment to revolutionizing drug development, benefiting the pharmaceutical industry and patients alike.
Winner Winner
Company of the Year Scale
Presented in partnership with Clio
Winner
Oxygen8 is a clean energy technology company that helps create healthy and sustainable buildings using material science, advanced engineering design and intelligent controls. At Oxygen8, we are reinventing how buildings are ventilated to significantly improve indoor air quality by providing 00% fresh filtered outside air to occupants with very low energy consumption and no carbon emissions. As of 2024, Oxygen8’s ventilation systems have been installed in over 1,000 commercial buildings across North America.
Vancouver-based Invinity Energy Systems is a global leader in stationary energy storage. The Company manufactures high-throughput Vanadium Flow Batteries (VFB) for large-scale storage projects at commercial businesses and on the grid. Invinity is active in all major global energy storage markets with over 75 MWh of systems already deployed or contracted for delivery across over 79 sites in 15 countries. Invinity's batteries are safe and economical, and run continually with no degradation for over 25 years, making them suitable for the most demanding applications.
Novarc is a full-stack robotics company specializing in the design and manufacturing of cobots and AI-based machine vision solutions for autonomous welding. Novarc’s Spool Welding Robot (SWR ) is the world’s first welding cobot designed for pipe welding automation. As a proven pioneer in the field, Novarc’s team is dedicated to solving challenging welding automation problems that improve customers’ bottom line.
Company of the Year Anchor
Presented in partnership with Blakes
Jane is an online practice management platform for health and wellness practitioners that makes it simple to book, chart, schedule, bill, and get paid. The Jane mission is to *Help the Helpers* and facilitate the administrative aspect of running a clinic so practitioners can focus their time on helping their patients. Over 140,000 practitioners and 50,000 clinic support staff across a variety of non-primary care specialties rely on Jane as they open, run, and grow their practices.
Klue is an AI-powered competitive enablement and win-loss platform. Using Klue, product marketing and competitive intelligence teams collect and analyze intel from across the web, their company and buyers, ensuring go-to-market teams have the competitive insights needed to win more business. Klue leverages LLM’s and AI across its platform, generating insights like competitor strengths and weaknesses automatically, from a corpus of millions of proprietary and licensed data sources.
KOHO’s purpose is to empower Canadians to build a great financial foundation with products that are radically transparent and easy to manage. We first launched in 20 7, and we have since built a community of over 1 million users. Leading investors around the globe believe in our vision, and we’ve successfully raised over $320M to make our vision a reality.
The world needs metals to thrive. MineSense provides revolutionary BC-made technology and data solutions that help mines maximize
global metals while minimizing global impacts. Specifically, we help ore mines increase output, efficiencies, and profitability while minimizing environmental footprints across land, water, and energy. Our robust sensors, the first of their kind, are used at the start of the ore mining process, instantly and accurately characterizing minerals for optimized metal recovery. Real-time data improves immediate and long-term operations, automation, and planning, increasing the mine’s results, life extension, and overall bottom line.
E-One Moli Energy (Canada) Ltd. (“E-One Moli”) is a cutting-edge lithium-ion battery R&D center in Maple Ridge, B.C., with a rich history dating back to a UBC Physics lab in 1977. Today, E-One Moli is a global leader in materials research and battery development, known for their MOLICEL© brand powering high performance EVs, tools, medical gear, and more. E-One Moli’s passionate team thrives on battery innovation! The increasing need for green energy is driving the industry to investigate newer, safer and more energy efficient lithium-ion cell technology. E-One Moli continues to foster industry partnerships to develop world-leading battery systems.
ZEMA Global Data Corporation (formerly ZE PowerGroup Inc.) was founded in 1995 and is based in Richmond, B.C., with a secondary office in the U and satellite offices in Houston, TX, USA and Singapore with over 200 talented professionals as of 2024. ZEMA is internationally recognized as a leading data software development and professional services organization with a global presence in industries ranging from energy, agriculture, finance, mining, shipping, renewable energy, reinsurance, supply chain, and commodities. ZEMA is the developer of ZEMA™, an award-winning data integration, management and analytics platform, serving customers from medium-sized to Fortune 500 corporations globally.
Winner
Gamechanger Ambition
Presented in partnership with Export Development Canada
DarkVision Technologies Inc. is a BC-based tech company that has been disrupting the industrial imaging market since 2013. Our tools are revealing never before seen or understood cause and effects in critical infrastructure. We have created the world’s most advanced acoustic-based imaging platform and are packaging it into multiple new product lines. Our rapidly growing team of experts from machine vision, medical imaging, aerospace design, and computer graphics have come together to revolutionize how industry quantifies and visualizes the integrity of critical assets. Our work has been validated with significant year over year growth and multiple industry awards.
D-Wave is a leader in the development and delivery of quantum computing systems, software, and services, and is the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers—and the only company building both annealing quantum computers and gate-model quantum computers. Our mission is to unlock the power of quantum computing today to benefit business and society. We do this by delivering customer value with practical quantum applications for problems as diverse as logistics, artificial intelligence, materials sciences, drug discovery, scheduling, cybersecurity, and financial modeling.
Photonic is at the forefront of building largescale, fault-tolerant, distributed quantum computers. The company's unique architecture, based on proven spin qubits in silicon, incorporates a native telecom networking
interface and leverages the manufacturability benefits of silicon. This approach enables quantum systems to scale both vertically and horizontally, providing the foundational building blocks for truly scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computing. Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, Photonic also has offices in the United States, the United ingdom, and Europe.
Voxelis is a spin-off of Taeron Systems Inc., a BC-based designer and manufacturer of hardware for the helicopter industry. Today, we face a shortage of skilled pilots which presents a threat to wildfire agencies, who rely on these pilots as a cornerstone asset in wildfire response. Voxelis aims to capture the knowledge of the best pilots and use it to train an AI-based pilot with equivalent skills. Voxelis is on a mission to launch the first certified, mass deployable, low-cost AI edge computing system for the helicopter industry that will gather rich data about the fire environment and how pilots fly, with the long term goal of enabling the conversion of existing helicopters to autonomous helitankers.
Gamechanger Climate Leadership
Presented in partnership with MDA Space
Climate Action Secretariat, a division within the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, is responsible for setting the direction on climate for the province. This includes working across ministries to implement climate strategy (the CleanBC Roadmap to 2030 and Climate Preparedness and Adaptation Strategy), coordinating ongoing funding for climate policy and programs, and managing B.C.’s climate accountability framework, including annual reporting and an independent advisory council. While climate policies and programs live in many ministries, Climate Action Secretariat is the glue that holds it all together in a compelling narrative of how we will achieve our climate goals.
ENVO Drive Systems, established in 20 5 in Vancouver, Canada, is a pioneering engineering company specializing in evolving electric mobility solutions to mitigate the impact of fossil fuels on the planet. With a mission to bridge the technological gaps in e-mobility through innovative, modular, and versatile yet affordable products, ENVO has emerged as Canada’s largest e-Mobility brand. The company's diverse product lineup includes electric bikes, trikes, scooters, velomobiles, ATVs, water bikes, snowbikes, and snowkarts, designed for recreation, services, and daily commutes. ENVO prides itself on its Canadian engineering, sustainable growth, and commitment to quality, innovation, and community collaboration.
7Gen is making a difference in the mobility industry and improving air quality in Canadian cities by accelerating the successful deployment of zero-emission medium and heavy-duty vehicles. We deploy EVs and charging infrastructure and vehicles through our lease-to-own fleet electrification model, coupled with capital financing and software solutions while also helping customers realize their sustainability goals.
Hypercharge Networks Corp. is a leading provider of smart electric vehicle (EV) charging solutions that offers turnkey technology to residential and commercial buildings, fleet operations, and other rapidly growing sectors. Driven by its mission to accelerate EV adoption and enable the shift towards a carbon neutral economy, Hypercharge is committed to providing seamless, simple charging solutions by offering industry-leading equipment and a robust network of public and private charging stations.
Winner
Winner
Gamechanger
Diversity & Inclusion
Presented in partnership with PwC
Winner TreeTrack is a pioneering reforestation service company based in Vancouver, Canada. Utilizing custom-designed drones, we deploy innovative seedpod technology to restore post-wildfire lands efficiently. Collaborating with provincial governments, Indigenous communities, NGOs, and private forestry companies, we focus on enhancing seed pod production capacity while ensuring optimal germination rates and uniformity. Our commitment to sustainability drives us to create resilient forests globally. With a track record of successful projects and a dedication to environmental stewardship, TreeTrack leads the way in transforming forestry practices for a greener future.
We advance gender equity alongside women, families, Two-Spirit and gender diverse people through advocacy and integrated services that support personal, collective and economic well-being. Women face systemic barriers to good employment and economic security, like the lack of affordable housing and childcare, pay gap, and overrepresentation in low-wage work. Social norms play a role. For example, women take on the bulk of unpaid care work at home, which leads to work-life conflict, impacts their ability to keep their jobs and advance their careers. Indigenous, racialized and newcomer women, women living with disabilities and 2SLGBTQIA+ women face greater barriers to economic well-being.
The First Nations Technology Council is an Indigenous-led, innovative non-profit mandated by First Nations leadership in British Columbia. The organization works to advance digital literacy, improve internet connectivity, and provide guidance on data and digital technology for all 204 First Nations across the province. Technology weaves throughout every aspect of society. It is essential to the self-determination of First Nations and the implementation of rights. As rights holders, Indigenous people must play an active role in shaping the future of technology and their relationship with it. These training programs provide the digital skills and tools to support future generations.
Riipen stands as the world’s largest online marketplace for work-integrated learning (WIL) experiences. Since its inception in 2017, Riipen has facilitated 217,000 project experiences, translating into 14 million learning hours with a network of over 35,000 employers. Operating in nine countries and available in two languages (English and French), Riipen has forged partnerships with over 540 campuses and training providers. Collaborating with an extensive network of 35,000 employers, Riipen has become a cornerstone of education and employment. As we look towards the future, we anticipate significant innovations on the Riipen platform, further solidifying our position in pioneering workforce development.
us a distinct leader in customer service excellence and loyalty. As the first Canadian technology company to commit to a public reconciliation action plan, TELUS is dedicated to progressing reconciliation in partnership with Indigenous Peoples and in alignment with Indigenous-led frameworks of reconciliation.
Excellence in Company Culture
Presented in partnership with SAP
Winner
RaceRocks is a women-led, Indigenousowned training and simulation company that is a pioneering force in technology-driven training solutions, modernizing and elevating traditional training methods from static content creation to immersive solutions. The Victoria-based start-up has over a decade of experience in the defense industry, primarily working directly with the Royal Canadian Navy, resulting in NATO Secret and Controlled Goods Clearance.
TELUS is a dynamic, world-leading communications technology company with more than $18 billion in annual revenue and 18 million customer connections. Our social purpose is to leverage our global-leading technology and compassion to drive social change and enable remarkable human outcomes. Our commitment to putting our customers first fuels every aspect of our business, making
LBC studios is a mobile games developer and publisher based in Vancouver BC. We are leaders in free-to-play simulation games played by over 25 million people. Driven by core values of Accountability, Growth, Honesty, and Passion, LBC continues to innovate what it means to be a leading game studio in both Vancouver and on the world stage. Notable awards include: 3rd in the 2019 Startup 50 ranking of Canada’s Top New Growth Companies, with two-year revenue growth over 5200%, CEO recognized as a 2020 BIV Forty Under 40, and Best Workplace for Mental Wellness, Inclusion, Technology, and Youth in 2021.
2024 Technology Impact Awards
Pilot is building a Collaborative Travel Hub (AI-Powered) that helps groups discover, plan, book, and share trips together in one platform. It's an all-in-one tool for discovery and planning: personalized and customizable. We capture millennial/gen-z groups early, ensuring they go through us when ready to book.
Established in 2014 in British Columbia, Readymode has solidified its spot as a leader in the call center software industry. Readymode is an all-in-one, cloud-based, predictive dialer platform that delivers everything call centers need to make more connections, maximize agent productivity and scale their businesses. Recently recognized as one of Canada’s Top Growing Companies in the 2023 Report on Business, Readymode placed an impressive 242. With a solid, tenured team behind them, Readymode is well poised for continued success and growth.
Excellence in Industry Innovation
Presented in partnership with Accenture
Winner
TRIUMF is Canada’s particle accelerator centre, home to over 600 researchers, engineers, technical experts and students. TRIUMF works on a wide spectrum of global experiments including: how antimatter works, what happens when neutron stars collide and what holds together the nuclei of atoms. TRIUMF also has a track record of taking the technologies developed for these experiments and deploying them to solve real world problems like new medical isotopes that image and treat advanced cancers, and using energy from supernova explosions in space to provide x-ray-like visibility down to 1km beneath Earth’s surface to enable greener mining.
Operto Guest Technologies leverages smart technology, automations and integrations to provide comprehensive solutions across the hospitality spectrum, from short-term rentals to large chain hotels. Operto helps operators streamline operations, drive positive guest experiences, and find new efficiencies and areas of profitability. Features include digital check-in, access control, guidebooks, messaging, upsells, noise monitoring, energy control, and housekeeping management.
UniUni, a North American leader in last-mile logistics, delivers ecommerce parcels across Canada, and is rapidly expanding into the United States. Founded in 20 9, UniUni’s tech-driven innovation and crowdsourcing delivery model offers fast, economical, and reliable services to local, national, and international ecommerce clients.
Spring Financial is Canada’s leading online personal loan lender based in Vancouver, BC. Our mission is to give all Canadians access to fair-priced financial products entirely online from the comfort of their own home. We’ve developed industry-leading technology, making the process of obtaining a loan extremely simple and convenient. All our products are designed to help any Canadian access the credit they need and save money. Our team is made up of experienced young professionals who are passionate about making a positive impact on people’s lives through financial empowerment.
ThisFish Inc. is a global leader in traceability software and artificial intelligence for the seafood industry. ThisFish’s Tally software is a smart manufacturing and supply chain platform that enables seafood processors to automate and digitize their production, quality control, traceability and inventory workflows using tablet computers and IoT devices in real-time on the factory floor. ThisFish is leading the adoption of machine learning and computer vision technology in the sector. ThisFish Inc. won Innovate BC’s Aquaculture Innovation Award and Thrive Canada’s Agritech Startup Award. The company currently has customers in 13 countries on three continents.
HALL OF FAME BC Innovators
The BC Innovators Hall of Fame recognizes the key role of innovation to BC’s economy and the leaders that have left a legacy on this province, enriching our technology and innovation ecosystem and building a stronger BC economy.
OUR INDUCTEES FOR 2024 ARE:
PREVIOUS INDUCTEES:
Greg Aasen
Mark Betteridge Judy Bishop
Allen & Connie Eaves
Boris Wertz
Jeff Booth
Michael Brown
Kathy Butler Ward Chaplin
David Demers
Klaus Deering
Norman Durieux
Gordon English
Farris Haig
Andrew Harries
Roy Henderson
Judi Hess Ryan Holmes
Moe Kermani
Hugh Kay
Paul Lee Julia Levy
John Macdonald
Gordon MacFarlane Greg Malpass
Amos Michelson
Jack Newton
Josh Nilson
Greg Peet
Shahrzad Rafati
Firoz Rasul
Jonathan Rhone
Don Rix
Geordie Rose Shannon Rogers Roy
Laurie Schultz
Norm Francis
Don Mattrick
Warren Roy
John Seminerio
Gerri Sinclair
Keith Spencer
Ken Spencer
Jim Spilsbury
Morgan Sturdy
Husband-wife research team inducted into BC Innovators Hall of Fame
Dr. Connie Eaves is posthumously recognized for her contributions to science, health and research
One of this year’s inductions into the BC Innovators Hall of Fame is unusual in that it includes a husband-and-wife team:
Drs. Connie and Allen Eaves. Sadly, the honour will be bestowed posthumously for Connie, who died on March 7 this year, at the age of 79, from colon cancer.
BC Tech president and CEO Jill Tipping says it was important to recognize the couple jointly.
“They’re both really distinguished scientists in their field,” she says.
Indeed, both Connie and Allen Eaves were named to the Order of Canada—in 2021 and 2022, respectively—in recognition of their research in the fields of cancer and stem cells. In 2021, Connie was given one of the highest honours any scientist can receive when she was elected to the London Royal Society in recognition of her work in the identification of blood and mammary stem cells.
She was also inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame in 2019.
Connie and Allen had parallel careers working in cancer and stem cell research, and they sometimes worked as a team at the same lab at BC Cancer.
The couple met at the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto.
“We bonded there on our interest in understanding the regulation of [stem cells] and differentiation and how it goes on in cancer,” Allen tells BIV.
Connie came to Vancouver in 1973 to work at the BC Cancer Institute, and Allen followed her to Vancouver a couple of years later, after he finished his clinical training. He eventually became head of clinical hematology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and Vancouver General Hospital, where he spent nearly two decades building B.C.’s Leukemia Bone Marrow Transplant program.
While at BC Cancer, the couple founded the Terry Fox Laboratory in 1981. Connie worked there until her death this year, and led the Connie Eaves Lab, which specialized in hematopoietic stem cell research.
In 1983, the couple was among five scientists who published a seminal study in the New England Journal that demonstrated how normal stem cells could be found in patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia. It was not known until then that leukemia patients could have healthy stem cells, Allen explained.
This led to a new therapy in which a patient’s non-cancerous stem
cells could be separated out and cultivated, while the cancerous cells in the patient were killed off with chemotherapy or radiation therapy. The patient’s own healthy stem cells could then be reintroduced into the patient, obviating the need for bone marrow donors.
“This was the basis of doing autonomous bone marrow transplantation—that is using the patients’ own cells to treat cancer,” Allen explains.
Connie’s research at the Terry Fox Laboratory enhanced the scientific world’s understanding of hematopoietic stem cells—which produce blood cells—and, in particular, “quiescent” cancer stem cells. Quiescent cells are semi-dormant and resistant to treatment. Drugs used to treat cancer fail to target these types of cells, which can later become active and lead to the recurrence of tumours.
Connie’s lab identified molecular pathways that regulate quiescence in cancer stem cells, opening up potential therapeutic targets for different types of cancer, including leukemia.
She also discovered the stem cells that make breast tissue, which is important in understanding breast cancer—something Connie herself battled at one point.
In addition to heading her own lab at the Terry Fox Laboratory, Connie was a professor in the Department of Medical Genetics and the School of Biomedical Engineering at UBC, and editor-in-chief of the journal Experimental Hematology.
In 2006, Allen was forced to retire at 65, so he launched his second career building one of Canada’s largest and most successful life sciences companies.
StemCell Technologies makes specialized media and reagents for the growing stem cells, immune cells and other cell types. It now employs 2,000 people and has annual sales of $500 million.
A few months after Allen’s initial retirement, employment rules were changed, which allowed Connie to continue running her lab.
“Connie stayed on at the cancer agency and I went off and built StemCell Technologies,” Allen says.
While he says both he and his wife had a passion for research, he says Connie also was particularly passionate about mentoring young scientists.
“Connie was a big mentor of many graduate students and post-doctoral fellows,” he says. “In fact, she had over a hundred. And that was the thing she prided herself most on was teaching people how to do cancer research.”
Boris Wertz wins nod to BC Innovation Hall of Fame
Entrepreneur found new life as an angel investor and venture capitalist after his company was sold
BY GLEN KORSTROM
Boris Wertz, who has invested in hundreds of companies, is still seeking out new opportunities. He most looks for two things: A passionate entrepreneur and an emerging niche subsector.
Wertz is one of this year’s inductees to BC Tech’s BC Innovators Hall of Fame and he says he knows what it is like to be a young entrepreneur in a fast-growing niche sector.
That combination of strengths is what he had in 1999, when he and four university buddies co-founded JustBooks in Germany.
The concept started when they had trouble finding used books to buy. They decided to build an e-commerce website that sold a wide range of books.
The business was such a roaring success that, two years later, the quintet sold their venture to Victoria-based AbeBooks.
Wertz moved to Victoria a year after that.
He continued to work with the bookseller in his role as COO at AbeBooks, and sales grew. By 2007, Amazon.com Inc. came calling with an offer to buy the venture for more than US$100 million.
Wertz was one of many principals at the company, so his stake was small, but not insignificant.
Then 34 years old, he used proceeds from the acquisition by Amazon to get him started in a second career, as an angel investor.
He began to invest money into dozens of companies—first $25,000 here and $50,000 there.
Some of the startups that caught his eye at the time, such as Indochino, went on to find significant success.
In 2012, he founded the venture capital company Version One Ventures LLC, and he started courting other investors to provide money to invest in funds that he oversaw.
Version One has grown to have six funds, with about $250 million under management.
It has invested in more than 100 startups across a range of geographies, with some investments at $250,000, and others between $500,000 and $1 million.
“Dapper Labs was more like a $1 million investment,” Wertz told BIV of an equity purchase back in 2017 or 2018 that Version One still owns.
By late 2022, Dapper Labs, a blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) venture, had grown in value to around US$7.6 billion.
Undoubtedly, that value has lost some of its lustre with the collapse in interest in NFTs, but Wertz says that this is the way it goes with investing in upstart private companies.
“We’re big supporters of the company,” he says of Dapper Labs.
“Innovation markets have ups and downs. Sometimes there is too much hype, and then there is disillusionment.”
He says he usually keeps his stake in companies until they go public or get bought out.
Version One, starting in 2017, invested a total of US$2 million over two rounds in Coinbase Global Inc. It then exited the position in 2021, after that company went public, Wertz says.
Sometimes Version One does sell its shares when a venture is still privately held—and sometimes that move has been regrettable.
Version One in 2019, for example, sold to TCV its stake in the privately held, cloud-based legal technology firm Clio, which has a head office in Burnaby.
Boris Wertz co-founded a book-selling e-commerce venture in 1999, which was sold to a B.C. company, and then ipped to Amazon.com • SUBMITTED
Clio then went on to land several huge financings, including the staggering US$900 million venture-capital raise announced July 23 that put its valuation at more than US$3 billion.
“I still do angel investing but in things that are not competitive to Version One,” Wertz says.
“Version One is very focused on software startups. If there was a consumer packaged goods company or a company in India, where Version One does not invest, I still write the odd angel cheque, but 90 per cent of my energy is focused on Version One.”
Given that artificial intelligence is the zeitgeist of the current era, it is no surprise that this is an area where Wertz has been focused.
One investment, for example, is in Ada Support Inc., which uses AI to automate customer support with chat bots, emails and voice assistance.
“Today almost all of our portfolio companies are using AI to automate aspects of their business,” he says.
BC Tech president and CEO Jill Tipping says this year’s inductees into the BC Innovators Hall of Fame all have deep respect from the province’s entrepreneur-founder community.
“It is always impressive when people not only have created wealth and created value, but championed innovation throughout their careers and earned the respect and admiration of those that they’ve touched along the way,” she says.
Entrepreneurs such as Indochino co-founder Kyle Vucko have told BIV through the years that Wertz has operated somewhat in a mentorship capacity.
“Boris is a great example—probably the best example in modern times in B.C.—of someone who had all the skills required to build a business, but then was also successful in transitioning to being a highly successful investor who was able to identify the business opportunities in different very different areas of tech,” Tipping says. ç
Ray Walia inducted into BC Innovation Hall of Fame
Launch Academy has helped companies raise over $2.5 billion and has supported more than 6,000 entrepreneurs
BY ADAM CAMPBELL
Ray Walia is one of four individuals who will be inducted into the BC Innovators Hall of Fame this year.
Walia co-founded and is CEO of Launch Academy, one of Western Canada’s leading tech incubators. His company has incubated more than 6,000 entrepreneurs from over 100 countries. Three hundred of them have reached seed and series A funding, collectively raising more than $2.5 billion dollars.
“He’s a real networker and a connector,” says Jill Tipping, president and CEO of BC Tech, which launched the BC Innovators Hall of Fame in 2023. “He runs a tremendously successful private-sector-funded incubator and the Traction conference—the first conference to really bring world leading speakers and thinkers and technology to British Columbia.”
Launch Academy was founded in 2012 by Walia, Roger Patterson and Jesse Heaslip, who were working out of a co-working space in early 2011.
The three decided to start their own space in premises offered by Growlab co-founder Mike Edwards. It began with 12 desks and, within 12 months, the venture had moved to a 12,000-square-foot facility to accommodate demand.
Walia ended up running most of the incubator’s activities, eventually becoming Launch Academy’s CEO.
Fast forward 12 years and the company is now one of the most popular incubators in Western Canada. Walia also founded a venture fund and co-founded Traction—a conference that has drawn a tech community of 120,000 leaders to Vancouver from around the world.
Walia has been an important part of B.C.’s innovation ecosystem for a number of years, says Tipping, adding that the thousands of entrepreneurs who have been supported by him and Launch Academy speak very positively of Walia’s work.
BIV spoke with Walia, who underscored the success story of Later.com—a project from Launch Academy.
“This was just a hackathon idea by people that were working at Launch Academy,” he says. “It became one of the world’s top scheduling software for visual media.”
Walia says he inherited his entrepreneurial spirit from his father, an avid businessman who pioneered the live-concert industry in Bollywood and built single-family homes in Vancouver.
“In my childhood, I grew up either on a construction site pulling
nails from two by fours, or running around backstage helping to organize these concerts,” he says.
At 16, Walia began running concerts in Vancouver alongside his brother, producing his very own concert at the Pacific Coliseum for thousands of people.
Upon graduating from school, a piece of advice from his father would change the trajectory of his career.
“I was looking at joining the workforce, not being an entrepreneur,” he says. “My dad told me you can definitely make a good career and help someone achieve their dreams, or you can spend that time, energy, and pursue your own dreams.”
In 1999, Walia opened a Dairy Queen franchise in Richmond, followed by a second restaurant on Denman and Robson in 2002.
“If I can build a restaurant downtown and sell one ice cream cake to each tower every single day, I’ll do really well,” he recalled thinking. “In 2002, the challenge was how are they going to come to the store, pick up the cake and get it back to the office.”
This led Walia to build an online ordering platform, allowing orders to be faxed to his restaurant and to a sub-contracted courier company that would deliver purchases in under 30 minutes.
The developer, a friend of Walia’s, created the platform for free in exchange of using the store to test his programs.
“What he ended up doing with the store was turning it into a bluetooth hotspot,” he says. “We were pushing coupons to people’s cell phones whilst in the store, and that just blew my mind.”
“I started seeing all the different opportunities, and that got me into the tech space.”
By 2008, Razor Technology was built around this innovation, pushing movie trailers and music videos for Sony.
Walia sold his restaurants to focus on Razor Technology as CEO, but the company was forced to shut down due to the financial crisis.
This led Walia to start his own fashion app and join a co-working space, where he met the other future founders of Launch Academy.
Walia’s biggest contribution, he says, has been supporting thousands of startups and building transformative tools for Vancouver.
He says it’s been gratifying to service so many entrepreneurs and to see $2.5 billion raised by Launch Academy’s companies.
“By no means are we the only support system they’ve had, but I think that we played a bit of a role” he says. “Every time I talk to entrepreneurs, they’ve all had a touch point with Launch Academy or Traction at some stage.”ç
Ray Walia is CEO of Launch Academy • SUBMITTED
THE FANTASTIC GROWTH OF WELL HEALTH
After a ve-year, 2,300% increase in revenue, B.C.’s fastest-growing company is splitting into two
BY GLEN KORSTROM
After scaling its operations at an incredible pace, B.C.’s fastest-growing company is planning to split into two separate entities that would individually trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
The rationale is to entice new investors.
Well Health Technologies Corp. topped BIV’s Top 100 Fastest-Growing Companies list this year, registering revenue growth of 2,265.2 per cent between 2019 and 2023. In its 2023 fiscal year, the company generated $776,054,000 in revenue, up from $32,810,782 in 2019.
That growth shows no sign of stopping, as sales have continued to rise throughout 2024. The three-month period that ended June 30 was Well Health’s 22nd consecutive quarter of record-breaking revenue.
The company now anticipates generating between $970 million and $990 million in revenue this fiscal year.
Fuelling that sales growth are two distinct revenue streams. The dominant one comes from operating about 175 medical clinics in Canada, while the secondary stream comes from selling health and office management technologies to medical clinics, chair and CEO Hamed Shahbazi tells BIV.
He says the two sides of the business would be better off as separate ventures.
“About 90 per cent of our overall revenue comes from providing care to patients, and about 10 per cent, or probably less than 10 per cent now, comes from actual technology revenue,” he says.
“We really want to grow both of those.”
The plan to split the company into two would mean investors could buy shares solely in the technology company, which is a significantly different business than the provision of patient care.
The plan is for the Well Health division that runs medical clinics to own a majority stake in the technology company—dubbed Well Provider Solutions—which could go public in the first half of 2025, according to Shahbazi.
If this restructuring proceeds, the result would be that investors in Well Health would be primarily exposed to the medical-clinic
business, with about 10 per cent of their investment exposed to the technology company.
Investors who solely want exposure to latter will newly be able to make that investment, Shahbazi explains.
“It allows us to create greater capital and currency for that [technology] group, so we can go and do more acquisitions, and basically grow that business,” he says. “It will still be majority-owned by Well, so not much will change as far as our ownership, except that the [technology side of the business] will have a ticker symbol.”
Shahbazi says he anticipates hiring a CEO for Well Provider Solutions, and that he would serve as its chair while continuing to serve as CEO of Well Health.
ORGANIC GROWTH AND GROWTH BY ACQUISITION
Shahbazi says that since he founded Well Health about eight years, ago the company has made more than 80 acquisitions.
He is quick to add that the company has also seen substantial organic growth.
One of Well Health’s significant acquisitions was in 2020, when it spent US$14 million in cash and shares to buy Silicon Valley-based Circle Medical Ltd., which delivers telehealth services that bring doctors’ offices into patients’ homes or workplaces.
“When we bought Circle Medical, it was doing about US$5 million in revenue,” Shahbazi says. “We’re now on a run-rate of over US$100 million in just four years. So that’s all organic growth. That’s a huge amount of organic growth.”
One of its acquisitions in 2021 was a deal valued at up to US$51 million to buy a 53-per-cent stake in San Francisco-based Wisp Inc.
“When we bought Wisp, it was doing about US$30 million in revenue,” he says. “Now it’s doing about US$75 million in revenue.”
A third example of significant organic growth is seen in Well Health’s Canadian medical-clinic division. Shahbazi says that slice of
the business is growing by about 20 per cent annually.
Well Health made its biggest acquisitions in 2021. First came the US$372.9 million transaction to buy U.S.-based CRH Medical Corp.—a niche provider of services to help gastrointestinal disease practitioners.
Then followed the $206 million deal to buy Toronto-based MyHealth Partners Inc., which is the largest cardiology network in Canada, Shahbazi says.
“It is also the largest provider of imaging diagnostics, such as ultrasound and CT [computed tomography] scans,” he says. “In Ontario, there’s no larger provider of these services outside of the hospital channel.”
MyHealth operated medical clinics, and that acquisition was what made Well Health the largest operator of medical clinics in the country, with what at the time was 74, or about 100 fewer than what the company operates today.
About 60 per cent of Well Health’s revenue comes from the U.S., while the rest comes from Canada, Shahbazi says.
SHAHBAZI’S SECOND TIME ON BIV’S FASTEST-GROWING LIST
When Shahbazi founded Well Health in the 2016-2017 timeframe, his day job was as CEO of TIO Networks, a software company focused on processing payment transactions that he founded in 1997 and took public in 1999.
He hired someone to manage the Wellness venture that he was running off the side of his desk. Originally named Wellness Lifestyles, that venture was focused on what Shahbazi described as “aging gracefully.”
That forerunner business to Well Health operated yoga studios and had a partnership agreement with new-age author and fitness guru
Shahbazi says he soon realized that the venture would be difficult to scale into a big business so he pivoted into the operation of medical clinics.
Bay Area payments giant PayPal Holdings, Inc. liked TIO Networks enough to shell out US$238 million to buy the company in 2017.
Shahbazi stayed on for approximately six months before he left to grow his secondary Wellness company, which had started to buy medical clinics.
His stake in TIO Networks was what he described as being in the “mid-single digits,” so he could have netted roughly US$11.9 million, or $15.1 million in Canadian capital given the exchange rate at the time.
While Shahbazi was able to pump some of his own money in the venture, he has relied on multiple venture-funding rounds, and investments from companies related to Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka Shing.
Shahbazi says his experience with TIO Networks taught him that he did not want to lead a company with large companies as customers that required significant technological integration and long sales cycles, he says.
“TIO Networks was very successful, but it took a lot of time and that was very instructive for me,” Shahbazi says. “It was very helpful to learn that I wanted my next business to be one that where I had more independence in controlling my [corporate] growth and not be subject to some very long sales cycles.”
Some parts of Well Health’s business do have longer sales cycles but, for the most part, Shahbazi says, it is not limited in its ability to grow.
“Most of our businesses is ... subject to our own appetite to grow, to acquire, to integrate and to recruit physicians,” he says.ç
Deepak Chopra.
Well Health CEO Hamed Shahbazi founded the company and has steered it to be B.C.’s fastest-growing company in the 2019-2023 time period • CHUNG CHOW
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Top 75 Fastest-Growing Companies
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