Poised on a cliffside overlooking historic St. John’s harbor, the oldest city in North America, Genesis is literally, and figuratively, on the cutting edge of creating the world’s best startup community. Founded in 1997, Genesis helps build amazing tech companies, with the higher mission of creating widespread opportunity for Newfoundland and Labrador by supporting tech founders.
Far from larger metro areas like Toronto or Vancouver, Newfoundland and Labrador isa unique location for a technology business community that embraces its small island culture. Established business leaders and emerging founders can easily help each other or re-connect at various ecosystem events or even going for a hike next to the Atlantic ocean.
What makes a small, far-flung province so hospitable to growing some of the world’s best tech startups? At Genesis, you’re not just a faceless number in a big city environment. As community is a core value of Genesis, it is ingrained in Newfoundl and & Labrador’s culture to support each other. “A rising tide lifts all boats” is a saying that applies to the tech sector just as much as the province’s historic fisheries.
Genesis clients have proven there’s something in the water here, with success metrics punching far above their weight for a province of about 500,000 people.
Since 1997, Genesis clients have created over 2500 jobs, generate $700M in annual recurring revenues and over $730M in private capital. Technology companies have already transformed Newfoundland and Labrador to a place no longer limited by its remote geographic location, but rather by what people can imagine is possible. Years ago, people would have assumed a success story like Verafin (Genesis alum 2003-2006) would come out of a bustling city like Toronto or New York. But when Nasdaq acquired Verafin for $2.75B USD in 2020, it was the largest private acquisition of a company in Canadian history at the time, and put Newfoundland and Labrador on the map as a force to be reckoned with.
Genesis has seen exponential growth since starting out with one program and a handful of clients. Enterprise, the flagship three-year incubation program, helps early-stage ventures attain their first one million dollars in revenues, preparing them to fully launch themselves into their market. Genesis also quickly identified a need for market validation and customer discovery support, and in 2014 launched the Evolution accelerator and then Evolution+ in 2021 to help support a skyrocketing number of startup founders who need pre-incubation coaching in the leadup to Enterprise.
And that wasn’t all! With the purpose of creating more representation of women-founded companies, Genesis introduced the Women in Tech peer group in 2014 to encourage women to pursue careers in the tech sector, including senior leadership and founding roles. In 2018, Genesis again expanded its services with the Startup Visa program to attract new comer founders to the province, and acquired a second coworking space to accommodate the surge in its client base.
In 2020, Genesis and its suite of partners also co-founded the Ocean Startup Project as part of the federal Ocean Supercluster funding, a multi-year, pan-Canadian initiative to increase the number and quality of ocean industry startups.
So 27 years since launching, Genesis has doubled down on it’s purpose to create tech companies that can compete globally, attract substantial investment, and create economic opportunity for a province traditionally known for its natural resources such as fishing, oil & gas and minerals. Genesis clients represent a diverse array of markets in every corner of the world, reinventing Newfoundland & Labrador into an unlikely powerhouse hub of innovation and possibility. From students turning their academic projects into their first business ventures, to seasoned industry professionals pursuing their dream after decades of working for others, Genesis welcomes founders with a huge variety of ideas, life experiences and motivations. There’s never a dull moment in the halls of an incubator!
The most inspiring part of Genesis is that the story never ends. Ventures who started in Genesis programming twenty years ago are now pillars of local, national and international business communities, while in the same week a new founder with a fresh business idea takes the leap and applies to Genesis. Each day, a new voice starts the journey of a potential new company, inspired by those who came before, and the story begins again.
