About Startup Canada
With vast entrepreneurial expertise, our knowledgeable and talented team is dedicated to serving Canada’s early-stage founders.
We know that Canada’s aspiring entrepreneurs have the talent, passion, and drive to succeed in today’s economy. We want entrepreneurs to manifest their own vision, faster.
Who we are
Startup Canada is the gateway to Canada’s entrepreneurial ecosystem that points you in the right direction, eliminates barriers, and champions your needs to private and public sector partners. We connect you with support organizations and peers across the country with industry expertise, regional knowledge, and funding to help you start and build successful businesses.
Our Vision
To make Canada the best place in the world to start and operate a business.
Our Mission
To connect Canada’s entrepreneurs with the tools, community, and support they need to start and build their businesses.
Our values
At Startup Canada, we walk the talk of entrepreneurship every day.
We’re here for entrepreneurs
We're motivated everyday to serve our community, one entrepreneur at a time. When they win, we win. We go the extra mile to help, and amplify their voices using our platform.
We are one team
We support each other authentically, help each other grow, and achieve greater impact when we meaningfully collaborate. We celebrate our successes, challenge each other and lift each other in the pursuit of our mission.
We embrace an entrepreneurial spirit
We think like our community to better serve them - this means being resourceful problem solvers and innovators that value continuous improvement, and welcoming new ideas and experiments.
We make it happen
We set the bar high and we deliver. We don’t just show up—we bring our best work to the table every day. We move fast to go far, and we are deeply accountable for our work.
We’re a community
We punch above our weight to deliver high quality programs at a national scale with a local feel in partnership with Canada’s leaders in the entrepreneurship ecosystem. We are collaborative and complimentary, not competitive.
Acknowledgement
Digital land acknowledgement
Startup Canada’s head office, located in Ottawa, is situated on the unceded, un-surrendered territory of the Algonquin Nation. While our team is remote, Startup Canada recognizes the inherent and treaty rights of Indigenous peoples; we acknowledge the ancestral and unceded territories of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples. According to the original treaties, there is a mutual understanding between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples to protect and preserve the land and waters that we share today. We have much to learn from our shared past, and there is much work to be done to create a restorative balance to our original nation-to-nation treaty relations and obligations. Startup Canada strives to contribute to reconciliation through creating meaningful relationships with Indigenous organizations and businesses by creating Indigenous-led partnerships and initiatives to support Indigenous entrepreneurs and Indigenous Startup communities in Canada.
How it all started
In 2012, Startup Canada embarked on a six-month cross-country tour as a national community-building exercise, to kick-start a conversation about how we can better support Canadian entrepreneurs and cultivate an entrepreneurial culture. The tour brought together more than 20,000 Canadians and 300 partners through 200 events fuelled by hundreds of volunteers.
The feedback was clear:
1. Canada needed to re-discover its entrepreneurial roots and embrace entrepreneurship as central to its national culture.
2. There was a gap in celebrating and cheering on our entrepreneurs.
3. Early-stage startups needed to be cultivated and supported to produce major high-growth companies with a more ambitious global reach and a focus on sustainability.
4. Canadian entrepreneurship needed to be fuelled from the bottom-up by supporting the development of vibrant entrepreneurial communities, led by entrepreneurs, as the basis of a national entrepreneurship network.
Startup Canada was built on this foundation.
Entrepreneurs believed that there was a need to come together around a common vision and strategy, where we achieve more than the sum of our individual efforts, and where entrepreneurs are empowered to build success for themselves and for the country as a whole.
We needed to shift our culture to one where entrepreneurial achievement is admired, entrepreneurship is celebrated and supported, and where valuable experience is derived from failure. We also need to facilitate a national network based on local startup communities, led by entrepreneurs themselves, to form the foundation of an intensely connected and collaborative social network.
Now, our roots are planted in this foundation. Get ready, we’re scaling for impact.
Want to join our team?
Explore opportunities that have a direct impact on the Canadian entrepreneurship community.
View our openings