Portfolio Impact
The founders choosing Manitoba.
Manitoba Innovates is the province's largest federally designated Start-Up Visa organization — the program's recognized gold standard. Every founder below chose to incorporate, hire, and build here instead of Toronto, Vancouver, or Calgary. Here's what they've reported back, in numbers.
Immigration policy, made tangible.
Manitoba's general Business Investor stream has struggled — a handful of nominations most years against thousands of skilled-worker approvals. The Start-Up Visa channel run through Manitoba Innovates and North Forge is the exception: a due-diligence pipeline that screens founders for product-market fit, not just a bank balance, and then tracks whether they actually stay, hire, and spend here.
Retention over relocation
Newcomers who land through generic economic streams often move on to Toronto or Vancouver. Mentorship, community, and settlement supports are built to keep founders — and their families — rooted in Manitoba.
Filling real labour gaps
Portfolio companies are hiring into tech, agriculture, advanced manufacturing, and health sectors where Manitoba employers report the deepest shortages.
Foreign direct investment
Every incorporated company represents capital, payroll, and spending that didn't exist in the province before — much of it self-funded by the founders themselves.
A credible screening layer
Manitoba Innovates and North Forge are the province's only two federally designated Start-Up Visa incubators, giving government a vetted, monitored pipeline rather than an open-ended investment stream.
A conservative floor, not a ceiling.
These totals are built only from figures founders explicitly disclosed in their own progress reports — not every company reports every metric, so read each as a minimum.
An industry skyline.
Each silo is a sector. Height is the number of founding teams. Click one to filter the founder directory below.
118 companies. Their own words.
Search, filter by sector or stage, and read what each founding team reported about their progress in Manitoba.
How this page counts.
Every figure on this page comes from business progress reports, letters of support, and pitch materials that founders submitted to Manitoba Innovates directly — not from independent audit or verification. To avoid overstating impact:
- Investment and revenue totals use the largest single disclosed figure per company, not a sum of every number mentioned, to avoid double-counting projections against actuals.
- Companies that didn't quantify a metric are simply excluded from that metric's total — they are not counted as zero.
- Job, revenue, and investment totals should be read as a conservative floor: real economic activity is very likely higher than what's captured here.
- Sector labels are grouped into broader categories for navigation; a company's original self-described sector is shown on its card.
- This directory reflects a snapshot in time and is refreshed as new progress reports are submitted.