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Laurent Laferrière is the co-founder and CEO of Ditch Labs, a tech company that’s on a mission to solve the world’s leading cause of preventable death: nicotine addiction. One of the most addictive substances known to man, nicotine which claims the lives of 8 million people worldwide each year, disproportionately affecting lower income populations.
Cigarette smoking is responsible for the deaths of more than 480,000 people in the US alone each year, and is the cause of 90% of lung cancer cases. While the health risks of smoking are widely understood, the success rates of those attempting to quit remain low, with only 5% of smokers successfully able to stop smoking on their own.
For those looking to quit smoking, vaping has become a popular alternative. While it’s been shown to be about twice as effective as other smoking cessation methods, and overall less harmful than smoking cigarettes, it’s far from a perfect solution. Many smokers attempt to quit by transferring the addiction to vaping, only to find it impossible to wean themselves off of the vape.
As someone who was never a cigarette smoker to begin with, Laferrière was surprised to find himself addicted to vaping, a habit that has generally been regarded as less harmful than smoking cigarettes. However, vaping has still been shown to be harmful to your health and can contribute to heart and lung disease.
In founding Ditch Labs in 2020, Laferrière and his co-founders recognized the need to support people on their journey to quit smoking, and how this support could be the difference between success and failure.
Ditch Labs focuses on the heart of the issue: the addiction to nicotine, rather than the method through which it’s dispensed to the user. It’s Laferrière’s hope that this new technology will be the key to ending the cycle of addiction for good.
Inspired by his own struggle with vaping addiction, Laferrière and the Ditch Labs team set out to develop a personalized smoking cessation solution that leverages the power of AI to adapt to the needs of the user in real-time.
Funding research and development within a highly regulated industry can pose a significant challenge.
Working as part of a tight-knit team of 12 people, including pharmacologists, psychologists, and engineers, Ditch Labs successfully developed their own vaporizer that dispenses nicotine in a controlled manner, gradually reducing the dosage over time to wean the user off.
However, the real value of the device is in its ability to collect and analyze user data. The insights gleaned from this data are then relayed back to the user via the mobile app, giving them a better understanding of the patterns of their addictive behavior.
After thoroughly researching this area, Laferrière found that “every individual will have a very different relationship with their illness or their addiction. What AI enables us to do is to gather a very large amount of data and get insights from that data in real time, and in a very personalized way.”
“We have about another three years of clinical validation to do to get the approvals we need from Health Canada, the FDA, and other regulatory agencies around the world to be able to commercialize our products,” Laferrière explained.
Olivier Bourbonnais (left) – Laurent Laferriere (center) – Christelle Luce, PhD (right)
“Most investors like to invest really late in a company, but the startup costs that are necessary are pretty high,” Laferrière explained, “Formentera were early investors and also early believers, investing in our pre-seed round in May 2021, back when we were a team of just four or five people.”
Formentera Capital provided Ditch Labs not only with funding, but guidance as well, making it one of the most valuable partnerships for the early-stage startup. According to Laferrière, it was this expertise along with the cash infusion that has helped Ditch Labs to get closer to achieving its mission.
“The team at Formentera, they’re all successful business people, they’ve been there, they’ve built businesses. So they know the hardships, they know how to navigate different scenarios, different opportunities.”
From where Laferrière is standing, the future looks bright.
“We were super mission-driven from the start, and now we’re realizing we can do even more with what we’ve developed. It’s hard to adapt, to adjust the mission for growth and to mobilize a team around a new, bigger, broader vision. It’s basically change management, which is maybe a challenge that we face right now.”
The team at Ditch Labs is constantly iterating to discover new ways in which the technology they’ve developed may be able to serve people in the future, beyond smoking cessation.
“We’re working on using our technology and developing our resources internally to start thinking beyond nicotine addiction. And I won’t say more for now, but it’s really exciting. We really just want to kind of revolutionize the way devices deliver drugs, and collect data and manage chronic illnesses, that’s really kind of our long term vision. So it can apply to other sectors as well.”
In their recent seed round, Ditch Labs raised $3.25 million, which will enable them to begin clinical trials, the first phase of which is set to be conducted in Europe this Fall.
Formentera Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in tech-enabled companies that are good for the world.
Philippe Beaudoin is on a mission to solve a bold problem: how we consume content on the internet.
It is not the first time Beaudoin, a significant player in the world of advanced technology, leverages AI at scale to make a major dent in the digital world. Beaudoin, a PhD in Computer Science, served as Co-founder of ElementAI, one of Canada’s preeminent and most notable AI companies which achieved a valuation estimated between $600M and $700M USD at its peak.
The idea for Waverly, however, had long been on Beaudoin’s radar. During a tenure at Google in 2010 working on recommendation engines, he noticed that all algorithmic recommendations were designed to work the same way.
The result of that design was a concerning one. Users were left in the midst of an information overload: a superabundance of digital content fighting for our attention which created an ocean of noise, distractions, and a crisis of misinformation – a topic which has infamously become the subject of a 2020 Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. Tristan Harris, the primary subject of the film, also worked at Google in 2011, overlapping with Beaudoin.
“He had a big impact on me,” said Beaudoin.
Philippe Beaudoin – Co-Founder, Waverly
Beaudoin saw how users were faced with two options: spend hours pushing against the current of the major recommendation engines in order to (hopefully) find what they were looking for or directly digest what was being recommended to them. The former was exceptionally difficult to do, while the latter – as history has shown – risked major socio-political consequences when performed at scale.
“There were no alternative ways to build a recommendation engine; the entire internet was recommending and influencing content consumption for billions of individuals based on the same principles: keeping it ‘frictionless’ based on ‘sensing signals,” said Beaudoin. “I knew there was a problem, but I had no idea how to fix it.”
At ElementAI, Beaudoin worked on new Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems working with semantic-level AI. As the power, scope and potentiality of AI had progressed, solutions to the broken algorithm problem were becoming clearer.
Enter Waverly.
Waverly leverages innovative Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology that allows users to remain in control of the content that is valuable and important to them instead of simply what is trending, popular, or being impelled by platform recommendation engines.
The result: a transparent algorithm that delivers a reading experience that cuts through the noise, regains control from major platform algorithms, and allows users to ride the wave of purposeful content rather than drown in an ocean of (mis)information.
Content is curated through Waverly’s “waves,” thematically-driven micro-feeds which track specific industry trends, market insights, or ideas that a user is interested in. Vastly different in terms of functionality, scope, and level of transparency, Waverly’s algorithm studies intention rather than tracking a user’s every click.
Moreover, one user’s “waves” do not impact those of another user, generating a closed-loop of curation that is personalized and focused – and cannot, by design, act as a diffuser of misinformation.
After participating in a 2020 cohort of Real Ventures’ FounderFuel accelerator program, Waverly secured a pre-seed round of financing totaling $1.25M CAD. The funds have been mobilized to scale their small but agile team, allowing them to exit “stealth mode” and focus their efforts on a natural first market: B2B professionals.
“What we noticed with the exclusive beta is that the level of intentionality the algorithm requires works best with professionals,” Beaudoin noted.
With Pro and Business tiers to their app, Waverly becomes a notable tool in the arsenal of high-level professionals, knowledge workers, and performance-driven readers who want to read with intention.
Beaudoin’s bet on B2B as a starting point for the app – before releasing it for the mass consumption market – seems to be a smart one: recent research suggests that anywhere from 37% to 57% of knowledge workers have difficulty finding the right information they need.
Other studies show that high-level professionals and knowledge workers use an average of 88 different apps in order to source the right information. The modern professional is rapidly becoming their own data scientist, curating and capitalizing on the information economy – something Waverly can now do for them on its own.
No distraction. No noise.
The early data shows promise for Waverly’s product-market fit: from 400 users in a closed Beta version of the app to 3X that number in 24 hours post-launch, Waverly is poised to revolutionize the content and attention economy.
From Beaudoin’s perspective, the decision to bring on Formentera Capital as investment partners in Waverly’s pre-seed round was an easy one.
“Cherif {Habib} and I have been long-standing friends and colleagues,” said Beaudoin. “As CEOs, we developed a safe space with each other, having numerous conversations in the earliest days of building our companies. It is rare to find people who are truly on the same wavelength, but we were – and still remain so today.”
Despite an illustrious academic and entrepreneurial career spent in Canada’s AI limelight, Beaudoin is remarkably realistic about the realities of building from the ground-up.
“{Formentera Capital} understands what it really takes to build an early-stage company in a way that other investors don’t,” said Beaudoin. “From my view, it’s a slam dunk.”
With a clear “North Star” to change the way we consume content on the internet at large, Waverly’s journey into the ocean of internet content and the problem of curation vs. recommendation is unquestionably a noble, important and fun wave to ride.
Formentera Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in tech-enabled companies that are good for the world.
When Jean-Philippe Turgeon’s young daughter started struggling with life-threatening mental health challenges, he did what every parent would do: everything he possibly could.
From psychologists to psychiatrists, nothing seemed to work – and schools were vastly under-equipped in terms of educator preparedness, student resources and awareness. There seemed to be no perfect fit to support the challenges the Turgeon family was experiencing: school programs were too hard to implement for educators or not accessible for real children.
What Montreal-based Turgeon and family faced was far from a singularity in North America. Almost 17% of young people aged 6-17 in the U.S. have experienced a mental health problem – a number which accounts for 7.7 million kids in the U.S. alone. 3 out of 4 of them aren’t getting the help they need.
What the numbers unearth is bleak: across the continent, students are facing the biggest mental health crisis of the century.
At every turn, Turgeon was confronted by the same questions: Why did so many kids face the same barriers? How come kids didn’t receive mental health support at school? If well-being problems affected so many, why didn’t we teach kids how to better manage their emotions just like we taught languages or math?
As he and his family witnessed the devastating effects of mental illness first-hand, Turgeon was determined to make sure that no other family would have to face what they did ever again.
Enter moozoom.
A mission-driven technology company, moozoom solves a complex foundational problem in society: they simplify social and emotional learning for children. The key to improving mental health wellbeing in children begins by resolving two barriers: engagement and utilization.
In May 2020, the proprietary platform was launched to transform elementary school classrooms across the province, the nation and eventually, the continent. The beauty of moozoom lies in a two-fold value proposition: the platform’s content and design captivate student engagement by means of storytelling and accessibility of use while simultaneously decreasing the workloads of educators. One classroom at a time, moozoom reduces the bottleneck between administrators, educators and the students who benefit.
The digital environment plunges students into a fictional universe where other children their age are confronted with real-world situations ranging from emotional regulation in high-tension moments to handling rejection to overcome bullying and beyond.
There, students get to choose how they would feel and react if they were placed in the shoes of the characters, effectively building real-life skills by coming face to face with real-world problems. From there, teachers are able to prompt in-class discussions thanks to worksheets provided by the platform itself.
“Sparking a dialogue in an accessible way is in itself an enormous advancement in mental health prevention,” Turgeon said, as he explained the in-class component of moozoom. “Both educators and children quite simply have not been addressing these topics in a way that makes an impact in classrooms.”
In just 30 minutes per week, students are able to adapt the skills they need to better handle social and emotional situations. When implemented at a school-wide level, Turgeon said the change is quick and palpable.
As a turnkey solution for teachers that is engaging and easy to implement, moozoom enables students to understand their mental health, improve their relationships, increase their self-esteem and live a happier life.
Today, with 30 employees, moozoom has been implemented in 800+ licensed schools across Canada with 16,000 educators and 100,000 active students.
Built with 320,000 dynamic student activities available, the platform is surpassing academic results by transforming student potential, reducing risky behaviour and improving mental health.
Moozoom’s latest Seed round announcement, totalling $5M CAD, is led by Amplify Ventures, TELUS Ventures and Fondaction, with participation from Formentera Capital. Funding from this round will help scale sales and revenue, penetrate the US market, and add new content and features to the platform. Funds will also help solidify hiring plans, with goals to double headcount by the end of 2022.
“We are very fortunate to have people believe in what we do,” Turgeon said. “What I really love about Formentera Capital is that they are investing in social impact more than a return on investment.”
From Turgeon’s perspective, the decision to bring on Formentera Capital as part of the moozoom investment team was an easy one.
“They are true entrepreneurs themselves,” said Turgeon. “They know what it’s like to build a company from the ground-up, and their insight is invaluable to our mission.”
What started as filling a need for Turgeon and his daughter became a transformative business model that’s changing the way elementary school students approach their emotions.
As the future of SEL, moozoom has officially taken one step closer to achieving its goal: to help every child across the globe by opening the dialogue on mental well-being.
Formentera Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in tech-enabled companies that are good for the world.
Clinia co-founders Simon Bédard, Félix La Rocque Carrier and Etienne Soulard-Geoffrion met by chance at a StartUp Fest Digital Health Hackathon event in 2015. They knew they wanted to help solve the digital health accessibility problem – but the path to building Clinia was, as it so often is for entrepreneurs, similar to the data world in healthcare: indirect, unclear, and complex to navigate.
After renting a U-Haul truck to remove his furniture to make space for a giant boardroom table to work at, the three spent a year working out of Bédard’s apartment.
“I became obsessed with untangling the complexity of the healthcare ecosystem,” said Bédard. “We had one metric to measure our success: creating a solution that would help people easily find the information, support, or care that they need.”
They would go on to launch a B2C platform providing structured information for patients which, in less than 3 years, would grow to over 150,000 unique monthly visitors without spending a single dollar on advertising. Used by both patients and clinicians, the B2C directory model would act as a remarkable proof of concept: Canadians were desperate for clearer resources and reliable information on health.
As conversations with healthcare organizations and clinicians continued to develop, one thing became clear: traditional healthcare institutions like hospitals and clinics – primarily publicly-funded – needed help. If clinicians and health professionals could navigate health data effectively, patients would benefit.
Having previously worked at a private healthcare clinic, the complexity of accessibility of resources from the clinician’s side was familiar to Bédard.
“Nobody could navigate the data,” said Bédard. “It was a struggle to identify and unravel the right information needed to properly support patients.”
Clinia co-founders Simon Bédard (left), Etienne Soulard-Geoffrion (middle) & Félix La Rocque Carrier (right).
The digital health ecosystem required a robust back-end player to transform the results on the front end.
Enter Clinia.
Having pivoted to a B2B model, Clinia evolved into a technology company that develops a suite of solutions that empower organizations to support care teams andpatientsalike with their own personalized search experiences so they can find the resources they need in a far better, more efficient manner.
Clinia’s flagship product is a Search API which can be white-labeled into the existing search flows of healthcare organizations. Combined with their proprietary Directory platform, Clinia empowers health professionals to build out their own robust, easy to navigate, powerful “search stack.” Their Vizion product enables beautiful, fully-customizable UI components for a better search experience, while Clinia’s Search engine product makes complex geo-specific, personalized health search simple.
Today, Clinia counts 25 employees, a robust team of advisors, a notable suite of clients including telemedicine giants Dialogue and Teladoc, as well as Montreal’s CHUM hospital and research centre, among others. Their big vision is a clear one: to become the leader in health search infrastructure globally.
Clinia’s latest Seed round announcement, totalling $5M CAD, is led by AQC and Anges Québec, with participation by Formentera Capital and private family office investors. Funding from this Seed round will serve to scale the power of their Search API and Directory products while expanding their footprint into two additional enterprise-level verticals, health systems and insurance organizations.
When asked about their decision to bring on Formentera Capital as part of their investment team, Bédard was clear:
“There is a genuine alignment between us,” said Bédard. “We see many of the same challenges and opportunities throughout the wider digital health ecosystem and the experience they bring to the partnership is priceless.” The new investment partnership formalizes the guidance Cherif Habib & the team at Formentera Capital previously provided to Clinia.
Though Clinia’s business model and direction underwent several rounds of iteration, the vision Bédard, Carrier and Soulard-Geoffrion had developed would remain unchanged: efficient access to healthcare information and resources for all. Their mission to change the world’s health ecosystem is well underway.
Formentera Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in tech-enabled companies that are good for the world.
Fast-growth companies, regardless of industry, eventually arrive at a similar point in their growth cycle: they realize they face mountainous amounts of time-sensitive operational tasks – but have minimal bandwidth to handle them.
Mohannad El-Barachi & David Li are no strangers to the challenges which hyper-growth scaleups face. Former Founder & CEO and COO respectively of SweetIQ, a company that helps businesses manage digital location marketing, El-Barachi & Li noticed that, as they scaled from $1M to +$10M, they faced numerous roadblocks along the way when it came to process and delivery automation. Heavily dependent on manual support, SweetIQ did what most organizations are routinely forced to do: increase headcount.
“We hired more people to handle tasks which we knew could be automated,” said El-Barachi. “I thought to myself: there had to be a better way for companies to successfully leverage the power of automation in ways that truly enabled and supported fast-growing organizations.”
In 2017, after steering the company to four straight years of +300% growth and the addition of over 100 employees, El-Barachi and Li led SweetIQ to a successful acquisition by ReachLocal, a USA Today Network company part of Gannett Co., Inc.
Post-acquisition of SweetIQ, El-Barachi and David Li put their heads together around the problem of automation.
“Really quickly we realized the problem we were aiming to understand was 1000 times larger than we had originally thought,” said El-Barachi. “We focused our work on a reframed question: ‘How can we help organizations deliver at scale?’”
Serial technology entrepreneur & Wrk co-founder Mo El-Barachi
Wrk Technologies was the answer.
The world’s first Integration & Delivery Platform, Wrk’s software is a “delivery engine” designed to easily and quickly help companies fulfill their work at scale. From simple data entry to building entire presentations out of a single document to generating custom reports and configuring websites, Wrk is powered by advanced automation and supplemented by a remote, 24/7, on-demand Wrkforce.
Officially launched in September 2019, Wrk has since grown to over 50 employees and counts a strong leadership team in its arsenal. Unique in the market in terms of both its market positioning and its technical ability, Wrk fills a clear gap in the automation market.
When it came to getting routine-style and more advanced tasks done, the options available in the market were clear: humans (costly, and potentially subject to bias and error); Zapier and similar connector applications (reliant on public API’s and designed for smaller, repetitive task automation); Robotic Process Automation (RPA) which required internal expertise, heavy technical overhead and remains extremely costly overall. So how does Wrk differentiate itself in an increasingly crowded playing field? The answer is through innovation.
Wrk creates pre-built, pre-configured Wrk Actions which remove the burden of choice while guaranteeing price, speed and efficiency. More cost-effective than RPA yet substantially more robust than Zapier, Wrk quickly realized automation wasn’t about erasing the role of the human in work completion; it was about optimizing it. They built an on-demand, 24/7 team of experts to help maximize the “cognitive piece” of automating tasks – a team of (real) people working in tandem which all clients have access to along with the platform to empower work completion at scale.
Wrk helps any growing organization, from startups to larger enterprises, with a wide variety of work functions including payroll setup, customized client reporting, proposal development, market research, user testing, tax preparation & many more. Wrk’s pre-built workflows make it easy to serve any department within an organization, regardless of size, the scale of workload or the complexity of data.
Automating the completion of work with Wrk has quickly proven to reduce costs by 20% and delivery times by over 65%—and the team has already begun exploring the automation and optimization of more complex tasks ranging from copywriting, legal reviews, x-ray assessments and more. Armed with an impressive roster of clients including Cision, Pomelo Health, Silicon Valley Bank & White Star Capital, investors agree in the power of Wrk.
After completing an initial Seed round in 2020, with participation by Formentera Capital, Wrk is looking forward to a Series A round in the coming months.
Funding from Seed & future rounds will serve to scale the power of their self-serve platform, continue the development of major partnerships, and kick-start the commercialization of a marketplace for creators.
When asked about the role of Formentera Capital within their investment team, El-Barachi did not hesitate to confirm the team’s value.
“Bringing {Formentera Capital} onboard meant bringing on true operators who understood the real challenges of a scale-up,” said El-Barachi. “Their accomplishments in the operations of fast-growth technology companies aside, we felt a personal alignment with them simply as people.”
Indeed, the philosophical alignment between Wrk and Formentera Capital is a strong one. When automation can exist in tandem with human cognition, instead of erasing it outright, it becomes abundantly clear that the future of work is bright.
Formentera Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in tech-enabled companies that are good for the world.
Some consider “diversity & inclusion” a buzzword of the modern business world; others consider it the foundation (and future) of profitable business.
A study by McKinsey & Company found that companies with ethnically/culturally diverse boards worldwide are 43% more likely to experience higher profits. Other studies have shown that racially-diverse teams outperform non-diverse teams by 35%.
While the value of diverse organizations is becoming much clearer, finding ways to ensure diverse candidates find their way into the talent funnel is an entirely different complexity – one which companies across the globe continue to struggle with.
Enter Humanly, a unified conversational AI platform for recruitment. Designed to save recruitment teams extensive time, Humanly ensures an amazing brand-forward candidate experience while supporting bias-free diversity and inclusion through equitable screening.
Prem Kumar, Co-Founder & CEO of Humanly, knows firsthand the problem of diversity in hiring. Kumar spent the majority of his career at Microsoft in Product Management roles working on employee engagement, talent acquisition and other HR-focused products – many of which became integrated and transformed via Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn.
“I had always dreamt of entering the startup ecosystem,” said Kumar, “But I wanted to build a product that would bring companies immediate value while supporting diversity and inclusion. Humanly was born out of that mission.”
Numerous tools have existed for sourcing candidates and managing candidates (like ATS software) – but the screening and “conversational” part of the recruitment funnel had always been a manual, time-intensive practice – one that is notoriously subjective and open to the infiltration of bias in the hiring process.
“There are numerous tools in sales and marketing departments to engage with prospects,” said Kumar. “But none existed which were designed to help HR/talent departments engage in conversations with candidates.”
Humanly graduated from Y Combinator in 2019 and is committed to leveraging ethical AI by continuing to diversify its 10-person team, which currently counts a 50% diversity in both gender and ethnicity.
From left: Humanly Co-founders Bryan Leptich, Prem Kumar & Andrew Gardner.
Less than 14% of companies have robust, comprehensive diversity and inclusion training programs. While those among the 14% who do train for eliminating unconscious biases at work, little data exists when it comes to measuring and understanding the effectiveness of unconscious bias training.
The scope of diversity and inclusion epidemic in the modern workplace starts at the granular level: the average recruitment professional spends less than 7 seconds on a resume. From names to gender to experience to education, bias can take its roots in almost every square inch of a candidate’s CV.
Automating recruitment conversations helps create a “blindness” that drives up diversity and inclusion – which companies, employees and consumers are desperately calling for. Nearly 60% of employees think their companies should be more diverse; nearly 70% of job-seekers evaluate a company’s diversity before applying to or accepting a job offer; and end-consumers are increasingly paying attention to corporations’ stances on diversity, making purchasing decisions accordingly.
The studies are staggering and difficult to ignore. One study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that all else being equal, resumes with “white-sounding” names received nearly 50% more call-backs than those with “black-sounding” names. Other studies made waves in The New York Times showing that “blind hiring” increased the likelihood of women being hired by anywhere from 25% to 46%.
“More diverse teams mean stronger teams,” said Kumar. “Aside from being better for business at the bottom-line, it’s better for society as a whole – something we are extremely proud about.”
Indeed, the response to Humanly is a testament to the urgent need for equitable, streamlined recruitment solutions in the market. Since its founding in 2019, Humanly has seen 6X growth over the last year after raising an initial pre-seed round of $1.1M USD.
With the announcement of their seed round of $4.2M USD, Humanly is well-positioned for the future. Currently focused on mid-market organizations, this latest round of financing will help Humanly break in at the enterprise-level, with Microsoft already onboarded as a major global client, as well as help support engineering, design and product management growth.
When it comes to the team at Formentera Capital, Kumar remembers his first exchange with them – and knew they were the right types of investment partners for Humanly.
“I had met Cherif {Habib} at a tech accelerator event series,” said Kumar, “and instantly felt a connection. Aside from being incredible entrepreneurs, the team at Formentera Capital truly cared about the problem we were trying to solve.”
Beyond being mission-driven, Kumar appreciated Formentera Capital’s commitment to helping startups move forward. “They are extremely founder-friendly: the FC team brings mentorship, operational expertise, and guidance that founders actually need. It’s much more than just capital.”
Formentera Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in tech-enabled companies that are good for the world.
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