Government Agencies & Public Servants
Canada’s public research funding system excels at supporting scientific research, but struggles to translate it into real-world impact. The SAIL Fund complements Canada’s strengths and addresses its current structural challenges, investing pre-revenue startups turning publicly funded research into socioeconomic impact, a stage in which startups at present struggle to access both public and private support. By de-risking the early stages of development, SAIL Fund helps create the conditions for Canadian innovation to grow in areas aligned with national priorities, while recognizing that these priorities change over time.
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Our Approach
The SAIL Fund shares early risk between the public and private sectors and improves coordination and accessibility between existing public funding programs for innovation. By doing so, it helps increase the overall impact of Canada’s innovation spending. The SAIL Fund uses a proven method to crowd in private capital in support of the early stages of emerging technology development, both through direct matching of public funds and through subsequent investment in the companies SAIL Fund enables to exist.
It uses a phased, milestone-based approach to test commercialization potential. This approach helps identify technical, market, and implementation barriers before significant public resources are committed.
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Absorbing Risk
By absorbing technical risk, the SAIL Fund increases the chances that publicly funded research will lead to economic and social value in Canada. It also improves the effectiveness of existing public funding for innovation, both by providing the funds pre-revenue startups need to effectively use these programs and by crowding in private investment in research and emerging technology.
Rather than duplicating the efforts of the 134 federal innovation funding programs and 28 reporting agencies, the SAIL Fund flexibly complements and amplifies all of them, supporting experimentation, de-risking the pre-revenue phase of getting research out of the lab, and collecting performance data on what works and what does not.
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Generating data-backed insights
Data-driven insights from this approach benefit the broader Canadian innovation ecosystem. Validated processes, performance data, hard-earned lessons, and failure analyses can directly inform policy design, program adjustments, and ongoing improvements for Canada’s public innovation support.
Over time, the SAIL Fund strengthens both the quality and quantity of the scale-up pipeline, increasing the effectiveness of existing innovation programs. It promotes productive entrepreneurship and emerging technology development across the public and private sectors while giving emerging technologies a path to staying and growing in Canada.