Ag-West Bio has been helping businesses grow for over 30 years.
We understand the challenges you face in bringing research to market, and we can help.
Combining expertise and experience, Ag-West Bio provides a centralized hub for linking private business with market knowledge, advisory input, mentoring and guidance.
Ag-West forms a bridge between research and development institutions and industry, government policy makers and regulators, the general public and the bioeconomy. We provide commercialization insights and links to industry stakeholders, with a focus on contributing to business growth and competitiveness.
What’s the plan?
A business plan is your most critical document. It helps you establish goals, maintain focus and evaluate the performance of your operation. It provides investors with information they need to make decisions. A business plan is a blueprint for success.
Investment Readiness & Acceleration
Ag-West Bio financing takes the form of flexible and patient risk capital, and supports promising technologies at the early stages of development, when risk is too great for traditional capital sources.
Ag-West Bio devotes substantial effort to assisting bio-based entrepreneurs becoming investment ready. This is because we know becoming investment ready involves filling gaps in all facets of the business plan. Often these gaps are not just financial. They can take the form of human capital shortages, insufficient market knowledge, incorrect assumptions, and lack of strategic market signals, to name only a few. AWB provides significant input to entrepreneurs with promising technologies at the early proof of technology concept stage to challenge them on their assumptions and identify areas needing specific focus to attain the goal of getting a novel technology or product to market. We strive to get entrepreneurs to focus on how the technology will realistically and economically get into the hands of the end market user, whether it be through licensing, strategic market partnership, or the company’s own sales efforts. This gets companies on a path toward commercialization and, in turn, guides the company’s business planning and R&D efforts, advancing them toward investment readiness.
Ag-West Bio works closely with several companies each year to advance them toward detailed investment readiness for AWB’s Technology Commercialization Fund. From historical results, we know when a company goes through the process of becoming investment ready for AWB investment, they will also be ready to enter detailed discussions with other capital providers (ranging from public funding agencies to venture capital) and equally important – become prepared for advanced discussions with market partners.
Please refer to Ag-West Bio’s Commercialization Fund.
Investment & Commercialization Seminars
Ag-West Bio assesses commercialization information and resource needs of its members that are engaged in commercializing technology and products. We use this ‘needs assessment’ to devise investment and commercialization seminars, where industry professionals and mentors are brought in to discuss pertinent subjects aimed at providing critical information and insights.
Examples of previous topics include: developing strategic alliances, commercializing disruptive technology, raising private equity, the art of deal making, and effective proforma development. In addition we host seminars highlighting new funding opportunities, where the funders present the details of the programs.
We partner with other industry stakeholders to host these events, and place a strong emphasis on ensuring the seminars provide substantial networking opportunities in addition to valuable information. In this way, these seminars link research to business, and new business to established mentors.
I received support from Ag-West Bio that has been instrumental in helping Prester Foods have a step-to-step commercialization and investment strategy.
—Angela Oladiwura, Prester Foods
Advisory Input
Ag-West Bio works to increase the advisory capacity of early-stage companies involved in technology commercialization.
We have been working with entrepreneurs for over 30 years and know from experience that mentoring and advisory input are critical components for success. We are certainly not alone in our assessment (The 5 Do’s and Don’ts of Successful Business). Simply put: those that attain these components have a much higher likelihood of success.
We work closely with several companies every year, providing advisory input through our investment readiness service. These companies gain knowledge from Ag-West Bio management and board of directors, highly experienced and knowledgeable industry experts.
We strive to link these companies with advisors from our network of industry contacts. This is all based on our assessment of a company’s gaps, opportunities, and advisory needs and may include R&D, financial, legal, marketing, or strategic business input.
[Building an Agri-Value Business] was a great program. It gave us the basics about how to set up a brand, set up your product financing, figure out your business plan, marketing, and so on. It was really good for start-ups, particularly in the value added sector.”
—Randy Johns, Boreal Heartland
Ag-West Bio was actually our first supporter in the province. We came to them for networking and advice. The initial interest from Ag-West Bio was a boost of confidence; it’s really helped us get a foothold in the province.”
—Jamie Bakos, Titan Clean Energy Projects
Meet a few of our members: