November 27, 2003 - Vancouver, BC: Two of Ventures West portfolio companies, OctigaBay and Celator, were voted 'Forum Favourite' at the 7th annual Canadian IT and Biotech Financing Forum in Vancouver. More than ninety investors from fifty different Venture Capital firms visited Vancouver for two days of presentations and discussion.
Held at the Sheraton Wall Centre, the Forum succeeding in introducing North American Corporate and VC investors with serious entrepreneurs.
Among the forty companies presenting, the ´Forum Favourite´ award is given to the best presenting company in each of the Biotech and IT streams. The winner is chosen among Financing Forum participants as the company with the best potential for venture capital investment. The winners in this category, formally announced today, were:
- OctigaBay Systems (Information Technology): OctigaBay brings interconnect and management technologies to high performance computing to improve real application performance and expand the role of high performance computing (HPC) in engineering and discovery.
- Celator Technologies (Biotech Stream): Celator develops therapy products that will reduce cancer-related mortality by delivering synergistic ratios of anticancer drug combinations selectively to tumors.
This is the second year in a row that Ventures West portfolio companies have been named Forum Favourite at the event. Quadrus Financial Technologies, a Vancouver-based company developing next-generation financial software for the pricing, analysis and risk management of financial derivatives and Wavemakers Inc., a developer of software which can improve and optimize voice quality for automotive, PDA and consumer electronics applications, walked away with the coveted Investors´ Choice Awards in 2002.
Venture Capital firms in attendance included Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Intel Capital, Sierra Ventures, JP Morgan Partners, Cascadia Capital, Technology Crossover Ventures, Ventures West, MDS Capital, Growthworks, BDC and Discovery Capital. Investors heard from a total of twenty-three IT and seventeen biotech companies from across Canada.
The next Canadian IT Financing Forum will be held on May 3 and 4th at the Marriott Hotel in Toronto.
About the Canadian IT Financing Forum
The Canadian IT Financing Forum is the leading showcase for information technology venture capital investment in Canada. It was founded in 1995 as a joint venture between Macdonald & Associates, a Toronto-based firm that tracks the investment activity in the venture capital and private equity markets and CanadaIT.com, the leading Web gateway to news and information concerning the Canadian IT industry. For additional details, please visit: http://www.FinancingForum.com
