Canadians Named to Exclusive SVC2UK ‘100 Club’

Silicon Valley Comes to the UK brings leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, investors and thought leaders to the UK to explore ideas and to ignite local entrepreneurship.

Last week they named their SVC2UK “100 Club”: a group of individuals who they believe to have “the most innovative, high-growth ventures and who show the greatest promise to become future serial entrepreneurs and investors themselves”.  

The Club is rigorously handpicked by SVC2UK experts via a multi-step selection process, and consists of “CEOs likely to build global businesses worth £100 million in the next three to five years.”

This year not one, not two, but three Canadians were named to the Club—Bright*Sun Group’s Stephen Piron, Jostle’s Brad Palmer, and Wifarer’s Philip Stanger.

Techvibes readers will be familiar with both Palmer and Stanger. They reside in BC and recently took their companies to London for the inaugural C100UK event along with UKTI’s Global Adventure Competition winners.

Not so with Piron. Piron is a transplanted Canadian who now calls London home but made headlines in Canada eight years ago as a 25 year-old with his startup SimonSays Voice Technologies.

He is up to it again in London. This time with a threesome of self-proclaimed “ex-hedge fund quant nerds” and they’re tackling the data science behind investment decisions in the Venture Capital world. Which may explain why he’s on Silicon Valley’s radar.

Piron and his partners have been tracking the investing shift from “gut” to data for years. In the height of the recession, they decided to quit their steady corporate jobs to launch Bright*Sun Group with the goal to help investors find the “diamond in the rough” investment.

The data-driven investing trend is hot with a number of data sources becoming more mainstream including CrunchBase and AngelList and competitive aggregation tools in MatterMark and Dashboard.io.

Bright*Sun is already working with a handful of venture firms, including Canada’s OMERS Ventures. “They feel they need to be more data-driven to compete with the guys in California,” Piron told VentureBeat in June 2013.

I suspect Bright*Sun won’t have any trouble raising funds of their own when they’re ready.