TORONTO – The Canada Media Fund (CMF) has announced a new pilot program designed to offer existing Experimental Stream funded projects with increased access to mentorship, markets, and capital.
With a budget of $360K, the Accelerator Partnership Pilot Program (A3P) will support digital media projects that have previously received Experimental Stream funding for development or production by enabling their producers to enroll in acceleration programs.
A business accelerator, also called a seed accelerator, is an organization that selects businesses or teams at the early stages of their development, or that are looking to refine their project and accelerate their market roll-out and their company’s growth. Accelerators provide these companies with funding, mentorship and training.
For this pilot initiative, the CMF selected eight Canadian accelerators based on their ability to work with the variety of digital media projects and diversity of producers supported by the CMF across the country: Execution Labs (Montreal); FounderFuel (Montreal); GrowLab (Vancouver); HYPERDRIVE (Waterloo Region); ideaBOOST (Toronto); Inno-Centre (Montreal); INcubes (Toronto); Ryerson Futures and Digital Media Zone (Toronto).
“The CMF is building links with the investment sector, incubators and accelerators to provide CMF-funded projects with access to additional capital and expertise. We look forward to having many eligible producers seize this opportunity and take part in the pilot program,” said president and CEO Valerie Creighton, in the announcement. “We will closely monitor the results of this new initiative which will in turn provide information to help shape our future policies and programs.”
