I would be delighted to.
We first met with Bioenterprise in about March. You can see in our timeline that we were already essentially funded at that point. The interesting thing with Bioenterprise is that we came to that meeting with a deeper and broader network in ag-tech and food-tech and the investment community than they had. This is not to say that they're not good or anything like that. I mean, they have constraints that they must work within.
We commonly in Canada refer to organizations such as Bioenterprise as “accelerators”. This is a non-standard use of the term. An accelerator provides funding, and Bioenterprise does not. Also, Wavefront—recently departed—does not. Essentially, in terms of our entire federally supported accelerator network scheme, they're not actually accelerators.
When we are approached by an accelerator in the U.S., they not only introduce us to their network, but they give us money. As soon as you give somebody money, it creates a subtle or not-so-subtle obligation and pressure. As well, money leads to more money. We have offers on the table for matching funds from organizations in the States that are like Bioenterprise—basically, organizations supported by local and regional governments that will match dollar for dollar everything we raise in the private sector.
Now, we have not taken those, because I'm really good at bluffing and getting them to give us what we want without giving them what they want, but the reality is that there are Canadians all over the U.S. We are everywhere, especially in technology, and in anything to do with agriculture as well. That happens because there isn't enough to hold companies here long enough to set that taproot. All our customers are going to be in the U.S. in the first wave, but we can stay here because, number one, we have the money, and, number two, we were able to get our core team built in Vancouver Island to a kind of critical mass that it now becomes difficult to move. The support and all the other stuff can happen and will inevitably happen, some of it in the U.S., but that core team is now rooted.
The problem is that if you can't get that root tapped, they're going to go. It's like when you send a kid away to college. If you're from a small town, unless you have that taproot, that kid is probably not coming back until they're 40 and they have their own kids, right? You want to get them at that growth stage, because that's where the big bang for the buck is.