It's twofold. One, Foresight is a non-profit organization, and funding is never guaranteed. We started off with funding from Innovate BC, formerly BCIC, and our other funding to date comes from Western Economic Diversification Canada, along with matching funds that we get from industry partners, generally corporates and the like. In terms of the companies, it's really the companies.... We only have so many resources. If I told you my team size and the number of people that we've helped.... We're two and a half people, plus the EIRs and mentors that we bring in, doing all this work with hundreds of companies.
For us, we would love to be part of the program, but we need resources to really put the program together to help the companies navigate. They need someone to come in. Imagine the start-ups. They're either one or the other; they're hyper business-focused with maybe a potential technology, or they're really intense technology experts with some business acumen that needs a lot of work to prepare them for all of the rigmarole they're going to go through to apply for funding. That's where we come in. We have only so many resources, and the better we can do to have a repeatable, sustainable message for the companies, the less money we need to do this.
I will say one thing. One thing I find is that we do a great program. I heard you talking about the transportation issues. That's what we do in our challenge program. We worked with the Canadian oil sands group and all their companies—Shell—and we ran a challenge dialogue to help them solve the problem of managing heat—hot water—in their processes. Transportation is one of our segments. We can run a challenge dialogue with you as well, but that aside, we had this program. It was running; it was great; and now we don't know where the next round of funding is going to come from, yet the result of those six challenges was $65 million invested. We assessed over 50 companies, I would say, with the panels that we put together, the experts, to help us go through this process, and the technology is actually being adopted.
We're making a difference. We're spending money and adopting these technologies to improve sustainability in clean tech in Canada.
For us, helping the companies know exactly what they need to do at different stages to prepare for the funding is what we think funding needs to go into.