To carry on with that, I would like to mention a couple of investments that FedDev has made in businesses in my community. I'll focus on one very cool company that started in the digital and software area of warehousing, as well as equipment, and their particular focus has been the United States market. They wanted to expand. They were small here in Canada, but they had clients, and now they've been able to move into the U.S. market with the assistance of a FedDev loan, repayable to the government, to bridge a gap in their financing. They didn't have the ability to do that through conventional financing.
It was interesting to discuss this with the owner and the angel investors, who were there the day we celebrated the fact that they had succeeded in opening up the U.S. market. Now they have quite a number of what you would call Fortune 500 company clients as part of their customer base. It was exciting to see the overwhelming acceptance, and I would say endorsement, of the angel investors themselves, and that we would bridge it with this kind of gap.
I bring that example to the table today, sir, because to those small entrepreneurs, to those small companies that have a desire to move forward but sometimes don't have the sophistication and such to do that, FedDev offers a whole menu of opportunities in different categories for those kinds of companies.
Since FedDev was created, what have you seen in terms of the key things—the best bang for the buck, as was mentioned earlier—coming out of FedDev for companies right across southern Ontario? It's no secret that southern Ontario is one of the most fragile industry-based...it is still very fragile.