Absolutely. I'll answer your first two questions first.
Regarding ForaHealthyMe, I think for many years the founder and the company tried to navigate the Ontario-based health care system; however, because of different and pretty strict procurement rules in terms of the types of companies that the hospitals are allowed and able to work with, the overall infrastructure made it very difficult for companies. This is just one example.
This particular founder, who is representative of many of our companies, found more success in terms of going overseas, getting that first customer reference and then coming back home. He's now starting to see the validation. That's a bit of clarification of the story of ForaHealthyMe.
Regarding the second example, he tried for a number of years.... As Hyperion was trying to ramp up their product validation in Ontario, he talked to some of the local utilities, did demonstrations, had many conversations, explored partnerships. The first real interest came from a U.S.-based company, Ameren, the energy giant in Missouri. He's another example.
We chose those two examples to hopefully illustrate why we think we can do more here in Canada.
I'll use a good example of a Canadian success story, a global multinational, that I think is what we should be aspiring to do.
It's a company called ATI Technologies, which was a graphics company founded in Toronto in the late 1980s. It grew in scale to the size of and rivals Intel. They started off with a small office of 20 people in Markham, and they exited 25 years later. They were acquired by AMD, which is a global U.S. multinational.
The story there is that company continues to employ 2,500 people in Markham. That's a great economic impact for our country.
Those are the types of companies we would like to see and do more of.
To answer your third question around what could be done, from my own professional experience, both having been a founder and having scaled and exited, I think one of the things is that we have a massive opportunity with the trade agreements we have secured. We have a lot of very interesting, very compelling overseas investors and capital, and there's an opportunity to attract that capital into Canada.
However, with some of the trade agreements, I think there is an onus on protecting Canadian IP. When that capital comes into Canada, I think there should be some sort of—I don't know—mandate or an agreement that says if there's a foreign investor coming in to invest in a Canadian-based company, then you need to keep that company here: Grow it, and scale it and create jobs here.
That doesn't mean you don't want that company to be globally competitive. However, with that particular example that I gave you of ATI, which became AMD, 25% of their global workforce is still in Canada. They are a U.S. company now. They're publicly listed. They were acquired for $5.4 billion in 2006. That still means creating real technology in Canada.
Those are some solutions that I would like to offer.