At the ACOA, we work very closely with ecosystem partners, ecosystem players, in terms of helping to lay the groundwork, helping start-up companies and helping build innovation. That's where we use our non-profit or our non-repayable tools. Then, when the company gets to the point where it has a minimum viable product, some market traction, we will follow up with our investments in terms of repayable loans to help them grow.
We use that with a key approach to also try to leverage other funders so that we can manage the risk in terms of borrowing. We do that across all sectors. I know we're talking specifically about natural resources today, but for us, that's about an average of 1,300 projects a year. About 1,000 are business focused. About 300 are focused on the ecosystem areas.
We have metrics that we measure in terms of what the impact is on those, in terms of the sales growth of co-assisted firms compared to non-co-assisted firms and also the survival rate. We're seeing very significant numbers: a survival rate of about 73% for start-ups versus 33% for ones that aren't assisted by the ACOA.