A lot of it is luck. There was a very large company, QLT, that had a technology that was superseded by an American firm. Then they made some bad management decisions and they went away.
AbCellera is a current darling and is founded by a colleague, Carl Hansen. They delayed going for investment capital until they were better developed, so they didn't have to sell out the IP they'd grown, but they're lucky as well. They had a technology that fairly rapidly got into the clinic. Typically, the delay getting into the clinic is a decade or more, and it's tough to survive and do the necessary regulatory steps to do that.
Other companies have typically been bought out because that's the way to survive. You've heard about the valley of death. An organization whose founding board I was part of—the Centre for Drug Research and Development—provided facilities for developing and doing the necessary preclinical work to bring something to clinical trials. It's now adMare. It partnered up with a Montreal organization.
There are things like that, but all of these things help small companies survive. They don't help them grow into big companies. Growing into big companies is where the problem is.