Evok Innovations participated in MineSense’s Series E funding round which closed at $42 million. MineSense is a pioneer in smart mining solutions allowing the mining industry to deliver more metals with less impact on the environment.

In 2017, MineSense partnered with B.C.-based Teck Resources in a successful trial of its signature solution, ShovelSense, a robust sensor installed on mining equipment that instantly and accurately characterizes ore mined with each bucket. This real-time visibility into the orebody improves grade control and ore recovery, and reduces power, reagent and water consumption. Along with its complementary product, BeltSense, which is installed at the plant, MineSense is optimizing the entire mining process. Its technologies have been adopted by both major mines in B.C. and some of the largest copper mines in South America.

MineSense is expanding locally and globally. The company will relocate its B.C. headquarters to a new 32,000-square-foot space in Vancouver in the fall and opened a regional headquarter in Chile this April. As a proud contributor and collaborator in the B.C. technology ecosystem, its growing team, which includes top data scientists, data engineers, geoscientists and software engineers, is creating opportunities for high technology jobs in B.C.

MineSense’s growth and innovation are well recognized, including by Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) as one of Canada’s Sustainability Changemakers for 2023, the 2023 BC Export Awards in the Natural Resources category, Deloitte in its 2022 Technology Fast 50 TM list and Cleantech Group’s 2022 Global Cleantech 100 which lists the top global innovators across 20 countries. More recently, it is a finalist in BC Tech’s 2023 Technology Impact Awards.

Yaletown Partners led Zenhub’s Series A funding round which raised $10 million. Zenhub is a leading project management platform enabling software teams to become more efficient through agile automations. With Zenhub, development teams can manage projects entirely in GitHub. The platform facilitates team collaboration and gives stakeholders both internally and externally visibility into project progress.

Zenhub’s Series A funding is being used to expand its platform to give non-technical users access to create issues, tasks and track projects. As non-technical users are increasingly becoming involved in the development process, this expansion is making Zenhub approachable to more employees and bringing its productivity solutions beyond technical teams. Organizations are benefitting from the enhanced security, cost savings and improved collaboration.

Zenhub is certified as a Great Place to Work® by Great Place to Work® Institute Canada. Recently, the company published a Software Developer Happiness Report from a survey of 380 developers around the world.

Yaletown Partners participated in Inverted AI’s seed funding round which closed at $1.4 million. A spinout from UBC’s Creative Destruction Lab, Inverted AI is a research and product company using deep learning and generative AI to predict the behaviour of drivers, cyclists and pedestrians, for companies developing self-driving vehicles.  

Inverted AI builds AI agents known as non-playable characters (NPC) that behave like humans and simulate real driving behaviour, including the irrational human element, based on learning from massive quantities of video data. Its simulated environments are statistically accurate, with human-like NPCs that are reactive, realistic and diverse. By minimizing the amount of programing and replay required to validate and train autonomous vehicles, Inverted AI is accelerating the development of self-driving cars and advanced driver-assistance systems.  

Inverted AI was recently highlighted by Business in Vancouver (BIV) in its feature on B.C. companies using machine learning and artificial intelligence.