Calgary’s Small Business Week kicks off this year on October 16 with the marquee Calgary Small Business Awards taking place on October 20.
In preparation for the Awards gala, the Calgary Chamber of Commerce has announced the finalists for the 40th annual awards and a handful of tech-related companies have been shortlisted.
Last year’s big winner was Goodlawyer as they took home small business of the year honours for their tech-inspired approach to providing legal services to the city’s startup and tech sector.
Among the three finalists for the connectFirst Credit Union Small Business of the Year Award is TradeSpace.
The ultimate hardware at Small Business Week, this award is presented to the small business which has demonstrated significant business achievement, sustained growth, and the potential to become a leader in Calgary’s business community.
TradeSpace is Canada’s first co-warehouse community that provides on-demand warehouse, office space and fulfillment services to over 100 small businesses in the construction, light manufacturing and e-commerce industries.
The Grant Thornton Emerging Growth Award is presented to the new emerging small business that has shown rapid growth and profitability in its initial years of operations and shows the potential for future growth and commercial success. Calgary’s Tracecost is a finalist for this award.
This content is sponsored by Calgary’s own WCD.
WCD recently invested in an HP Indigo 15K Digital Press — the first in Western Canada. This game-changing technology will help WCD disrupt the print fulfillment industry by providing customers with a greater range of capabilities, higher degree of quality, improved order speeds, and more sustainable options.
Tracecost is a growing construction management platform with offices in Calgary and Delhi. At its core, Tracecost is about solving a problem and reducing error by reliably offloading manual work done by a human to a machine. The goal is to reduce time-consumed, repetitive and routine work and to maximize the repeatability and predictability of results.
The Bow Valley College Innovation Award is presented to the small business that is pushing conventional boundaries and is disrupting and reshaping their industry through groundbreaking achievements in bringing innovation to market. All three finalists for this award have been on our radar over the past year.
CleanO2 Carbon Capture Technologies makes green and clean soap that’s reducing the world’s CO2 emissions. Clean02 recently partnered with Carbon Upcylcing to 3D print components of CleanO2’s small-scale carbon capture device, CarbinX, which transforms CO2 into an ingredient used in products ranging from soaps to fertilizers and glass.
Founded in 2018 by former CDL-Rockies’ site lead Alice Reimer, Fillip calls itself the first digital payment platform built for business fleets. With Fillip, business owners can empower drivers to pay for fuel and maintenance expenses with a secure digital wallet, spend controls and real-time transaction notifications.
Fillip took home the top prize of $250K at the inaugural Calgary Fintech Awards in 2022 and Calgary.tech named them a startup to watch in 2023.
Another of our startups to watch in 2023, HEMPALTA is an Ag-tech company focused on processing industrial hemp from farmers in Southern Alberta to produce consumer goods and commercial products. CEO Darren Bondar brings his entrepreneurial zeal to the efforts and is leveraging tech to process the hemp and run operations.
The Air Canada Resilient Business Award is for businesses, big and small, who have shown resilience, compassion and dedication since the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Among the trio vying for the award is Showpass.
Showpass is the world’s first customer-centric ticketing and discovery engine for events, activities and things to do. Showpass is empowering event scaling technology, ticketing, distributed commerce and the mixed delivery (live, virtual and streamed) of experiences for tens of thousands of event hosts.
The final award on our radar is the Social Entrepreneurship Award which is presented to the small business that has been a leader in finding ways of doing business while doing good for the greater community.
Finalist PurposeMed believes virtual health care has the potential to equalize how care is provided to people, regardless of their social status, income, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability or gender identity. PurposeMed works to empower the best clinicians, automate low value tasks and develop novel care pathways.
This year’s awards gala will take place on Friday, October 20. Check out the complete list of finalists online here.
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