The business and brand accelerator that helped launch Hootsuite is merging with one of its own spinoffs.
Invoke Media announced September 16 it was joining up with Invoke Labs, a tech startup accelerator that split off from the company in 2012.
Invoke Media managing director Chris Miller will take the helm of the merged organization.
He told Business in Vancouver the merger came about after the two companies realized they’d spent the past few months sharing a significant amount of employees and talents on certain projects.
“The change we have ahead of us and the strategic thinking for bringing the two companies together is really an evolution in how the two groups will offer their kinds of unique services to both startups and brands,” he said.
Miller added the companies begin sharing the same space on the same floor of their Gastown headquarters beginning Friday (September 19). The legal and logistical elements of the merger will take about another month to figure out.
This isn’t the only merger to hit a B.C. accelerator recently.
Last month, Vancouver-based tech accelerator GrowLab merged with Toronto’s Extreme startups. The two groups on opposite ends of the country are now called the Highline accelerator.
Highline CEO Marcus Daniels told Business in Vancouver in August one of the reasons the accelerators came together was to make early stage companies more lucrative to capital investors — a group that’s in short supply in Canada compared to other tech hotspots like Seattle or the Silicon Valley.
Instead of focusing on businesses that are still developing concepts, Highline is trying to entice more investors by providing help to businesses with products close to hitting the market.
Food-tech startup Food.ee, which graduated from both Invoke Media and GrowLab, is one of the first companies to seize upon the Highline merger.
The Vancouver-based company is setting up in Toronto this October, using Highline’s offices and resources to expand into Ontario.
Although Miller said the Invoke merger wasn’t driven by a need to attract more capital to Vancouver, he said coming under a single umbrella would help make the brands and startups they work with more enticing to investors.
