The $100-million Ax-C facility will be housed in an existing downtown building and is designed to attract start-up investors.
Governments will provide almost half of the funding for a $100-million entrepreneurship hub that mirrors existing structures in cities such as Paris and aims to turn Montreal into a global innovation leader.
Called Ax-C, the facility is scheduled to open in December 2024 at an as-of-yet undisclosed downtown location, officials said Friday. It will be housed in an existing building, said Montreal executive committee member Luc Rabouin, who oversees economic development for the Plante administration.
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“We will now have a world-class place that allows the most promising start-ups to thrive,” Quebec Economy and Energy Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon said at a press conference held at the École de Technologie Supérieure. “The objective is to stimulate, support and commercialize the innovations of Quebec companies.”
Ax-C “will be a showcase for our innovative power,” added François Gagnon, head of the ETS.
The estimated $100-million price tag includes about $70 million for infrastructure alone, said Richard Chénier, head of the Montreal-based non-profit organization Centech, which the ETS created in 1996 to support high-tech companies.
Quebec is providing $38.5 million, while Ottawa is contributing $7 million and Montreal chips in $2.5 million. The rest of the money will be injected by private partners, said Chénier, who is one of the driving forces behind the project.
Ax-C will bring together under one roof several types of actors Fitzgibbon says are essential to the success of the tech “ecosystem” — entrepreneurs, incubators, university researchers, management experts and investors. It is patterned after existing innovation hubs such as Toronto’s MaRS, Waterloo’s Communitech and Paris’s Station F.
A dynamic start-up ecosystem “attracts investors, who themselves bring their expertise and the knowledge that they have picked up all around the globe,” Fitzgibbon said. “We want the best investors from San Francisco, London and Tel Aviv to invest here and drive our companies. With this space, we will attract their attention.”
Hubs such as Ax-C play a crucial role in shortening innovation cycles, Chénier says.
“The magic of those environments lies in the regular, and sometimes improbable, collisions that occur between different universes,” he said. “We have all the talent we need. We just didn’t have this kind of flagship.”
While entrepreneurial talent abounds in Quebec, “we were lacking this gathering, this synergy between key actors that can sometimes make companies grow twice as fast,” Chénier said.
As far as the city of Montreal is concerned, the facility will also help to breathe new life into downtown at a time when teleworking has deprived the central business district of thousands of full-time workers.
Ax-C “helps to reinforce our common message that downtown is alive, it’s effervescent and will continue to play its role as the economic engine of Quebec,” Rabouin said. “We have an issue with downtown, we know that. A project like this will really help us to populate our buildings.”
ftomesco@postmedia.com
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