Canopy Boston 2016

Our visit to Boston was to explore the potential for Dashboard entering the US market via the East Coast, engaging with the strong investment/academic cluster centred on Boston.

Our hosts for the mission were Canopy Somerville, a unique community focused on entrepreneurial co-working space/business acceleration dedicated to supporting innovators and Start-Up companies.

Whilst visiting Boston, we had meetings with investment funds focused on the IoT space, potential customers (including a discussion in relation to municipal waste water management) together with prospective technical partners.

We attended two events whilst in Boston; Start up Grind (for which the centrepiece was an interview with Melissa Withers from Betaspring) and one of the weekly events held at the Venture Cafe in the Cambridge Innovation Centre (the building with the single highest concentration of startup companies in the world). Both were well attended and had speakers who were seasoned entrepreneurs and who now choose to share their experience by nurturing/supporting companies through the early stages of the startup journey.

The Canopy team also brokered meetings with various service providers who were there to offer advice and support to UK companies looking to create a presence in the States in the most efficient manner.

A key item on the itinerary was a visit to Greentown Labs (the largest cleantech accelerator in the world) who are not merely a coworking incubator/accelerator (whose emphasis is on industrial development environment provision rather than office space) but who also have transformational relationships with multiple corporates seeking to increase their engagement with cleantech innovators.