Thin Air Labs: Building what’s next
As someone who regularly cooks up new things, James Lochrie has been spending much of his time lately working on something that is sure to appease Calgary and the tech sector’s appetite, with a bold approach to ecosystem venture building.
As the Co-Founder of global fintech startup Wave, self-taught entrepreneur, investor, and volunteer, Lochrie is part of the management team at Thin Air Labs, an innovation and investment firm building future-fit ventures and helping to grow a diverse ecosystem by raising money for startups. Currently, Thin Air Labs has 17 companies in their portfolio, from health and education to games, and on the consultation side of the business, “we probably touch around 100 companies in a month.”
Calgary’s budding tech sector, with the expertise of companies like Thin Air Labs, is helping Alberta’s economy bounce back in a meaningful way. Seeing this community growth and success is important to Lochrie and the Thin Air Labs team, who like others during 2020, had moments of anxiety.
“Like everybody else, I think the world paused and had to re-evaluate – and so did we,” said Lochrie, Managing / Capital Partner at Thin Air Labs.
Technological advancements all over the world have transformed not only the way people and businesses interact, but how they function, especially in the past year – and Alberta is a key player in this technological revolution.
Thin Air Labs
HOW IT WORKS
Thin Air Labs sits in between different types of business models – one of their most unique traits. Not entirely a venture capital firm, though they behave like one in Lochrie’s words, they also make investments in early-stage companies.
“The differentiator is that we are entrepreneurs. We don’t sit and throw money into a company and wait for things to mature over time, we get our fingernails dirty and help entrepreneurs,” said Lochrie. “The key thing and that differentiator is our philosophy of partnership with the entrepreneur. When we make an investment or do a consultation job, it’s not just about making money – that is an end result and outcome of different things that have to go right.”
Thin Air Labs’ primary goal is to build partnerships with entrepreneurs to help make them successful and, ultimately, facilitate their dreams. Meaningful relationships are at the core of everything Thin Air Labs does.
And Calgary is the place to do it. Lochrie is a firm believer that this city is Canada’s next technology hub, and a tremendous place to attract further business and talent. “I don’t know why people continue to think that Calgary isn’t going to be Canada’s next technology hub. It already is.”
“Calgary is leading the way, and we’re doing that without the number of companies we see in Toronto, Vancouver, or Montreal. The percentage of winners we see out of this province is incredible. The question is how big and prolific is it going to be?” Lochrie asks, adding that as a percentage of GDP and on a per-capita basis, Calgary is likely to be the most successful hub in the country.
James Lochrie, Managing / Capital Partner at Thin Air Labs
“The ecosystem here is truly incredible,” Lochrie says. “The reason that I can say that is because the level I work at is the very earliest stages of innovation. My team and I work with people’s ideas. We look at companies that are in the idea stage, the prototyping stage, the pre commercialization stage, almost exclusively. That allows us to understand how those companies are being built. What I'm seeing today in Calgary is a real proliferation of early-stage companies tackling incredibly pragmatic problems that are at mass scale.”
“I think the key driver behind that is, when you look at the economic history of Calgary in particular, we create the biggest companies in Canada, create the biggest exits in Canada, and deploy the most capital into our venture based businesses per capita, more than anyone else in Canada. That's why we're the richest province in the nation. And I don't think that's going to be limited to just the oil and gas and energy sector, I think that's going to proliferate into the technology sector.”
According to Lochrie, Calgary’s leadership is another game changer for the city. The types of problems they’re facing, the way they’re tackling them, and the aggressiveness they have are all key differentiators for the city and its businesses.
With little competition in their respective market, Thin Air Labs was strategic in their choosing of Calgary to set up shop. Based on Lochrie’s history and reputation, what his team does, and how they approached the Calgary market were all factors in enabling Thin Air Labs to be one of the premier brands around technology.
“When I moved back to Calgary in 2015 after building Wave, I believed we were going to see some of the biggest companies come out of Calgary, which was largely driven by the disruption happening in the oil and gas sector. That displacement of energy, people, and talent needed to find a home, and I knew the only place that that was going to happen was in technology. That’s what great people do. They take bad times, find opportunities, and create the new future, which is what we’re seeing in Calgary today,” Lochrie says.
“There is an entrepreneurial spirit here that is second to none in the nation.”
One of the companies Thin Air Labs is working with is Syantra DX Breast Cancer, which has developed a breakthrough method of detecting breast cancer. “The ability to detect cancer early on will save millions and millions of people's lives,” says Lochrie.
“That is something incredibly tied to the way that we think and operate as a company. It’s not just making money, but making money and impacting humans.”
OTHER PORTFOLIO HIGHLIGHTS
Symend: In spring 2020, Calgary-based Symend closed a $73 million Series B round of funding – one of the largest in Alberta history – for its customer engagement platform designed to better connect with financially at-risk customers.
Athennian: In September 2020, Athennian, developers of the leading cloud-based legal entity management software, announced a $10 million raise.
Orpyx: In July 2020, Orpyx® Medical Technologies, an innovator in digital health therapeutics to prevent diabetic foot complications, announced the close of a $7.6 million Series A round of funding, and also announced a $60 million contract with Alberta Health Services to supply more than 40 million medical masks over the next two years.
Another way Thin Air Labs supports the tech ecosystem is through the InceptionU and EvolveU full-stack developer retraining programs for displaced technical workers. The programs are targeted towards high-quality engineers, chemical engineers, physicists etc., that have been displaced out of the energy workforce, and they train about 100 per year.
In the meantime, Lochrie is continuously on the lookout for the next innovative idea. “That’s what I do. I’m looking for the next entrepreneur who is building it, or even just thinking about it and not even building it yet. We’re really good at helping to understand how we take an idea to commercialization.”
OVERCOMING HURDLES
In the midst of the economic impact of COVID and crashing oil prices, Thin Air Labs concentrated on the task at hand. “We focused on ensuring that our portfolio companies and the companies we advise were healthy, had our support, and were able to function properly moving forward,” says Lochrie. “That was really challenging. There were many long days, many Zoom calls, and a lot of stress, but at the end of it, we came out of it with everybody healthy and were able to move forward.”
Once stabilized, the team set its sights forward, and realized that this was an opportunity of acceleration, seeing what they refer to as 10 years of progress in six months. “We saw the adoption of technology, including collaborative software technologies, when people had to start working from home, and saw our portfolio companies really gain momentum because of that.”
Lochrie noted people working in early-stage technology, much like the rest of the world, were not ready for a pandemic, but the skillsets they have built up and the way they work now is all about solving the next problem they encounter. “We’re just born problem solvers,” said Lochrie.
“When the pandemic first hit, buying processes changed, and people rapidly adapted to what those changes in the market were so they could continue operating their business. We’re a group of people that walk nimbly on the path we’re on, because we might have to turn quickly, which is what we did.”
WHAT’S NEXT
As Lochrie and Thin Air Labs set their sights on the future, “I think in 10-year chunks. We’re only one year into my 10-year plan. One thing we want to do is complete the raise of our fund, a large amount of money to invest in Calgary-based companies, which would be a big milestone this year. My aggressive goal is to raise $300 million. We will be satisfied with a $100 million raise, though,” he says. Another goal they have is growing the Thin Air Labs team, expecting to grow from 11 team members to 40 by year’s end. We’d better let them get on with it.
Are you ready to make moves in Calgary’s tech scene, working with forward-thinking companies like Thin Air Labs? Head to our Live Tech Love Life careers page and see what opportunities might be out there for you.