Social-good companies still feel accelerator's reverberations

Losing a program that helped companies focus on public good, investment, and scale is a "big loss," says one successful grad of the defunct Community Safety and Wellness Accelerator.

"Seeing how there was a really focused support in the community safety and wellness space was such a vote of confidence for us," said Lana Cuthbertson, CEO and co-founder of Areto Labs. "(We felt) validation in hearing there was a real market need for what we were doing — and on top of that, a societal need — from these significant voices in the landscape."

Areto Labs was part of the first of six cohorts in the Community Safety and Wellness Accelerator, known as the CSW. Areto uses artificial intelligence to filter hate speech and harassment online, today counting ex-prime ministers and international sports organizations among its clients.

"We have endless stories from our customers who say, 'This was such a huge relief, night and day, not having to deal with reading these toxic comments, having a piece of software take care of it,'" Cuthbertson told Taproot. "If there's anything we want to outsource to the robots, this is at the top of the list."

Upon graduation from the CSW, Areto Labs was the first company to receive investment from the ScaleGood Fund. The $10-million fund is managed by Ashif Mawji, who also led the bid for the Edmonton Police Foundation to operate the CSW with programming partner AlchemistX and initial sponsorship from TELUS.

"Sure, you can make money without doing good, but I think if you make money and do good, you'll do much better," Mawji told Taproot. "I'm a believer that it has to be both."

The CSW was one of the accelerator programs in the Scaleup GAP pilot that Alberta Innovates ended last year, not long after it faced significant cuts from the Alberta government. CSW's managing director Jillian McLaren was named Leader of the Year at the Start Alberta Tech Awards in November of 2025, and the accelerator did not officially bid farewell until about three weeks ago, even though Alberta Innovates noted its demise in August.

"What began as a bold vision to support social impact entrepreneurs working to build safer, healthier communities has grown into a global movement," the CSW's farewell post said. "While this program concludes, the movement does not. The work continues through each founder, each venture, and each supporter who believes that community safety and wellness deserve bold solutions."

Mawji said the "GAP" in Scaleup GAP indicated a need for growth-focused acceleration when the Alberta Innovates programs kicked off. The CSW's peers were Alberta Accelerator by 500, whose programming was provided by 500 Global; Plug and Play Alberta, whose programming came from Plug and Play Tech Center; and Alberta Catalyzer, a pre-accelerator operated by Platform Calgary and Edmonton Unlimited, which served its last cohort in December of 2025 and officially wraps up operations on March 31. SVG Ventures also ran an agri-food accelerator as part of the Scaleup GAP program.

"We needed different levels — and different accelerators in each level," Mawji said. "There's an accelerator where founders have done a proof of concept; they might have an MVP, but now they need to scale it. And then there is another one where a company has generated $1 million-plus in revenue in a year, and now they want to get to $10 million."

Mawji said some of the founders he worked with at the CSW needed help to think bigger. For example, Technology North founder Ling Huang started out with the goal to find jobs for neurodivergent youth, such as his son, here in Edmonton.

"'Why just Edmonton?'" Mawji recalled asking Huang. "'Are there no neurodivergent youth in Calgary, in Toronto, in BC, in the U.S.?'"

Technology North counts the Edmonton Police Service among its many partners for services such as body camera redaction and has opened offices in Ottawa and Toronto since graduating from the CSW. It also received nearly $600,000 from the Edmonton Edge Fund in 2024 to help the company scale.

Other CSW alumni include RUNWITHIT Synthetics, Standard Field Systems, SpectraCann, Click & Push Accessibility, Nurture, and NiaHealth among its dozens of graduates. Another is Kid-Drop, which credited Scaleup GAP for its success in 2023 but went bankrupt in 2025.

Not all accelerators are created equally — nor do they guarantee success for participants — Arden Tse of Yaletown Partners told Taproot in September.

"Everybody talks about the winners that come out of accelerators, but (a lot of companies that participate in accelerators) also don't make it," Tse said. "Believe it or not, a lot of Y Combinator companies don't get funding, don't grow, and don't succeed."

The best way to get value from an accelerator? By listening, said Mawji.

"'Coachable' is the key word," he said. "If I get a really successful founder that's not going to listen to anything that the mentors and coaches tell them, what's the point?"

Cuthbertson said the coaching, networking, and dedicated time to think about how to grow Areto Labs was a key value of the CSW. "For us, (the lesson) was probably the breadth of applicability for our technology," she said. "Thinking more broadly, thinking bigger."

Alberta Innovates has not yet developed new scale programming, communications manager Karen Garth told Taproot in an email in mid-March. "We're grateful for all participants' and accelerators' contributions to this pilot program," she said.

With the CSW no longer in action, Mawji points to his son Kinza Mawji's ScaleupMap for nascent community safety and wellness companies. The AI-powered platform has a suite of tools for both companies and investors, and the elder Mawji is a power user on the investor side.