PEI’s
PREMIER
START-UP
ACCELERATOR
PROGRAM

The Summerside Xchange leverages the state of the art facilities and resources of Summerside’s Living Lab. Many successful partnerships have emerged from the Living Lab, and the Summerside Xchange will build on these stories and create new ones. All Xchange portfolio companies will have access to office and lab space and everything the Living Lab has to offer.

One of the most renowned success stories from the Living Lab is Connective Touch, an innovative UK-based biometric technology company that was, at the start of 2020, preparing to launch their products to international markets by first establishing themselves in North American households.

By choosing to make our city of Summerside, PEI, their home, Connective Touch reduced the risks of expansion by establishing cost certainties, improving returns, and easing the transition of their start-up in a new market.

Electric Utility companies around the globe understand the core problem with managing demand: electricity demand fluctuates throughout the day, with peaks in usage in the morning and early evening. To manage these fluctuations, utilities need to run more generating stations, which significantly increases operating costs, requires more investment in new infrastructure and increases C02 emissions. Summerside's Electric Utility, which has the same level of sophistication as utilities across the globe, faces these challenges on a daily basis and finds ways to innovate and further the adoption and adaptation of PEI's grid system as its core strategic focus.
 
Enter Stash Energy and a partnership with The City of Summerside and their Living Lab Program, which became the genesis of their newfound market acceptance.

Fast-forward to Spring 2018 and with solid test results and mentoring from the City, Stash has reached another milestone: an envisioned outcome of the lab program with another round of equity investment from Island Capital Partners of $250,000 and an additional $250,000 from New Brunswick Innovation Foundation (NBIF) to further full-scale production of their Stash M1 Comfort System.