Starting a business and ensuring its growth requires a colossal effort. While there are dozens of government programs to help entrepreneurs, they still need to find the appropriate programs for their projects and submit applications. Montreal start-up Panna thinks that artificial intelligence (AI) can simplify all this.
Panna is a small company of a dozen employees founded in 2021 whose mission is to help Quebec companies working in the innovation sector to obtain without much effort all non-refundable and non-refundable government assistance. dilutive value that they can receive. The young company says it can seek assistance of all kinds for its clients, ranging from the few hundred dollars needed to hire interns to the millions of dollars needed to invest in a new market.
Panna says he has around a hundred customers at present, mainly in Quebec. The company says it is not itself looking for additional financing, but it plans to expand very soon elsewhere in Canada and, later, in the United States.
Her business card is rather interesting: she assures that in more than 80% of cases, the companies she has helped in the last two years have obtained the desired government assistance in the first year of their business relationship. The company still goes a little further than this first helping hand: it builds with its clients a schedule that extends over three years and thanks to which they can hope to submit a request to a little more than a dozen assistance programs per year.
“It’s a turnkey process,” assures Florence Samson, a project manager who is expected to become Panna’s general director in the coming days. “It involves three steps: we sort through more than 12,000 financial assistance programs that exist at the federal and provincial levels, we find those for which the company can apply, and we carry out the writing and planning of the applications. »
Reviewing 12,000 government programs is a daunting task. Panna is developing an automated system that will do the work for her and allow her to double the speed with which she responds to her customers’ requests, Florence Samson continues.
“Our AI is at the design stage, it is not yet entirely complete, but we are already using it internally,” she says. It helps us find more quickly the most appropriate assistance programs according to the criteria of the businesses we help. »
Financing without conditions
In their twenties, Raphaël Bernier and Virgil Sammartin met during their previous jobs, within the Longueuil Continuums incubator for young businesses. Their role of supporting other businesses has allowed them to see that there is a gulf between the aid programs put in place by governments and smaller businesses, which do not always have the time or resources. to request this assistance. This is what led to the creation of Panna.
The two co-founders had to comb through aid programs themselves to launch their own business. Today, they apply what they learned to help their customers. “We present ourselves as a model for our clients,” confirms Florence Samson. We applied for grants to launch Panna, which were necessary for our growth, but which did not dilute our ownership. »
For a young company from innovative sectors, this notion of dilution is not trivial. Private investors who are ready to support start-up companies or, subsequently, in stages of strong growth in their turnover require an equity investment in return for their financial support, which is not to everyone’s liking. entrepreneurs.
However, there are all kinds of government assistance intended for businesses in their first years of existence, especially those specializing in business sectors considered promising, such as digital technologies. “It’s still quite broad, it could be agricultural technologies, artificial intelligence tools, and something else,” says Florence Samson.