View the full list here.
It hasn’t been easy to be a startup lately. Global funding for startup companies hit a five-year low at the end of 2023, according to an analysis by Crunchbase. And the Canadian startup ecosystem was no exception. A report from Tracxn, a research platform, found that as of early December 2023, funding for Canadian tech startups for the year totaled $4.4 billion, a 45% drop from the $8 billion raised in the same period in 2022, and a 67% drop from the $13.5 billion in 2021.
There are, however, some Canadian startups that show no signs of slowing down—which Forbes has now captured in our first-ever ranking of Canada’s Best Startup Employers.
To determine the list, Forbes partnered with market research firm Statista to identify a shortlist of 1,500 companies based in Canada. Qualifying startups were required to have at least 10 employees, to have been founded between 2014 and 2021 and to not be publicly traded.
The startups were then evaluated based on three main criteria: employer reputation, employee satisfaction and growth. To assess employer reputation, Statista searched articles, blogs and social media posts about each company, and used text analysis to categorize them as positive, negative or neutral. Employee satisfaction was measured by researching employee retention and online reviews, as well as exploring the companies’ websites to gather information on employee offerings. Growth was evaluated by examining the organizations’ website traffic, head counts and job listings. Ultimately, all of these data points were tallied into a scoring model, and the 200 companies with the highest total scores made our final list.
Original article edited by Rachel Rabkin Peachman, Forbes.