TC: Victoria’s tech revolution includes ViVitro Labs and Dev Amatya

 A Victoria Times Colonist Capital March 29, 2014 article by Andrew Duffy analyzes why Victoria boasts a $3-billion high-tech industry and features a dramatic image of Dev Amatya, ViVitro Labs senior research biomedical engineer in the Victoria research lab.  The same Times Colonist issue features: Study finds better survival with Medtronic device to fix heart’s aortic valve without surgery. 

“Both articles are proof of the local Victoria connection to the growing cardiovascular device market” notes  Gerry Wight, GM of ViVitro Labs.  “It’s exciting to be part of a Victoria company that has been facilitating these developments for the past 30 years and is currently testing this latest generation of heart valves.” 

ViVitro Labs and StarFish Medical are both part of  StarFish Holdings Inc.  The Capital article includes comments from Scott Phillips, President of StarFish Medical: Scott Phillips, chief executive officer of Starfish Medical, says high-tech’s growth was also fuelled from within as early successful companies like AXYS spun out small firms and re-invested in other start-ups. “People had seen enough entrepreneurs be successful here and they got the idea to start their own companies and others that had been successful were willing to invest,” he says. It helped that the city remained quite small and the tech community remained tight knit.

That internal investment continues with the executives behind success stories such as ParetoLogic and Aspreva continually investing in and mentoring new firms. “There is a magical size. If you’re too small, there’s not enough going on, and if you’re too big, people fragment. At this stage everyone wants the whole industry to be successful,” Phillips says. That means senior entrepreneurs are happy to help bankroll and guide new ventures.”