For socially and environmentally driven entrepreneurs seeking to immigrate to Canada under the Startup Visa Program
Spring’s IMPACT Startup Visa (ISV) Accelerator is a 4-month cohort-based virtual program. We help immigrant entrepreneurs who own businesses that create a positive social or environmental impact, move to Canada, apply for Permanent Residence status and scale globally through the Canadian Startup Visa Program.
How do we do it? Apart from delivering a business acceleration program, we provide you with support and a community to help you make Canada the new home for your venture.
A lot of us at Spring are either immigrants or have parents who have immigrated to Canada. While we cherish our current lives here, we have deep ties with our respective home countries. We see our being in Canada as an opportunity to bridge our communities back home with new opportunities and vice versa. Let us help you make a big and exciting move easier so you can focus on what really matters—people, planet and profit.
Entrepreneurship is not an intellectual exercise, it's an emotional one. A leap of faith. But, it's an exciting leap of faith because you can do it in a way that's not blind. At Spring, we wrap the tools, training, resources, mentorship and capital around our entrepreneurs to get their business on a clear path to changing the world.
As a designated partner to the Canadian Government’s Start-Up Visa Program, we help entrepreneurs like you immigrate and move their businesses to Canada. Our online IMPACT Startup Visa Program combines the training, mentorship, opportunities, and connections needed to successfully scale in North America.
As a certified B-Corporation, we’ll also work with you to fine-tune the positive social and environmental impact you’re passionate about making through your business.
The program focuses on five key objectives:
For impact motivated entrepreneurs, Canada is the place to connect and thrive with like-minded changemakers.
Our admissions process is multilayered, allowing us to dig deeper into understanding you and your team who plan to move to Canada with you.
What does it mean that Spring is the only impact-first designated business incubator under Canada’s Start-up Visa?
Watch our most recent information session, where we go over the what, how and why behind the ISV program. You’ll also hear from women-founders who have participated in ISV and who share their stories about their journey to Canada under the Startup Visa.
This event went live on January 20, 2022 at 9 am PST
We are now accepting applications for our May 2022 intake | Application deadline: February 16 at 11:59 pm PST
Applications received after the deadline will be considered for the following intake. Intakes generally begin in February, May, and September and one intake is limited to 15 companies.
The program runs for a period of 4 months during which you’ll be expected to attend virtual training sessions 2 days per week.
We do accept companies that are pre-launched but recognize that admission is competitive. Come prepared with a strong application that justifies your background and experience in the business that you intend to establish.
So far, we’ve had no Permanent Residency rejections out of our total number of participants. We do, however, have a few participants still waiting to hear back about the status of their PR.
*Please note that due to the impacts of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), the IRCC is experiencing delays in processing applications and can’t provide accurate processing times. To learn more, click here.
We acknowledge that we are headquartered on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō, and sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples, and as a global team we’d like to extend this acknowledgement to all those who have historically stewarded and nurtured the lands we live, work, and play on today.
