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Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1332052
S P O R T S G et in F or m ation After racing other people for years, Dan Eisenhardt has been just fine swimming with the sharks, too. The former competitive swimmer sold his first entrepreneurial venture, a sports eyewear technology firm called Recon Instruments, to Intel Corp. in 2015. Just over a year later, the UBC Sauder School of Business grad dipped his toes back into the market with Form, billed as the first producer of augmented reality swimming goggles. The Vancouver-designed specs display metrics like distance, pace and calo- ries burned. Form closed $12 million in Series A funding last April. –N.C. C A N N A B I S High Test When Aurora Cannabis bought Vancouver's Anan- dia Laboratories in August 2018 for $115 million in stock, investors were still danger- ously high on the federal government's imminent legalization of recreational marijuana, which left many of them nursing an expensive hangover. (Since that deal closed, Aurora's share price has plummeted from the $75 range to about $12 as of early January.) But the Edmonton- headquartered licensed pro- ducer could have done a lot worse than acquire Anandia. Botanist Jonathan Page, who founded the company at UBC with chemist John Coleman in 2016, led the Canadian team that first published the cannabis genome sequence. Launched to develop new pot varieties for medical and other uses, Anandia became known among fellow producers for its testing services, which cover everything from potency and pesticides to contaminants and terpenes. True to its roots, it also offers breeding tools and genetics archiving. Anandia, which oper- ates independently of its parent, now works out of a False Creek Flats HQ that houses the country's largest dedicated cannabis testing laboratory. The first such lab to offer analysis of 46 terpenes—compounds that contribute to users' enjoyment—in dry cannabis, it's also launched a genotyp- ing service that ensures the accuracy of naming conven- tions for dry samples by confirming their genetics. And Page? He's Aurora's chief scientific officer. –N.R. PA RT T WO 34 BCBUSINESS JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021