Venture 50 spotlights tech, crypto stocks

The TMX Group celebrated another great year for early-stage public companies in Canada with its 2022 TSX Venture 50 list of top companies across five different sectors of the TSX Venture Exchange.

No surprise, the TSXV saw mining stocks end up high on the list of top performers but tech stocks also featured prominently in the Clean Tech & Life Sciences and Technology sectors, with Sernova Corp (Sernova Corp Stock Quote, Charts, News, Analysts, Financials TSXV:SVA) taking the top spot in Clean Tech & Life Sciences with a share price return of 172 per cent and cryptominer Bitfarms (Bitfarms Stock Quote, Charts, News, Analysts, Financials TSXV:BITF) doing the same in Technology with a return of 155 per cent.

“Early-stage growth companies are a critical component of our capital markets ecosystem. This year’s list is a reflection of the ongoing evolution of Canada’s markets and the face of TSXV, featuring a cross-section of companies from a range of sectors, using public capital to fund their expansion strategies and making a positive impact on the communities in which they operate,” said Tim Babcock, Vice President and Head of TSX Venture Exchange, in a February 24 press release.

The Venture 50, which uses three equally-weighted criteria in market cap growth, share price appreciation and value traded for the 2021 year, highlighted ten companies from each of five sectors — Clean Technology & Life Sciences, Diversified Industries, Energy, Mining and Technology — with the ten mining companies combining for the highest average share price increase at +572 per cent and highest market cap increase at a whopping +990 per cent, with the majority of mining names coming from the lithium and battery metals space.

As for Technology, four of the top ten were cryptocurrency and/or blockchain companies, where, after Bitfarms, the list includes Powerband Solutions, Voxtur Analytics, A2Z Smart Technologies, Digihost Technology, Nubeva Technologies, Reliq Health Technologies, Goldspot Discoveries Corp, Neptune Digital Assets and DMG Blockchain Solutions.

TMX said this year’s Venture 50 showed the strength of the market for early-stage companies, where the average Venture 50 name this time around is 3x larger in terms of market capitalization than the average from ten years ago. Four of the companies even had market caps at the year’s close of greater than $1 billion.

Other names from the Clean Tech & Life Sciences bracket included Eguana Technologies, Nanalysis Scientific, Therma Bright, Arch Biopartners, Perimeter Medical Imaging AI, First Hydrogen Corp, CHAR Technologies, BluMetric Environmental and H2O Innovation.

The TMX Group (TMX Group Stock Quote, Charts, News, Analysts, Financials TSX:X) operates the TSX, the TSXV, the TSX Alpha Exchange, the Canadian Depository for Securities, Montréal Exchange, Canadian Derivatives Clearing Corporation and Trayport.