TORONTO—Eight ontario companies have received more than $6 million in seed and later-stage financing from the Investment Accelerator Fund (IAF), a program investing in companies to develop technologies and bring products or services to market.

The IAF supports innovation for ontario firms in the advanced materials and manufacturing, information technology, clean-tech and life sciences sectors.

The program is funded by the government of ontario and delivered by Toronto-based innovation centre, MaRS.

These investments are usually in the form of a convertible debenture or an equity investment and help firms develop products or services and attract additional investment.

The IAF is investing $500,000 each in the following companies:

Temporal Power develops and manufactures electrical energy storage systems using a flywheel technology that helps electrical utilities modernize power grids by integrating wind, solar and water to generate clean energy.GridCentric develops cloud computing and a technology that cuts the number of servers needed in client and server IT setups.Karos Health is creating an exchange network to improve electronic ordering and results distribution of diagnostic imaging tests between client hospitals, imaging centers and radiology reading services.Locationary commercializes cloud-based, local data management systems that help mobile and web publishers improve quality and reduce the costs of managing local business data.

Four other life sciences firms will receive $1 million in funding from the IAF.