BetaKit

techNL's new CEO, Andrea King, says her priorities are reducing red tape, speeding up the review process, and reforming procurement to enable more purchases from local companies.

Vistara says its sixth is anchored by a commitment from longtime LP Ryan Beedie, and doesn't have a number on it because it will be a "flagship forever fund."

Cohere says it can’t tell if this was a bug or deliberate behaviour. But while the model was taking the actions, its reasoning trace gave the Cohere team no indication of its intentions.

Led by Tech Horizons, the new round brings NVD’s total funding to nearly $28 million USD in equity funding.

Zafin says Naehas will expand its capabilities as it builds out its portfolio of AI-enabled technology for regulated institutions, particularly in marketing and compliance.

This week’s BetaKit Newsletter takes a closer look at Canada’s newest venture capital program. Plus: 🚀 Reaction Dynamics’ rocket plan 📉UniUni loses go-public deal 📈Tenstorrent hits new valuation high

Proposed regulations include requirements around reserve assets for issuers and where those assets can be held, as well as prohibitions on marketing stablecoins as legal tender, bank deposits, or publicly insured products, and from paying interest to holders.

Page is only two years old, but it already monitors tens of thousands of sources across more than 80 jurisdictions, and says it powers a quarter of the Fortune 100. Now, its entire team is joining Clio.

COVID-19 stopped Symx from getting into mines to install its hardware. But that crisis eventually helped the hardware startup transform into an industrial AI company that now operates in 14 countries.

DropGenie is building a miniaturized gene-editing platform designed to let researchers run far more experiments from the same scarce sample, while using far less reagent in the process.

Amid growing #FinTech competition, Questrade says approved users can now access extended hours options trading for select stocks and ETFs.

CSCA says Ottawa-based TJ Misra has a long history of consulting for startups and helping to commercialize innovation.

Researchers from Mila and @natural-resources.canada.ca have partnered on an AI model that maps wildfire hazards: how likely an area is to burn, how quickly fire will spread, and how intense it might become.

Dayforce's acquisition of Ribbon would help it give its enterprise customers more agentic recruitment options, including offloading some job interviews to AI.

.@kyla.bsky.social’s AI-bubble scenario isn’t a sudden implosion. It looks more like empty data centres, disappointing demand, mounting debt payments, and some companies slowly defaulting. So more of a sad balloon than a dramatic bang.

Data centres use a lot of concrete (Meta’s in Sturgeon County could use up to 37 CN Towers’ worth), which comes with an enormous carbon footprint. Cleantech advocates like Gil Yaron and Genevieve Sherman say the data-centre boom is a chance to push low-carbon concrete beyond its current niche.

The Canadian #VC industry welcomed today's announcement on federal VC funding, but a long timeline and an early-stage gap remain concerns.

Welbi founder and CEO Elizabeth Audette-Bourdeau told BetaKit that it plans to double its headcount to roughly two dozen employees following the deal, with three hires already made.

Industry minister Mélanie Joly will release details today of the feds' $750-million #VC funding envelope and open applications for the Growth VCCI program.

Riding demand for its developer and #AI security tools, 1Password CEO David Faugno said he sees a path to hit $1 billion USD in ARR over the next several years.

Two Canadian e-commerce brands, Cymax Group Technologies and CommerceBear, appear to have shut down this year amidst tough market conditions.

At a conference in Ottawa on Tuesday, experts mulled the risks of Canada’s burgeoning prediction market industry. Also in the BetaKit Newsletter: 🍁 A cyber vulnerability hits home 🚀Tesla and SpaceX explore merger 🛍️Shopify’s CTO departs

The next Mass Effect game won’t make it out of BioWare. Development on the game is stopping as the Edmonton studio shuts down. The closure is a particularly stark ending for a company that helped turn Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Baldur’s Gate into globally recognized franchises.

NordSpace says the contract covers the minimum cost of maintaining the facility and systems over its length, but not individual missions or launches.

.@evansolomon.bsky.social says the sites were taken down temporarily and as a precaution in response to serious vulnerabilities identified in PHP, software that underpins much of the internet.

Hive spent 12 years pivoting, lost 60% of its revenue during COVID, and kept going. Now, it says it’s well past $10M USD in ARR as it announces $27 million in equity Series B financing.

“There’s an enormous amount of noise and distraction if you spend too much time concerning yourself with the startup ecosystem.” Taylor Young says being farther from Silicon Valley forces the company to focus more on customers and less on what every other startup is doing.

Garden Loft can track 37 behavioural signals inside a home to look for early signs that someone’s health is changing. The goal is to make something that's not just a smart home, but a part of seniors' medical care.

Celesta Capital will work with students, researchers, and faculty on entrepreneurship, patents, commercialization, and intellectual property as the University of Alberta tries to turn more of its deep-tech research into companies.

The self-proclaimed “King of Bay Street,” Wes Hall, and philanthropist Patsy Anderson and their families have pledged millions to support SickKids' AI programs.

In the VC world, moving straight to general partner is rare. Most people gradually work their way up the ranks. But Ryan St. Germaine and Raven say they're confident he can excel in the position.

MAK first warned UniUni last month that it wasn't living up to its end of the deal. The next day, UniUni found private funding from an undisclosed investor. It's still not clear if that funding was meant to improve its finances for the SPAC deal, or provide liquidity if the deal fell through.

Reaction Dynamics is looking to raise $350 million and add nearly 300 employees over the next five years to send a new, more powerful rocket toward the stars.

Shopify CTO Mikhail Parakhin, who has helped lead the Canadian retail tech giant’s AI charge, is departing after two years. $SHOP #CDNtech

Montréal-based technology investor Inovia secures $200-million USD first close for sixth early-stage #VC fund. #CDNtech

ResolvMD serves about 1,700 of Alberta's physicians. Now, it's bringing its medical billing tech to Ontario.

Rozvelt, the Montréal startup behind a breath-filtering mask for hunters, is expanding into the defence sector with a $3.1-million seed round.

Exclusive: Toronto and NYC’s Mecka AI has recruited the growth hackers behind Ottawa-based “IRL sidequest” app Thirdspace to help gather home video for training real-world robots. #CDNtech

Anthropic has been revealed as a long-term leaseholder for a large Nova Scotia data centre project—the #AI giant’s first data centre in Canada. #AtlCan

Canadian-founded, US-based #AI chipmaker Tenstorrent secures $1.5 billion USD Series E at $6.2-billion valuation to challenge GPU dominance. #CDNtech

10KC came within two weeks of selling. Then the buyer walked away with very little notice. The company had spent six months and $150,000 on the process, and co-founder David Wilkin says the team considered winding the business down. Instead, it stayed alive and eventually landed a better deal.

Waymo's Toronto pilot program is the company's first official foray into Canada.

Maritime Launch has been conditionally approved to list its shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol $MAXQ. The company has been trading on the OTCQB Venture Market and the Cboe Canada Exchange since 2022.

Senator Daryl Fridhandler’s vision for a better SME policy in Canada looks like “Multiple BlackBerrys and Nortels remaining in Canada.” Read the full interview to learn how he wants to make that happen.

Canada once considered deeper membership in the European Space Agency. Matija Renčelj thinks the next 12 months may be the right time to revisit an idea first floated nearly 50 years ago.

A surprising amount of industrial knowledge still lives in Excel files, email threads, and employees’ heads. Aerium wants AI to pull that information together and make it usable.

Steve Walton helped build CoolIT before its $4.75B USD sale. Now he’s back with another data centre bet in 3C Datalec, which is tackling cooling, power, construction, and operations.

.@utoronto.ca's Citizen Lab says dozens of devices at @aljazeera.com were compromised with mercenary spyware from Israeli spyware firm Candiru that worked through ads that didn't require users to click on anything.

Fresh out of Y Combinator, Molagri has raised seed funding that will help it double its team (from four to eight) and put its tech to the test in field trials.

Canada’s food processors are trying to keep prices down with equipment that CFIN says hasn’t kept pace with global competitors. This funding aims to fix that by helping producers adopt more automation, AI, and digital tools.