Canadian companies secured some high-profile awards at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, even while most face hurdles building their solutions on home soil. Montréal-based Eli Health won a Best of Innovation award at the event for the Hormometer, an app-linked home device that the company says can measure levels of the…
Can ChatGPT write a founder’s story for them? What does life after exit look like? And how do you get men to back a fertility solution? On January 13, four founders took the stage at the MaRS Discovery District for TechTO Together to share hard-earned lessons about fundraising, storytelling, life post-acquisition, and winning at every…
Two venture-capital (VC) firms from opposite sides of the country are establishing new presences in Alberta. Montréal-based Luge Capital and Vancouver-based Pender Ventures are both adding new Calgary-based investors after the Alberta Enterprise Corporation (AEC) contributed to their most recent funds. The new VC presence indicates a boost in capital available to early-stage companies in Alberta….
‘Tis the season for stump speeches. I’m writing to you from my newsletter bunker shortly after former finance minister Chrystia Freeland and government House leader Karina Gould announced their candidacy for Liberal party leader. Along with Mark Carney and a host of other candidates (but not Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne), they are running for the…
Social media is going through a midlife crisis. How does that work? Social media is only around 20 years old! Well, tech ages twice as fast, so it only took half the time. “It does make me increasingly nervous that one of them really wants to move to Mars and the other one has a…
A wave of exits and acquisitions in the first few weeks of 2025 is signalling continued heat in Canada’s tech sector. In the last month alone, BetaKit reported that Carbon6 will be acquired for over $300 million CAD, 1Password made its largest-ever acquisition, Humi was acquired for $155-million CAD, and Payfare will join Fiserv in…
British Columbia (BC)-based startup Moment Energy has secured a $15-million USD ($21.5-million CAD) Series A round as it continues to load up funding for its planned gigafactory in the United States. A gigafactory refers to a facility designed for the production of batteries, particularly those used in electric vehicles (EVs). Moment’s new facility will be…
Toronto-based incubator DMZ has received $3.5 million from the federal government to establish the Centre for Housing Innovation (CHI), a new hub that will provide a training program and a housing-focused accelerator. The funding, which comes from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario), aims to establish CHI as a central hub…
Embattled edtech startup Paper has appointed Silicon Valley edtech veteran Martina Tam as CEO following a whirlwind 2024. Tam brings experience from various San Francisco-based tech companies, including early education platform Brightwheel where she served as the chief operating officer and interim chief growth officer. She also worked as the vice president of marketing at…
Multiple websites related to Shopify’s Equitable Commerce programs are no longer active following the recent departures of the company’s Equitable Commerce and Build Native leads, BetaKit has learned. Pages for the Build Native with Shopify, Empowered by Shopify, and Social Impact programs are no longer live on Shopify’s site. The Internet Wayback Machine indexed archived…