Pick the winner 👇

Our next pitch competition is all FinTech. Know a founder who should be up there on November 5th? Drop their name in the comments below. 💬

We recorded Episode 4 of Tech Thursday Live! on October 22nd in front of a live audience, and it was our AgTech episode.

Mark Le Dain and I went through the week’s tech news: Ottawa’s new $1.75B plan for Canadian venture, Grindr buying PurposeMed for US$250M, and an OpenAI engineer charged with planting a recording device in a company conference room.

We also sat down with:

• Mark Hlady, CEO at SimpleHedge, on helping family farmers lock in good prices from their phone

• Wilson Acton, Managing Partner at Tall Grass Ventures, on why AgTech is much bigger than farm tech

📺 You can watch the full episode on Youtube here. Or listen on Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. If you enjoy the episode, please subscribe and review.

Here’s what stuck with me.

1. Farming is a risky business.

Mark Hlady built for Instagram at Meta and sold his last company, Triple Play, to Roblox. When he moved back to Calgary, he spent a year talking to farmers. Most AgTech founders he met were building drones and computer vision. Farmers told him they wanted something that would make them money right away.

He showed us why with a chart of corn prices. The profit margin on a farm can be about 10%, and the price of corn can swing 20% either way. In 2025, a farmer who sold at the wrong time lost money on the whole crop. He asked the room:

“Could you imagine any of you guys doing your full-time jobs and then not getting paid?”

The fix is locking in a good price ahead of time. Farmers have always been able to, but it meant calling an advisor during business hours, faxing forms and waiting up to 90 days. You can’t do it on TD or Wealthsimple. SimpleHedge puts it on your phone, for canola, corn, soybeans and cattle, and just raised $4M to build what’s next.

I also learned something the hard way. Wilson had tried to explain soybean prices to me two days earlier, and I didn’t understand anything. Mark’s answer: exports are up, demand is up, “basic supply and demand.” Mark Le Dain kindly translated":

“More people are buying it. So the price is going up.”

Don’t miss our FinTech episode of Tech Thursday Live! on November 5th

We’re digging into Canada’s FinTech opportunity and what’s next for innovation in financial technology, co-hosted with our friends at Questrade.

Plus, it’s the second round of the Tech Thursday Pitch Competition, sponsored by BLG.

Featuring:

• Andrej Simeonov, Head of Technology, Questrade

• Lucas Scheer, Co-Founder & CEO, Purelend

• Pitchers TBA soon!

RSVP Now

2. Ottawa is putting money into venture. Wilson likes that everyone else left… at least AgTech.

Ottawa just laid out a $1.75B plan for Canadian venture, run through BDC and mostly aimed at later-stage companies. Mark is optimistic: if it lets Canadian funds take more risk, that’s a huge win. I’m more skeptical. It looks like the same playbook we’ve used for 20 years, and I don’t think more money alone creates more exits.

Wilson Acton sees the opportunity somewhere else. His firm, Tall Grass Ventures, is almost fully deployed on its $32M Fund One and now investing out of Fund Two, at a time when AgTech venture deal count is down 40%. His read:

The tourist money that chased meat alternatives and high-tech greenhouses is gone, and Wilson isn’t sad about it. The capital that stayed is going to work in a market that’s roughly a third of the global economy once you count fertilizer, shipping and the barley in your beer. Ag companies are also getting acquired at almost double the rate of the broader venture market.

Tech Thursday Live! is presented by Ramp

Ramp just launched in Canada, and more than 70,000 businesses already use it so they never chase another receipt. Corporate cards, bill pay and accounting syncs, with full control of your spend policy the whole time. Sign up your company today.

3. Canada’s farmers already have a head start.

Mark Le Dain opened our AgTech segment with the case for Canada: over $100B in agri exports, and one of the few legacy industries where tech still brings big productivity gains.

Wilson made it even stronger. Prairie farmers were practicing what social media now calls regenerative agriculture back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and Canadian farmers are some of the lowest-carbon farmers in the world. That matters, because a low-carbon crop is worth more when it becomes renewable diesel or jet fuel. He put it this way:

What’s left to build is the unglamorous stuff. Wilson wants to back new ways to make nitrogen fertilizer, a better cold chain, and a way to “stop barbecuing grain in order to dry it.” His view on where Canadian ag goes from here: “we’re only getting started.”

Tech Jobs Available 💻

A few roles worth knowing about across Calgary’s startup and tech ecosystem:

• Cura - Hiring across engineering, prototyping and business development

• Ultimarii - Hiring across regulatory solutions and sales

• Helcim - Hiring across software engineering, data, marketing and sales

• Eavor - Hiring across mechanical engineering, project delivery and IP strategy

• SensorUp - Hiring across backend software engineering

• Neo Financial - Hiring across product design, finance, lending and sales

• Promise Robotics - Hiring across robotics software, mechanical engineering and production

• AltaML - Hiring across software engineering, AI architecture and product

• CruxOCM - Hiring across engineering, product and sales

Hiring? 🧐 If you have a role you’d like to share to the Calgary Tech Thursday community, please fill out this form.

More Content From Thursday Media

🎙️ Your Business is on the Line: Canada’s Number One Business-Comedy Podcast is back with Alyssa McMasters, who pitches Vyb, a marketplace where you can rent an extrovert to liven up your conference, wedding or trade show booth. Shubh Sidhu and I gave it 75 out of 75 salsas, the most hilariously viable business idea yet. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

💶 November 5th: We’re back with another episode of Tech Thursday Live! This time we’re digging into Canada’s FinTech scene, co-hosted with Questrade, plus round two of the Tech Thursday Pitch Competition, sponsored by BLG.

Don't Forget to RSVP

💻 November 14th: Tech Thursday x Garmin Hackathon.

What can you build in 8 hours? Join a cross-functional team to build a working app on Garmin’s Connect IQ platform, using Garmin’s programming language, Monkey C, with a Garmin mentor on hand all day. No hardware or coding experience required, lunch and snacks are included, and the ​ winning team takes home $1,000 in cash & Garmin smartwatches. Second place gets $500 in cash. With support from Helcim, Motiv and Platform Calgary.

RSVP Here

🤝 November 18th: For our final Tech Thursday Live! of the year, we’re switching things up and going live on a Wednesday. We’re getting into Canada’s DefenceTech and aerospace sectors, plus the final round of the Tech Thursday Pitch Competition.

RSVP in Advance

Thank You to Our Incredible Sponsors

Ramp, Boast, Alberta Innovates, Skip, Borden Ladner Gervais LLP (BLG), and Crestview Strategy. These folks make it all possible, we couldn’t be more thankful to them.

That was Episode 3 of Tech Thursday Live!, recorded October 8th in front of a live audience. This one was about the infrastructure behind AI: satellites, gas turbines, and the capital it takes to build them

Mark Le Dain and I went through two weeks of space and energy news: SpaceX launching Google’s test of data centres in orbit, Cenovus buying Athabasca Oil, Emera and Canadian Utilities combining in a $72B deal, and the leaked numbers behind Anthropic’s IPO.

We also sat down with:

• Kurtis Broda, COO & Co-Founder at Wyvern, on spotting dark ships from orbit and why Canada needs its own satellites

• Eva Kiefer, President and CFO at Northbase, on financing power equipment that now takes three years to arrive

• Daniel Fipke, CDO & Co-Founder at Kanin Energy, on Kanin’s US$100M raise and why industry is building its own power

📺 You can watch the full episode on Youtube here. Or listen on Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. If you enjoy the episode, please subscribe and review.

Here’s what stuck with me.

1. Getting to orbit is about to get harder.

On October 1st, SpaceX’s Transporter-18 put 130 satellites into orbit, including Google’s Project Suncatcher, a test of whether data centres can run in space. Mark has gone from bearish to bullish on the idea: if building on the ground means years of approvals, orbit gives you:

“Certainty of project completion without community pushback.”

Kurtis and the Wyvern team build hyperspectral satellites that can tell what something is made of from orbit. Their new product, SeaDrake, identifies ships by their paint and structure, so a tanker can’t hide by changing its name or switching off its beacon. Wyvern was also just selected for NASA’s Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition program, the first pre-Series A company to get in.

The catch is getting up there. Kurtis says SpaceX is winding down its Transporter rideshare missions, the cheap seats startups have relied on. After 2028, you may need a dedicated launch. He said:

“No matter how good your allies are, they’re always gonna prioritize their own issues. So having Canadian satellites that can monitor the Arctic or monitor Canadian interests is becoming much more important.”

Don’t miss our AgTech episode of Tech Thursday Live! on October 22nd

We're digging into what's next for Canadian innovation and opportunity in agriculture.

We have:

• Mark Hlady, CEO & Founder, SimpleHedge

• Wilson Acton, Managing Partner, Tall Grass Ventures

RSVP Now

2. The money is there. The equipment isn’t.

Cenovus is buying Athabasca Oil, and Emera and Canadian Utilities are combining in a $72B deal. Mark’s read on both: there are more good projects than capital to build them.

That gap is where Eva works. Northbase finances the long-life equipment behind energy projects, and just closed a revolving credit facility with Oaktree for up to US$300M. She spotted the gap during her time at Pipestone, and her rule is simple: “matching the right capital to the right asset.”

The problem now is time. Behind-the-meter generation equipment that used to take about a year to arrive takes three. Mark named the trap: buyers won’t sign a power purchase agreement until you have the equipment, and banks won’t lend until you have the PPA. Northbase lends against the equipment itself. With its partner Compass Energy, it put deposits on engines before customers were lined up, and every one has since been deployed.

Her warning for everyone piling into AI power:

“An announced project doesn’t always equal a financeable project.”

Tech Thursday Live! is presented by Ramp

Ramp just launched in Canada, with a new office in Toronto. Corporate cards, bill pay and accounting syncs, with full control of your spend policy the whole time. Sign up your company today.

3. The grid can’t keep up, so bring your own.

Founders like Daniel, and the work they’re doing, are exactly who that beer is for. Kanin just closed a US$100M equity round, led by S2G Investments with Canada Growth Fund.

Kanin turns industrial waste heat into electricity. The idea came from an early customer:

“I just wanna produce molecules and focus on that. Can you focus on electrons?”

That job is getting bigger. One of the largest US grid operators paused new connections, and ERCOT in Texas just announced a data centre moratorium. Kanin’s customers keep hearing they’re 10 years away from a new connection, so they put generation on site. Alberta is heading the same way with its bring-your-own-generation policy, which Daniel calls pragmatic.

His ask for a room full of tech people: “I encourage folks to think about infrastructure.”

Surprise of the Week 👀

Our new closing segment. Someone asked Claude for a route up a mountain called Widowmaker and had to be helicoptered out. Mark’s advice to AllTrails: put it in your ads.

Tech Jobs Available 💻

A few roles worth knowing about across Calgary’s startup and tech ecosystem:

• Kanin Energy - Hiring across project engineering, business development and finance

• CruxOCM - Hiring across engineering, product and sales

• Validere - Hiring across software engineering and growth

• Ultimarii - Hiring across regulatory solutions and sales

• Helcim - Hiring across software engineering, data, design and sales

• Benevity - Hiring across software engineering, data, AI/ML and marketing

• Enverus - Hiring across power markets research, AI infrastructure and product

• Pason - Hiring across drilling optimization engineering, data science and electrical design

Hiring? 🧐 If you have a role you’d like to share to the Calgary Tech Thursday community, please fill out this form.

More Content From Thursday Media

🎙️ Your Business is on the Line: Canada’s Number One Business-Comedy Podcast is back with its first-ever Best Of episode, a look at the favourite moments from Season 1. Shubh Sidhu and I revisit pitches like rating grocery-store salsa, monetizing prayer, and animal talent agencies. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

🤝 November 5th: We’re back with another episode of Tech Thursday Live!

RSVP in Advance

💻 November 14th: Tech Thursday x Garmin Hackathon.

What can you build in 8 hours? Join a cross-functional team to build a working app on Garmin’s Connect IQ platform, using Garmin’s programming language, Monkey C, with a Garmin mentor on hand all day. No hardware or coding experience required, lunch and snacks are included, and the winning team takes home Garmin smartwatches. With support from Helcim, Motiv, and more.

RSVP Here

Thank You to Our Incredible Sponsors

Ramp, Boast, Alberta Innovates, Skip, Borden Ladner Gervais LLP (BLG), and Crestview Strategy. These folks make it all possible, we couldn’t be more thankful to them.

Our interview guests:

• Eva Kiefer, President and CFO, Northbase Finance Inc.

• Kurtis Broda, COO & Co-Founder, Wyvern

• Daniel Fipke, Chief Development Officer & Co-Founder, Kanin Energy

Mark Le Dain, Chief Revenue Officer at Fuelled, and I are hosting again in front of a live studio audience. We’ll break down the tech news from the last two weeks and have short interviews with the people building the companies behind it.

We can’t wait to see you there!

RSVP here

News to Catch Up Before This Thursday 🧐

Want to walk in with the full picture? Here’s a quick catch-up on our guests’ latest news and the space and AI stories shaping the conversation.

• Northbase Finance closed a revolving credit facility with Oaktree, providing up to US$300M in financing capacity.

  • The facility will support its equipment financing platform across power generation, compression and industrial assets.

• Kanin Energy closed a US$100M equity round, with S2G Investments leading and Canada Growth Fund joining, each committing up to US$50M.

• Wyvern was selected for NASA's Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition program in June, which BetaKit reports makes it the first pre-Series A company admitted. It also pitched a $230M full-program estimate for its deployable-optics satellite project at the Canada Investment Summit.

• Google launched its Project Suncatcher prototype satellite on a SpaceX Falcon 9 on Oct 1, carrying four of its TPUs to test whether AI computing could one day run in orbit.

• Halifax’s Galaxia raised $4.5M CAD, co-led by Amiral Ventures and Invest Nova Scotia, to build satellites that process data in orbit.

• Forbes reports estimates for the AI data centre buildout run as high as US$10.3 trillion by 2032, and developers have already raised at least US$1.3 trillion in debt.

Also this month: October 22nd

Another live show is upcoming. Guests to be announced, so stay tuned.

RSVP for Oct 22nd

Thank you to our incredible sponsors

Ramp, Boast, Alberta Innovates, Skip, Borden Ladner Gervais LLP (BLG), and Crestview Strategy. These folks make it all possible, and we couldn’t be more thankful.

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“Taste is a point of view that has a backbone... and it survives under pressure.” George Bugg, Staff Product Designer, Ramp

We recorded Episode 2 of ‘Tech Thursday Live!’ last week in our studio, in front of a live audience.

Mark Le Dain and I went through a wild couple of weeks of Canadian tech news: A new tax cut on business investment, billions in bank and pension pledges, the largest VC fund in Canadian history.

We also sat down with:

• Andrew Curtis, CEO at Clearco on rebuilding Clearco

• Doug Schweitzer on Ultimarii’s $13M Fundraise and the status of Major Projects

• George Bugg from Ramp on why taste matters more than ever

📺 You can watch the full episode on Youtube here. Or listen on Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. If you enjoy the episode, please subscribe and review.

Here is the top ideas that stuck with me 👇

1. Canada wants to build. Ultimarii is making it faster.

2. Big funds are back. So is discipline.

3. Agents are coming. Taste is the moat.

1. Canada wants to build. Ultimarii is making it faster.

Ottawa cut the marginal effective tax rate on new business investment from roughly 13% to 6.4%, and banks and pensions pledged billions at the Canada Investment Summit. Mark’s caveat: some of those pledges are advisory services, not capital.

Either way, the money only matters if projects get approved. That’s Doug Schweitzer’s whole company. He watched major projects stall as an Alberta cabinet minister. Now Ultimarii, fresh off a $13M+ Series A led by BDC, uses AI to work through the 30,000 to 40,000 pages a single mining approval can take. His words: “Canada has one of the most complicated regulatory environments globally.”

Don’t miss the next Tech Thursday Live! on October 8th

We have:

• Kurtis Broda, COO at Wyvern one of the most exciting SpaceTech companies in Canada

• Eva Kiefer, President and CFO at Northbase, fresh off a $300M credit facility from Oaktree Capital Management

• More to be announced

RSVP

2. Big funds are back. Discipline is back too.

Radical Ventures closed over US$1B for its Breakouts Fund. Portage closed US$600M for fintech. The money is flowing again.

Andrew has lived the other side of that cycle. Clearco, founded as Clearbanc in 2015 by Michele Romanow and Andrew D’Souza, was one of Canada’s breakout fintech stories. It funded ecommerce brands by taking a cut of their future revenue instead of equity. In 2021 it raised $215M from SoftBank and was valued at roughly US$2B.

Then the market turned. Over 2022 and early 2023, Clearco went through several rounds of layoffs and pulled out of its international markets. Andrew joined as an advisor in 2022 and became CEO in January 2023, when the company was, in his words, “close to an emergency.” That October, Clearco recapitalized with a US$60M Series D at a valuation about 90% below its peak.

Since then, it’s been a slow, disciplined rebuild. This August, Clearco closed a US$100M facility from Macquarie that it expects will back about US$900M in funding to ecommerce brands over the next two years. Andrew’s rule for Clearco 2.0 is simple: if you give someone $100 plus a fee, you’d better get the $100 plus the fee back.

Tech Thursday Live! is presented by Ramp

Save time and money with Ramp. They have corporate cards, accounting, bill pay, and a whole lot more all in one place. Sign up your company today.

3. Agents are coming. Taste is the moat.

Harvey is shifting from selling software to building AI for law firms, and Meta launched Muse, an agent that does things for you. Mark’s take: if agents do the buying, “you don’t even have to exist as a business from a brand perspective.”

George took that to its conclusion. LLMs work by scanning what already exists and predicting what comes next. Hand them all the design, code and ideas, and “all of the IP that it uses will just be reused nonsense. Everything will look the same.”

So what is taste? His answer was the best thing said all night:

“Taste is a point of view that has a backbone… and it survives under pressure. It survives in different environments.”

He says taste comes from “seeking the uncanny in the world”: looking for things that aren’t mass-produced and holding opinions other people don’t. That’s risky, and it’s the point. “That requires putting yourself on the line,” which, as he put it, an LLM can’t do.

Ramp puts that into practice. Its head of brand says the brand “should behave like jazz”: recognizable, but never the same twice. That’s how you get Kevin from The Office sitting in a glass box in Times Square doing receipts for 12 hours, a wrecking ball dropped on a BMW, and a one-night-only Broadway-style musical to sell finance software.

Founder Myth of the Week

Last week’s: does Jeff Adamson run to work everyday? Confirmed. Philippe and George watched him do it.

This week’s: does Tate Hackert drag race his Audi R8? Answer next episode.

💼 Jobs

• Bitdeer: Project Coordinator

• Clio: Machine Learning Engineer

• Questrade: Product Marketing Manager

• North Vector Dynamics: IT Manager

• WestJet: Senior Developer

• Quantized Technologies: Head of Quantum Development [link]

Other Content from Thursday Media

🎙️ Your Business is on the Line, Canada’s Number One Business-Comedy Podcast is back with Adam Thompson, founder of Friday Socks, a Calgary success story built on purposely mismatched socks. He pitched Atomic Bath Bombs and PopTop Plants. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

🤑 How Questrade is Building a Technology-First Bank, Tech Thursday was joined by Hwan Kim, Chief Product Officer, Andrej Simeonov, Head of Technology, and Ralph Sadowski, Product Director to talk about how Questrade is going from one of Canada’s first online brokerages, to a Schedule I bank. Watch on Youtube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

🤝 October 8th, We’re back with another episode of Tech Thursday Live! RSVP here.

💻 November 14th: Tech Thursday X Garmin Hackathon. Come build Garmin Apps with the Garmin team. This is a super interesting hackathon because Garmin uses Monkey C coding language. With special help from Helcim, Motiv, and more. RSVP here.

Thank you to our Incredible Sponsors

Ramp, Boast, Skip, Alberta Innovates, Crestview, and BLG. These folks make it all possible, we couldn’t be more thankful to them.

LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube | Thursday Live Podcast

Tech Thursday Live! is our new show format we’re trialing here in Calgary with myself and Mark Le Dain as co-hosts. Instead of panels, TTL is more like a live show with segments that reflect what’s happening in Tech. In our first episode, we covered:

• The Alberta Data Centre Build Out - Graeme Harrison, CEO at Simply Silicon, joined us via phone to discuss the survival rate of most projects in Canada and across the globe.

• Tech News - Mark and I gave our analysis of the new Dyson Toothbrush, the SaaSapocalypse, Revenue concentration risk for OpenAI and Anthropic, and of course, Robot Olympics.

• Founder Interview - We had Nic Beique, CEO at Helcim, join us to discuss their recent $53M Series C, and the sale of Moneris to US private Equity.

• House Call - An onsite tour of Geologic AI, presented by Ramp.

• Sandi Gilbert Interview - Sandi spoke about the Canadian Founder exodus to the US, and how we stop it.

• Jobs - We ended the show with jobs across the Prairies.

This is our recap of our first event. You can watch the full episode here, or tune in on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Note: the audio got corrupted. We tried our best to fix it, but it still sounds a little funny so you’ll have to bare with the audio on this first one.

Tech Thursday’s is presented by Ramp, with support from Boast, Skip, BLG, Crestview, and Alberta Innovates.

Tech Thursday Live! is thrilled to be presented by Ramp. Ramp is now in Canada, and have recently opened an office in Toronto.

In a recent Forrester’s 3-year analysis of business that use Ramp, they found that Ramp delivers a 408% ROI to enterprises. Ramp helps replace fragmented card, expense, payment, procurement, and accounting workflows with one AI-powered platform for greater visibility, control, and efficiency.

The Alberta Data Centre Build Out

Meta is building a roughly 1GW AI-optimized data centre in Alberta, and Danielle Smith was in the room for the announcement. We called Graeme Harrison, dialing in from Santa Clara, to pour cold water on the regional gold rush. Four months after his LinkedIn post titled “The Alberta Data Centre Bubble Update,” his position hasn’t moved.

“I’ve seen hundreds of pitches from people, all walks of life, big developers, small developers, landowners, big companies. 99% of these projects are gonna fail, and the reason is that they can’t get a customer. Alberta right now, there’s a lot of tailwinds. It’s a great place to build. But if you can’t get a customer, you’re toast.”

The problem is monetization. Margins on inference are enormous, but a gigawatt-scale project has five or six possible buyers on the planet, and regional players can realistically fill twenty to forty megawatts. Going smaller doesn’t save you either: treat it like a commercial real estate deal and it takes two to four years to bring online, while customers want capacity today. Harrison expects Anthropic lands here, OpenAI possibly in time, Google and Microsoft harder to see, Amazon already operating in the province. The one genuine Alberta advantage is political. American developers have noticed the province standing behind data centres while Texas politicians float the word moratorium, and that’s worth more than any tax credit.

The Next Tech Thursday Live! is September 24th

Join us at the next ‘Tech Thursday Live!’. We have an incredible lineup:

• Andrew Curtis, CEO at ClearCo to speak to their recent $100M financing facility. Andrew has lead the turn around at ClearCo after a few difficult years.

• Doug Schweitzer, Co-Founder and CEO at Ultimarii to speak to their $13M Series A and the progress of Large Projects in Canada.

• George Bugg, Staff Product Designer at Ramp to speak to the roll of taste in an age of AI.

RSVP Here

Founder Interview: Nic Beique, CEO of Helcim

Helcim just closed a $53 million Series C.

“It’s also like, it’s not really celebration. You’re kind of like, oh, investors think we can do this work that we promised them. So you’re kind of just like, ‘Oh, I guess we have to work harder now.’”

Helcim bootstrapped from 2010 to 2020 reselling another processor, relaunched as its own company, started raising in 2022, about $100 million in venture since. On going from no board, to now having a board, Nic had this advice for other founders: Never surprise your board, and the board is not your boss, they’re partners at a table who already bought their share.

On Moneris selling to US Private Equity, Nic says the timing was luck. BMO and RBC sold to Francisco Partners for $2 billion right as Helcim was lining up its raise.

“Press reached out to us to talk about what does it mean for sovereignty, ‘cause we’re one of the last true Canadians left, which is amazing for us. It just looked like a one-two punch, but we just got lucky.”

He gave the exclusive to Sean Silcoff of the Globe, who wrote Losing the Signal, on the condition Silcoff wrote it his way. Three-plus hours of interviews, then calls to customers and investors. On investors: AI takes 80%-plus of venture dollars and fintech is merely doing okay, but you can’t vibe-code your way into an Amex or an RBC relationship. Four raises in, he’s found fundraising is as much trend cycle as fundamentals. You were cool two years ago and now you’re not, nothing about the business changed.

What’s next for Helcim: 150 to 200 people in four months, and a plan to take the mantle of Canada’s payments company. Expect billboards.

Founder Interview: Sandi Gilbert, CEO of Intergen

We brought Sandi on to react to the Dominion List: 517 US companies with a Canadian founder, 88% of them trained here, Waterloo the top feeder ahead of Toronto, McGill and Queen’s.

Her read on the exodus is that the panic is overhyped.

“You’ll never stop the draw to a market that has many customers, much capital, a lot of talent. For us to think that we’re gonna put up a wall and say, ‘How are we gonna stop these people from going to the US?’ I don’t think we’re gonna stop it.”

She pointed to the C100 as founders who left and now back Canadian companies with capital and expertise. The real job is supporting founders from early stage through their C and D rounds, because once a company is genuinely built here, like Helcim or Zayzoon, it stays. We still need the US for customers and for growth capital that doesn’t exist here yet. On tax, she supports reforming capital gains but doesn’t think it’s the fix, since a founder isn’t thinking about their exit tax when they decide where to build.

Her sharpest point was procurement, and she named the room.

“You go to the chamber of commerce and you’re gonna go to an event and they use Eventbrite. We got Showpass right here in town. These are the things that we need to start to realize, that we need to support these companies if we wanna build big companies here. It totally pisses me off.”

Mark added the cultural half: American buyers fear being out-competed, Canadian buyers fear being fired, and nobody gets fired for hiring IBM. Both landed on government as a first customer, and on Alberta’s attempt to fix procurement rules that used to screen out any company without five years of history. On funding models, Gilbert’s view is that spray and pray is fine as a start, but the missing piece is doubling down once you can see who’s winning, and being willing to cut the rest.

Tech Jobs Available

Here’s some of the companies in the ecosystem, hiring right now:

• Payworks, Team Lead, Product

• Questrade, Senior Software Engineer

• GeologicAI, Intermediate Software Engineer

• Helcim, Senior Product Marketing Manager

• ZayZoon, Staff Engineer

Links from our Friends

• Applications are Open for Venture Foundations for Hard Tech Founders. Building physical technology comes with unique challenges, from prototyping and manufacturing to IP, funding, and customer validation. Venture Foundations: Advanced Manufacturing is a five-part workshop program for early-stage hard tech founders. A cohort of 8 founders will work through practical sessions focused on customer discovery, validation, commercialization, and making better decisions as they build. Applications are open until September 23, with rolling admission. Learn more and apply.

• Your Business is on the Line has just release a new episode with Brooke Hahn. Have a listen to it here.

• a16z has just launched its applications for speedrun Alpha. The Alpha fellowship invests in early stage founders, often before a team or idea even exists. For top early-career engineers, Alpha provides a direct path into roles at breakout startups. Apply to alpha here.

• Energy Disruptors UNITE 2026 is one of the best conferences in Calgary. This year, their speakers include Margaret Atwood, Lord David Cameron, and Arlene Dickinson. We’re thrilled to provide Tech Thursday discount codes to get 25% off GA passes. Use the code: PROOCIECJNP at checkout.

• September 22nd: ‘How Scientists Become Biotech Founders’ hosted by Nucleate Canada and Amplitude. Register here.

• Fortinet, the global cybersecurity leader driving the convergence of networking and security, today unveiled its cutting-edge cybersecurity innovation hub in downtown Calgary, Alberta. Representing a $30 million investment, Fortinet’s eight-story, 122,000-square-foot Calgary cybersecurity hub, acquired in September 2024, will support the Fortinet cloud point of presence (PoPs) strategy.

Thank you to Ramp, our presenting sponsor, and to Boast, Skip, BLG, Crestview, and Alberta Innovates for making the first live show possible.

LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube | Thursday Live Podcast