Last Thursday we ran our first-ever ‘Tech Thursday Live!’ $3,000 pitch competition, sponsored by BLG. Two AgTech founders got 90 seconds each, and you decide who takes home $1,000 in cash plus $2,000 in legal services from BLG.
Pick the winner 👇
Agrivanna, pitched by Haden Harrison, is building virtual fencing on an ear tag. A rancher draws a line on a map, and as a cow gets close it hears a sound and learns to turn back. Agrivanna has over $125,000 in letters of intent and is piloting its software on 400,000 acres in Canada.
FarmerTitan, pitched by Katie Friesen, puts a QR code on every machine on the farm. Scan it, say what you did, and it’s logged. Katie says preventable repairs cost her family’s farm about $30,000 a year, and up to $400,000 on a large potato farm.
Want a say in who wins? Make sure to subscribe to vote your favourite pitch.
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!
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.
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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.
💻 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.
🤝 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.
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.
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