Canadian AI: Apple Goes Shopping in Waterloo
And more on Cohere, AI Memory, a new pre-seed round and more.
First issue, welcome! Great week in Canadian AI. Apple goes shopping in Waterloo. Accel-led pre-seed round in Toronto. Cohere making mint. Loblaw is plugging groceries into ChatGPT. A Canadian startup solving AI memory.
💰 Deals & Milestones
Apple quietly acquired Kuzu (Waterloo), a graph database startup founded by UWaterloo CS professor Semih Salihoğlu.
Deal closed in October 2025, surfaced this week via EU Digital Markets Act disclosure. ~10 person team. Terms undisclosed.
Built an embedded graph database for query speed and scalability — open source under MIT license. Website and GitHub now dark.
Apple’s second Kitchener-Waterloo acquisition since DarwinAI in 2024, which brought on-device visual inspection AI to Apple Intelligence. Waterloo keeps graduating startups straight into Big Tech.
Modem (Toronto) closed a $4.4M USD pre-seed led by Accel with Inovia.
Founded by Ben Vinegar, former VP Eng at Sentry. Angels include Cohere co-founder Ivan Zhang.
AI product management — helping dev teams manage context as AI speeds up shipping.
Cohere (Toronto) According to CNBC, hit ~$240M ARR.
CNBC obtained a February investor memo: 50%+ QoQ growth throughout 2025. Gross margins ~70%.
SAP integrating Cohere’s North agentic platform into its Sovereign Cloud ERP for public sector and regulated industries in Canada.
(Disclosure: Cohere is a portfolio company.)
Shopify Q4: revenue up 31% to $3.67B. GMV hit a record $123.8B. Announced $2B share buyback.
Orders from AI search queries rose 15-fold since January 2025. Signed GM, L’Oréal, Balenciaga.
Harley Finkelstein: “The AI era has now reached commerce.”
Loblaw partnering with OpenAI to integrate PC Express into ChatGPT.
Ask ChatGPT for a recipe, add ingredients to your cart, check out for pickup or delivery. First grocery retailer to build this.
Lauren Steinberg of Loblaw: “Rather than asking Canadians to change their behaviour, we’ll adapt to it.”
Backboard.io (Ottawa) became the first platform to lead both major AI memory benchmarks.
Founded by Assent co-founder Rob Imbeault. Solving AI amnesia, portable memory across LLMs and sessions. 93.4% accuracy on LongMemEval and 90.1% on LoCoMo.
(Disclosure: Pre-seed led by yours truly.)
📊 Data
Meta / Linux Foundation report: AI could add 9% to Canada’s GDP by 2035. Only 26% of orgs have fully implemented AI.
CMA survey: half of Canadians are using AI for medical advice. Only 27% trust it for accuracy — but they’re using it anyway.
🏛️ Policy
Canada’s AI Task Force — backlash and ripples from the government’s recommendations continue.
350 pages, 28 members, 32 reports. Consistent diagnosis: leads in research, lags in commercialization, no domestic compute.
Then comes a take down of the methodology.
Then an insider’s take: “The diagnosis is consistent, but the prescriptions are not.”
My take: Call me Mr. Glass Half Full, at least the gov’t’s talking about it and trying. Two years ago, they weren’t.
Canada and Germany signed a joint AI declaration and launched the Sovereign Technology Alliance.
Focus: expand secure compute infrastructure, accelerate AI commercialization, strengthen talent pipelines.
The declaration flagged Yoshua Bengio’s LawZero as a potential area for cooperation on safe-by-design AI.
Sovereign AI data centre proposals due Saturday Feb 15. ISED wants proposals for centres exceeding 100MW. No funding committed — MOUs only.
In brief
Vector Institute hosting its third annual Remarkable conference Feb 19-20 in Toronto. Sessions on agentic AI, privacy, and LLM frontiers with Layer 6, Accenture, Linamar.
Angelica Lim, Canada CIFAR AI Chair at SFU, profiled by CBC for her work teaching robots to read human body language and facial expressions. Previously led the emotion team on SoftBank’s Pepper robot.
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