Canadian AI: From Painting Robots to "Wise" AI, the Immense Range of Canadian AI
Data centres in small towns, robots blasting paint on ships and "wise" AI.
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The Canadian AI Newsletter is written by Raif Barbaros, Partner at Mistral Venture Partners. Views are my own.
This was the week Canadian AI showed its range — from SMS agents cutting insurance quotes to 3 minutes, to robots blasting paint in Vancouver shipyards, to a Waterloo researcher asking whether we can teach AI to be wise, not just smart. Meanwhile, Ottawa’s confrontation with OpenAI over the Tumbler Ridge tragedy continues to escalate. Alberta and Quebec are drawing different battle lines on how to power the AI infrastructure boom with data centres. Let’s get into it.
💰 Deals & Milestones
General Magic (Toronto) raised $7.2M USD to enable insurance quotes via SMS in 3 minutes instead of 30.
Led by Radical Ventures with a16z Speedrun, Figma VP Brendan O’Driscoll, OpenAI’s Larry James Erwin, and Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez are pitching in.
The playbook: find a regulated vertical where incumbents are slow, automate the friction, and don’t require customers to download anything.
JetScale AI (Montréal), founded by ex-Dataperformers founders Mehdi Merai and Gabriel De Lisi, secured $5.4M in seed funding.
Cloud infrastructure accounts for 3-4% of global GHG emissions — matching aviation.
JetScale is building AI-powered optimization software that reduces both cloud spend and emissions.
Co-led by BDC’s Seed Venture Fund and Diagram’s ClimateTech Fund.
PeerSupport.io (Whitehorse) secured a deployment with the Yukon government for its voice-activated AI browser for medical referrals.
10.5 hours saved per week per clinician.
Launching a $5,000 “North of 60” scholarship for healthcare workers in the territories.
By end 2026: supporting 1M+ patient files across 5 major providers
Augure launched a sovereign Canadian AI platform hosted exclusively on OVHcloud’s Montreal data centres.
No US CLOUD Act exposure — data stays in Canada
The sovereignty play is becoming a real compliance moat.
Small team alert: spun out of an agency with 2-10 people on LinkedIn. I’ve reached out to the founder to learn more, and execution might feel a little rough, but it's promising. Tested it on Canada exports. Comparable to Gemini. Not an in-depth comparison by any means, but interesting.
I found the idea super interesting. As foundational models become interchangeable and open-source proliferates, we might see more “sovereign wrappers” appear.
Confined Space Robotics (Nisku, Alberta) won a $1.5M contract with Seaspan Shipyards in Vancouver.
Semiautonomous robots that handle abrasive blasting and painting in tight, dangerous spaces. The kind of work humans might be happy to give up.
Part of the federal national shipbuilding strategy.
Industrial robotics, Alberta-built, B.C.-deployed. Loving the cross-Canadian collaboration.
TD Bank is scaling AI through its anti-money laundering program with a $1B value target.
Strategy: “build once and use many times.”
$1B AI target. Last week we found some humour in RBC setting that same goal on ~$330B market cap. TD’s ~$220B — so, 50% more ambitious. Progress.”
Bitfarms converting 13 crypto mining sites — 8 of them in Quebec — to AI and high-performance computing data centres.
Quebec-founded, Toronto-based, NY-bound.
The bitcoin-to-AI pivot is happening across the sector, but Bitfarms has the Quebec energy advantage with committed power (for now).
📊 Data
KPMG Canada found that 72% of Canadian organizations lost up to 5% of annual profits to AI-driven scams last year.
81% of businesses that experienced fraud faced AI-enabled attacks.
7 in 10 were targeted more than once.
Types of attacks: AI-generated phishing emails/chats (60%), deepfake documents (39%) and voice–clone executive impersonation calls (24%).
🏛️ Policy
The OpenAI-Ottawa confrontation escalated this week.
AI Minister Evan Solomon summoned OpenAI’s safety team to Ottawa after revelations that the Tumbler Ridge shooter’s ChatGPT account was banned in June 2025 — but police were never notified.
OpenAI admitted “in hindsight” they would have reported the shooter, and revealed shooter evaded the ban with a second account.
Justice Minister Sean Fraser and Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree are now signalling legislation if self-regulation fails.
The policy stakes are enormous. Canada has no AI-specific regulation on the books. Only a voluntary Code of Conduct exists. Ottawa is reportedly moving toward mandatory 24-hour reporting of violent ideation, with formal legislation potentially tabled by April.
Evan Solomon is scheduled to meet with Sam Altman next.
The provincial data centre divergence: Alberta vs Quebec.
Alberta: $10-billion AI data centre proposed in Olds (population 9,679) with a 1.4 gigawatt natural gas power plant — the second-largest in the province — as part of its push to attract $100B in data centre investment by decade’s end. Highly recommend reading, simply fascinating to think of such a small town with such a large data centre.
Quebec: Hydro-Québec proposes doubling rates for large data centres from ~6.5¢/kWh to ~13¢/kWh for facilities consuming >5MW annually
Most observers framed Quebec’s move as anti-development. But context matters: Quebec has among the lowest electricity rates in North America thanks to its public hydro resources. The proposed 13¢/kWh brings large data centres in line with North American norms — including Ontario — while individuals and smaller businesses keep the low rates. Two provinces, two approaches to powering the AI boom. I think they will both benefit greatly.
🔬 Research
University of Waterloo researchers led by Dr. Sam Johnson published the first study proposing to train LLMs in “wise reasoning.”
Teaching AI to recognize the limits of its knowledge and adapt to uncertainty — metacognition and intellectual humility.
Published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
New architectures and benchmarks for measuring AI wisdom.
It’s a fundamentally different approach to AI safety than just adding guardrails.
“If the smartest person in the world were a toddler, we still wouldn’t hand them the nuclear codes. AI is increasingly resembling a child genius, still needing a healthy dose of wisdom from its human parents.”
U of T’s Schmidt AI Fellows gathered for a Foundation Models for Science workshop.
Three days of hands-on exploration into how AI can accelerate scientific discovery.
The kind of research-to-application pipeline that keeps Toronto in the global AI conversation.
Cipher AI, led by a University of Regina professor, is a Canadian-developed disinformation detection system.
Human-in-the-loop agent architecture.
Proven effective on Canadian networks; now being trained to detect Russian narratives in Russian for European deployment.
In brief
• HEALWELL AI (TSX: AIDX) announced its first Middle East contract — a deployment with a major governmental health system. Canadian healthcare AI going global.
• U of T Desjardins Startup Prize — March 5 pitch competition, 10 finalists competing for $100,000. Early signal on which AI verticals are attracting founder talent.
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— Raif Barbaros