Canadian AI: Two acquisitions in a week, Cohere brands the EY Centre, and Ottawa reveals six AI pillars
And more on $20M for Featherless, former defence minister Sajjan's defence-AI listing path, and UBC's AI chatbot addiction paper.
Good morning! Welcome to the Canadian AI Newsletter, a weekly rundown for founders, operators and investors.
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I am Raif Barbaros, Partner at Mistral Venture Partners. Views are my own.
Busy week for Canadian AI deals. Two acquisitions inside seven days, with Plum going to Phenom and Cibotica going to Appetronix, both all-Canadian on the sell side. Vancouver defence-AI startup Juno Industries pulled together $12M and announced a TSXV listing path, with former Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan as co-founder. Toronto-connected Featherless AI closed a $20M USD Series A from AMD Ventures and Airbus Ventures. Cohere bought naming rights to Ottawa’s old EY Centre. Ottawa revealed the six pillars of its long-delayed national AI strategy. Geoffrey Hinton told a Toronto audience we need to convince AI to treat us the way a mother treats her child. And UBC published the first peer-reviewed framework for AI chatbot addiction. Let’s get into it.
💰 Deals & Milestones
Featherless AI closed a $20M USD Series A co-led by AMD Ventures and Airbus Ventures, with Panache Ventures participating.
Open-source AI infrastructure, serving 30,000+ Hugging Face models.
Co-founder and COO Wesley George is Toronto-based, previously of Proof Data Tech and connected to the Hyper alumni network we covered in Issue 9.
Canadian-led AI infrastructure plays continue to find capital outside Canada more easily than inside it.
Juno Industries (Vancouver) raised $12M CAD in pre-IPO financing and announced a planned reverse takeover with Trail Blazer Capital, en route to a TSXV listing.
Co-founded by former Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan and CEO Hunter Scharfe. AI-native command-and-control software with a Polar Nexus Arctic platform.
Defence-AI thread continues. Vivacity, Dominion Dynamics, and now Juno on a faster public-markets path than I’d have predicted. There’s some product overlap with Dominion on the C2 / situational-awareness side, though Juno’s Arctic-domain Polar Nexus framing is more specific. The Sajjan name carries political weight in Canadian defence procurement, which matters more than any pitch deck.
Plum (Kitchener-Waterloo) was acquired by Philadelphia-based Phenom for undisclosed terms.
Plum was founded in 2012 and raised about $19M CAD across its lifetime (BDC, Real Ventures, EDC). Their core platform applies industrial-organizational psychology to assess behavioural traits and match candidates to roles based on talent fit, not just resume keywords.
Phenom is rolling Plum’s behavioural assessment engine into its broader talent intelligence stack. Clean strategic fit: Phenom owns the candidate experience layer, Plum owns the underlying psychometric model. KW exit, US acquirer, AI talent stack consolidation.
Appetronix (London, ON), the food robotics company behind autonomous Donatos pizza kitchens, acquired Vancouver’s Cibotica for undisclosed terms. All-Canadian deal.
Cibotica was founded in 2021 by Ashkan Mirnabavi and Soroush Sefidkar. Their “Remy” platform uses ML-driven, ingredient-agnostic dispensing to assemble up to 300 bowls per hour, claiming 30% labor cost reduction and 50% food waste reduction.
This is a technology acquisition rather than a full company purchase. Sefidkar confirmed on LinkedIn. The founders are not continuing with the acquirer.
Appetronix CEO Nipun Sharma framed food robotics as a sector that needs to “create meaningful exits for innovative founders.” That’s a candid quote, and Cibotica’s IP handoff is the kind of clean transfer he’s pointing at: best-in-class dispensing tech finds a scaled home, founders take a win and reset for the next thing.
Two Canadian AI exits in the same week (Plum and Cibotica) deserve attention even when the dollar sizes aren’t headline-making. Ontario × BC, geographic spread, and a real handoff inside the country.
🏢 Large Company / Big Tech
TELUS and L-SPARK launched the Sovereign AI Accelerator, a six-month program for Canadian startups.
Inaugural cohort gets access to TELUS’s Sovereign AI Factory, built on NVIDIA infrastructure and powered by 99% renewables.
First five companies span across retail, healthcare, robotics, enterprise software and industrial automation.
Sovereign AI is now accelerator-scale infrastructure. The TELUS factory is a real asset, not vapourware, and L-SPARK has a track record running cohort programs with cellular and SaaS startups.
Cohere (Toronto) bought naming rights to Ottawa’s former EY Centre, rebranding the 200,000-square-foot venue near Ottawa International Airport as the Cohere Centre effective May 1.
Owned by Shenkman Group. Financial terms undisclosed despite BetaKit and Ottawa Business Journal requests.
Cohere VP global public sector Dave Ferris framed it as Canadian innovation branding in the nation’s capital.
Soft power. After the Aleph Alpha merger and the ISED 1,400-user North deployment we covered in Issue 11, Cohere now puts its name on a building federal officials see whenever they fly in or out of Ottawa. National-champion behaviour, executed cleanly.
(Disclosure: Cohere is a portfolio company.)
🔬 Research
Concordia researchers published a peer-reviewed paper in IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics on a fully autonomous AI-driven cardiac ultrasound robot.
Deep reinforcement learning agent, trained inside a generative-AI-built simulation environment, controlling a robotic arm with an ultrasound probe.
On a training phantom, the system found standard cardiac views faster and more accurately than remote human operators.
The methodological wrinkle is the use of GenAI to build the training environment, not just generate outputs. That design pattern is worth tracking for any Canadian medical-AI lab thinking about how to train scarce-data clinical agents.
Mila, Aéro Montréal, and Espace Aéro signed a strategic partnership on aerospace AI.
Mila researchers gain privileged access to aerospace use cases from the Quebec aerospace cluster. Aéro Montréal members and Espace Aéro tenants get Responsible AI training in return.
Valérie Pisano, Mila CEO, framed aerospace as a sector “where the requirements for reliability, safety, and precision are among the highest.”
Mila’s international and sectoral alliance map keeps growing: RISE Sweden, Mozilla, now Quebec aerospace.
Independent Robotics (Montreal) won a $2.28M ISC contract to deliver IMPAC, a natural-language command-and-control system for autonomous robots and uncrewed systems.
Year-long testing program at DRDC Atlantic Research Centre near Halifax, currently testing autonomous marine vehicles for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance workloads.
CTO is Dr. Gregory Dudek, McGill James McGill Chair and former Samsung VP and Chief Scientist.
Defence-AI thread keeps drumming. Federal procurement is now writing real cheques for conversational interfaces to robot swarms, and the testing site is on Canadian soil. That detail matters for sovereign-AI accounting.
Amii received $2.7M from the Government of Alberta over three years to build AI learning kits for Alberta K-12 classrooms.
Amii CEO Cam Linke: “AI is the defining literacy of the coming decades.”
Provincial AI literacy programs are still rare, and locking Amii in as the K-12 vendor for three years is a serious commitment. The angle I keep coming back to: LLMs can be the best tutor most kids will ever have, on most topics. Personally still my top use case. If Alberta’s K-12 cohort gets that experience early, the ROI on $2.7M will look small in retrospect.
UBC researchers published the first peer-reviewed framework for AI chatbot addiction at CHI 2026 in Barcelona.
First author Karen Shen (PhD, UBC ECE) and senior author Dr. Dongwook Yoon (UBC CS) analyzed 334 Reddit posts to identify three addiction types: Escapist Roleplay, Pseudosocial Companion, and Epistemic Rabbit Hole.
The paper calls out character.ai by name for a dark-pattern account-deletion popup that reads, in part, “you sure about this? You’ll lose everything... the love we shared... and the memories we have together.”
Shen: “Some users don’t know that AI chatbots are not real because they’re so convincing.” The framework lands the same week BC’s AG is asking Ottawa for federal AI-chatbot guardrails. Good timing.
🏛 Policy
The federal government tabled the Spring Economic Update and used it to reveal the six pillars of the long-delayed national AI strategy.
Framing line from the update: “Canadians want AI that is safe and sovereign, and to drive AI adoption, create new economic opportunities, strengthen public services, and improve our quality of life.”
The six pillars:
Protecting Canadians and safeguarding democracy. Modernized privacy and online safety laws (PIPEDA refresh expected to cover copyright, IP, data sovereignty), plus stronger national AI safety capabilities.
Empowering citizens. AI training and education access for all Canadians.
Powering AI adoption for shared prosperity. Pro-worker, industrial AI deployment across the economy.
Building the Canadian sovereign AI foundation. Sovereign compute infrastructure (SCIP), domestic data and model capabilities.
Scaling Canadian champions. Direct support for the growth of Canadian AI companies and commercialization.
Building trusted partnerships and global alliances. Coordination with international middle-power allies on AI governance.
The strategy itself is still not tabled. Solomon told reporters on May 4 it would arrive “very soon.” He had originally promised end of 2025.
The update also delivered a new SMB AI procurement program designed to help small and medium businesses bid for federal AI contracts.
Council of Canadian Innovators CEO Patrick Searle pushed back on the update, saying it “does little to show that the government is taking the digital economy seriously or using it to strengthen Canada’s major traditional economic strategies.”
My take: six pillars without a strategy is still six pillars more than we had last week. Pillars 4 and 5 are the operative ones for builders. If you’re a Canadian AI company looking for federal traction in the next twelve months, you want to be on the sovereign compute side or in the scaling-champions cohort.
BetaKit analyzed the 11,300+ submissions and 64,000+ responses Ottawa received during its national AI strategy consultation.
Madison McLauchlan and Xavi Richer Vis ran the analysis. 35.6% of comments oriented around economic priorities, 34.6% around AI harms. Single most-used word: “ethics.”
PrairiesCan committed $7.9M split across Saskatchewan AI infrastructure and operating Canadian AI firms.
$3.7M to Co.Labs (Saskatoon). $4.1M from the Regional Artificial Intelligence Initiative to Coconut Software ($1.5M), Vendasta ($1.4M), and HomeTeam Live ($976K). Plus $257K to the University of Regina for a tree-ring AI project.
Canadian Robotics Council launched a Capital Committee to coordinate investment into domestic robotics.
Members: BDC, Garage, Inovia, RBC, Two Small Fish, Version One. Framing is “physical AI.”
Sits perfectly alongside the Independent Robotics defence contract and the Appetronix-Cibotica acquisition above. Canadian robotics is having a real week, and the Council giving it a coordinated capital story is more than performative.
BC Attorney General Niki Sharma issued a statement backing Manitoba’s under-16 chatbot ban (Issue 11) and calling for federal-level guardrails.
Heritage Minister Marc Miller said Ottawa is “very seriously” considering social-media and AI-chatbot age restrictions but has not decided.
The provinces are now coordinating around youth-AI-safety pressure on Ottawa. Manitoba moved first, BC backed it publicly, Quebec’s Liberal convention had a resolution in March. Watch this list grow.
📰 In Brief
Geoffrey Hinton at OCI’s DiscoveryX Toronto event, repeated his 10-15% AI extinction-risk estimate and said the goal should be to convince AI to treat us the way a mother treats her child. The mother analogy travels in a way the doom rhetoric doesn’t. Watch it show up in policy speeches.
CIRA ran a Q&A on Anthropic’s Mythos and the case for sovereign AI. Useful primer on the Mythos demo and what it implies for Canadian institutional buyers thinking about model dependence.
Also worth a glance: U of T Magazine republished a feature on the $20M Hinton Chair in AI (announced last December as a Google match plus U of T endowment), framing it as the first appointment under U of T’s new Third-Century Chairs program. Recruitment search continues.
📅 Upcoming Events
The AIA (Montréal) — May 5, 2026
Upper Bound (Edmonton) — May 19–22, 2026 (Sold out. 8,000+ attendees.)
Canadian AI Conference 2026 (Vancouver) — May 25–29, 2026
ALL IN Toronto — May 28, 2026
ALL IN Main Event (Montréal) — September 16–17, 2026
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— Raif Barbaros