CanadianAI: A month of Canadian AI in one issue, an AI takes the CEO seat
And more on Stathera’s US$55M Series B, a Fields Medalist joining OpenAI, and a record Canadian showing at one of the “Big Three” AI research conferences.
Good morning! Welcome to the Canadian AI Newsletter, a weekly rundown for founders, operators and investors.
As promised in last week’s H1 report, this is the catch-up issue covering July. The regular weekly cadence resumes next Tuesday.
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I am Raif Barbaros, Partner at Mistral Venture Partners. Views are my own.
The big story in July is Skyfall AI: the Maluuba founders reunited roughly 25 researchers across Toronto and San Francisco, raised an undisclosed round from Fidelity and Inovia, and plan to buy a SaaS business and run it with an AI as CEO. Also in the window: Superhuman acquired GPTZero, Montréal’s Stathera raised US$55M for AI data centre chips, and a freshly minted Fields Medalist is leaving U of T for OpenAI. Ottawa wrote its first big AI for All cheques, and BC retained counsel to pursue OpenAI. Plus a record Canadian showing at ICML in Seoul. Let’s get into it.
💰 Deals & Milestones
Skyfall AI (Toronto and San Francisco) emerged from stealth on July 20 with an undisclosed round from Fidelity, Inovia, Touring Capital, M13, NextView, and Garage Capital.
Founders Sam Pasupalak, Kaheer Suleman, and Sumit Pasupalak previously built Maluuba, the Waterloo NLP company Microsoft acquired in 2017. The new team is about 25 researchers drawn from U of T, Waterloo, the University of Alberta, and Mila.
The thesis is “Enterprise World Models” aimed at an autonomous enterprise. The first initiative: acquire a SaaS business for up to US$1M and run it with an AI as CEO.
Superhuman, the rebranded Grammarly parent, agreed to acquire GPTZero on June 23.
The AI-detection company reached 19M+ registered users and roughly $30M in ARR on just $13.5M raised. Both co-founders join Superhuman.
Founders Edward Tian and Alex Cui grew up in Toronto; the company itself was never headquartered in Canada.
Stathera (Montréal) raised a US$55M Series B on June 30 led by Maverick Silicon.
The fabless semiconductor company makes silicon timing chips for AI data centres. Celesta, BDC Capital, MediaTek Innovation Fund, TXC, and Ultratech participated, bringing total funding to US$75M.
A10 Networks acquired TrojAI (Saint John) on June 15; terms were not disclosed.
TrojAI built red-teaming and runtime protection for enterprise AI systems. The 22-person team stays in Saint John.
Good to see an AI security team staying put in Atlantic Canada after an exit.
Superwhisper (Toronto) is adopting Cohere‘s open-source Transcribe model as its dictation engine, announced July 29. (Disclosure: Cohere is a Mistral Venture Partners portfolio company.)
Transcribe is a 2B-parameter open-source speech model averaging 5.35% word error rate across 14 languages, runs fully offline, and currently tops Hugging Face’s Open ASR Leaderboard. It will eventually replace Nvidia’s Parakeet as the app’s default.
The pairing puts two Toronto companies across the app’s entire speech stack.
🏢 Large Companies
Shopify (Ottawa) shipped a Hydrogen developer preview on July 8 that lets storefronts expose actions to in-browser AI agents.
The preview adds WebMCP tools for catalog search, browsing, cart, and checkout, alongside Storefront API caching, a Customer Account API, and predictive search.
CIBC launched AdvisorAssist and CAI 2.0 nationally on July 31.
AdvisorAssist is a proprietary genAI tool for advisors with automated meeting notes; the bank claims up to a 50% reduction in admin time. The release also cites DocuMind processing 63,000 documents a month, saving about 16,000 hours a quarter.
Bloomberg reports the most powerful tier is limited to roughly 250 handpicked staff over cost.
RBC renewed its platinum sponsorship of the Vector Institute through 2032 on July 30.
The release cites 30 applied AI projects with Vector to date, 200 Vector-affiliated hires, and a #1-in-Canada AI-maturity ranking.
1Password (Toronto) shipped two AI launches in July: AI Spend and Consumption Management on July 14 and 1Password for Claude with Anthropic on July 16.
The spend tool normalizes AI token spend across providers including Anthropic, Cursor, and OpenAI. It is in public preview, with general availability planned for fall 2026.
The Claude integration, built around an “Agentic Mode” zero-exposure framework, lets Claude use stored credentials in the browser without secrets ever reaching the model.
Cohere and the University of Toronto signed a multi-year partnership on July 16. (Disclosure: portfolio company.)
Cohere’s North platform becomes the orchestration layer of U of T’s enterprise-wide AI platform, framed around responsible, sovereign AI adoption at scale.
Clio (Burnaby) launched Clio Work in Canada on July 23.
The AI legal work platform handles case summarization, case-law surfacing, and drafting. It is built on the Jurisage acquisition from June, which brought 470,000+ Canadian cases across 40+ courts, updated daily.
Tenstorrent (Toronto) CEO Jim Keller shot down the Qualcomm acquisition rumour at a Tokyo media event on June 30.
Keller denied the reported US$8-10B Qualcomm interest that surfaced in June. No transaction was ever confirmed by either company.
🔬 Research
Canadian institutes posted record numbers at ICML 2026 in Seoul, July 6-11.
Mila had 82 main-conference papers and Vector had 73 accepted, including 11 spotlights, its strongest ICML showing ever. The conference itself set records with 23,918 submissions at a 26.6% acceptance rate.
A paper with Canadian senior authors took an ICML Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention.
“Motion Attribution for Video Generation” traces which training examples most improve motion quality in video models, matching quality with roughly a tenth of the data. Senior authors are Sanja Fidler, Jun Gao, and Jonathan Lorraine of U of T, Vector, and NVIDIA Toronto; the lead author is at Princeton.
Doina Precup’s group at McGill/Mila posted Adaptive Multi-Horizon Reinforcement Learning (arXiv, July 22).
The method lets RL agents adaptively blend multiple time horizons, balancing short- and long-term reward without hand-tuning.
Aaron Courville’s group at Mila/UdeM/CIFAR recast quantum wavefunction optimization as reinforcement learning (arXiv, July 2; ICML main conference).
“Proximal Wavefunction Optimization” treats variational quantum-state search as policy-gradient RL and scales it to a 1.5B-parameter model.
🏛️ Policy
Ottawa put $100M into the VITAL health-data platform on June 23.
The first major AI for All implementation cheque connects 160 hospitals across Ontario, Québec, and Alberta.
AI Minister Evan Solomon floated Ottawa leading AI investment rounds on The BetaKit Podcast, July 1.
The $500M Canadian Tech Growth Fund could lead rounds with debt and equity optionality. The Council of Canadian Innovators’ Laurent Carbonneau pushed back on the missing detail.
Solomon announced PrairiesCan funding for AI adoption in Manitoba at the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce on July 6.
The federal money targets Manitoba businesses adopting AI and digital technologies.
BC retained counsel to pursue legal action against OpenAI over Tumbler Ridge on July 7.
Attorney General Niki Sharma said the province is “preparing legal action,” with legal teams retained in both BC and California. No provincial claim has been filed yet.
The affected families’ civil suits were filed in late April, in BC Supreme Court and San Francisco federal court.
Canada Economic Development invested $13.85M across 63 Québec AI projects on July 15.
The money flows through the Regional Artificial Intelligence Initiative, explicitly under AI for All, and runs to March 2031. The announcement was made in Trois-Rivières.
📰 In brief
Jacob Tsimerman, who on July 23 became the second Canadian ever to win the Fields Medal, announced he is joining OpenAI in San Francisco to work on AI safety, which he called “the most important issue of our time.” He is taking leave from U of T while keeping his faculty post.
Shopify ran a recruiting-scale presence at ICML in Seoul, touting 40M LLM inferences a day and $1.5B+ in R&D spend.
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— Raif