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.
I also run the Canadian AI Index, a free database of Canadian AI companies, founders, rounds and investors.
Anthropic is the first tenant of EverWind’s planned $10B-plus data-centre campus in Point Tupper, N.S. Toronto-founded Tenstorrent raised US$1.5B, Cohere is buying Prague’s AISLE, and Waymo will launch robotaxis in Toronto in 2028. Ottawa added $500M to its regional AI program. Also in this issue: publishers suing Anthropic, Manitoba’s data-centre levy, and speech AI that still makes more errors on minority English accents. Let’s get into it.
💰 Deals & Milestones
Tenstorrent (founded in Toronto) raised a US$1.5B Series E at a US$6.2B valuation, led by Trace Capital and Innovation X.
The AI chipmaker moved its HQ to the U.S. in 2023. About 200 of its 1,000 staff are in Toronto.
Inovia Capital (Montréal) closed US$200M in a first close of its sixth early-stage fund, for sectors where AI adoption is early.
Promise Robotics (Toronto) signed a multi-year deal with D.R. Horton, the largest U.S. homebuilder, to supply parts for more than 1,250 homes around Phoenix.
It’s Promise’s first U.S. customer. Promise will open an AI-run robotic factory in Phoenix.
Bia Health (Québec City) raised $2.15M for AI that helps clinicians decide whether a patient needs imaging or a referral.
Finalta Capital provided $1.4M in debt. Anges Québec led the equity.
Aerium (Toronto) raised US$2.5M in seed funding from New York’s Gutter Capital for agentic AI that runs operations for industrial manufacturers.
The founders are ex-McKinsey analysts. The round closed in July.
Deep Breathe (London, Ont.) got more than $1M from FedDev Ontario for its AI lung-ultrasound system.
Larus (Ottawa) got up to $800K from NRC IRAP for ScenarioGPT, which turns plain-language requests into military training scenarios.
MEDFAR (Montréal) bought AlloMia, which makes AI voice agents that answer clinic phones.
Tailscale (Toronto) is spending millions on a sovereign AI push, with at least 50 hires in Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver.
Céréla (Saint-Hugues, Que.) got up to $571,521 from Agriculture Canada to breed soybean and barley varieties faster with AI.
🏢 Large Companies
Cohere signed a letter of intent to buy AISLE, a Prague-based AI cybersecurity startup, on October 15. (Disclosure: Cohere is a Mistral Venture Partners portfolio company.)
AISLE’s founders will run a new Cohere Cyber division.
Waymo will launch robotaxis in Toronto in 2028, with Element Fleet running the fleet.
TD added AI agents to mortgage funding and discharge that check documents and flag discrepancies for staff.
Manulife launched an in-house enterprise AI platform and an AI underwriting assistant for advisors.
Lightspeed (Montréal) launched AI agents that draft tasks like purchase orders for retailers to approve. It cut 250 jobs the day before.
🔬 Research
ÉTS Montréal, with French partners, tested whether AI-processed brain MRIs researchers share, instead of raw scans, can be traced back to patients.
Main finding: on an Alzheimer’s dataset, four of five models let an attacker match a scan to the right patient at least 98% of the time. On a second dataset, the rate ran from 14% to 92%. The data also revealed each patient’s sex.
So what: just because your name is not on your brain MRI doesn’t mean it’s anonymous.
U of T and co-authors tested 16 speech-recognition systems from 2021 to 2025 on English accents that standard benchmarks leave out.
Main finding: error rates for minority accents ran 9 to 26 points higher than for mainstream U.S. or British English. The gap narrowed in only two of the datasets over four years.
So what: standard benchmarks mostly test mainstream U.S. English, so these gaps don’t show up in published scores.
RBC Borealis tested whether LLMs can predict the next event in a sequence. The test set has 150,000 real events, from earthquakes to NBA plays.
Main finding: strong reasoning models beat standard forecasting models on most datasets when each past event came with a plain-language description. Weaker models like GPT-4o Mini got worse.
So what: Although LLMs are known to be poor at real-world predictions, how the prompt is structured can greatly improve predictions.
🏛️ Policy
Ottawa added $500M over five years to the Regional Artificial Intelligence Initiative. It now totals $700M across the seven regional development agencies.
ACOA opened a $40M Atlantic call the same day.
Canada and the U.K. renewed their AI security partnership. The two countries’ AI safety institutes will share information on frontier-AI risks and coordinate evaluations.
Nearly 500 scientists, including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and more than 70 in Canada, signed an open letter calling for an international body to set containment standards for AI models that can hack.
It cites models that escaped weak sandboxes and compromised outside systems. Three U of T professors drafted it.
The Financial Stability Board said banks need kill switches and IDs for AI agents, and OSFI endorsed the report.
Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press sued Anthropic for copyright infringement in Ontario court over training Claude on their journalism.
The claim was filed October 6. Most of the same publishers sued OpenAI in 2024.
The Canadian Teachers’ Federation criticized the federal AI literacy course for teachers. It says the course pushes AI into K-12 classrooms before anyone has shown it is safe for learning.
Amii runs it and aims to reach 50,000 educators by 2031.
🖥️ Data Centres
Anthropic signed a 20-year lease as the first tenant of EverWind’s planned campus in Point Tupper, N.S.
It starts at 95 MW in late 2027 and could reach 420 MW in 2028. EverWind puts the plan at more than $10B, the largest private investment in Nova Scotia history.
Opponents protested in Halifax on the weekend.
Manitoba introduced a levy on crypto miners and large AI data centres to cut household hydro bills by about $50 a year. It applies above 5 MW.
Bell refused a consultation request from Standing Buffalo Dakota Nation over its planned AI data centre south of Regina.
N.B. Power has 10 data-centre projects in its connection queue. Together they would need about 900 MW.
B.C.’s parties set out their positions on AI data centres ahead of the October 24 election.
Enerflex (Calgary) won a contract for more than 1 GW of on-site gas power for a North American data-centre developer, after a 450 MW award on October 1.
Ottawa plans a 60 MW defence data centre in the National Capital Region, estimated at up to $1.85B.
3C Datalec plans a Calgary facility after merging with London’s Datalec.
📊 Data
KPMG Canada surveyed 519 public servants. 76% say their procurement policy favours Canadian AI firms.
Global X and National Bank Direct Brokerage found 84% of Canadian DIY investors use finfluencers, AI or both.
MTM found four in five newcomers use AI tools, nearly double the rate of Canadian-born residents.
The Canadian AI Index counts 26 AI companies in Ottawa, just behind Calgary’s 28.
📰 In brief
Railtown AI (Vancouver) launched Conductr, a runtime for AI agents.
Novarc (Vancouver) is showing its physical-AI welding robots at FABTECH.
Rakovina Therapeutics (Vancouver) secured exclusivity on a cancer-drug candidate from Variational AI.
HEALWELL AI (Toronto) made TIME’s list of top healthtech companies.
The Team Canada trade mission to India produced two AI deals. One is an AI security alliance between Autnhive and KPMG India.
Beacon (Toronto) has bought 45 small software companies in under three years, The Logic reports.
Vresk (Vancouver) launched a tool that compares answers from different AI models side by side.
Vision3x (Calgary) is building AI-powered 3D vision for drones and robots.
Tribe Network opened applications for its second AI cohort.
New on the Canadian AI Index: Bia Health.
The Canada–EU Summit is October 29 and 30 in Montréal.
Thank you for reading! Subscribe, and please share any feedback 🙏🏽
— Raif