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.
The big story this week is Veeda AI, Sanja Fidler’s Toronto world-model startup, which came out of stealth on August 19 with a seed round of more than US$90M, one of the three largest ever raised in Canada. Also this week: Anthropic posted jobs for a “gigawatts” compute buildout in Canada, all four Quebec parties signed a code of conduct on AI use ahead of the October 5 election, and Alberta’s data-centre town halls drew hundreds of angry residents. Plus two East Coast rounds we missed earlier this summer, and research on why neural networks forget how to learn. Let’s get into it.
💰 Deals & Milestones
Veeda AI (Toronto) raised more than US$90M (~C$124M) in seed financing co-led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures to build world models for physical AI.
Founder Sanja Fidler left her post as Nvidia’s VP of AI Research on July 31, covered here two weeks ago. Co-founders Huan Ling (Toronto) and Zan Gojcic (Zurich) are also ex-Nvidia, and Fidler remains a U of T professor.
Radical’s Tomi Poutanen and Khosla’s Sven Strohband are joining the board. PitchBook ranks it among the three largest seed rounds in Canadian history.
At a time when https://dominionlist.com/ keeps getting cited, fantastic to see a team of this calibre choose to build from Toronto. 🇨🇦 🇨🇦 🇨🇦
stratosX (Montréal) signed Air Transat as its launch airline customer for X360, its AI platform for recovering from flight delays, cancellations, and schedule changes.
X360 uses predictive modelling and generative AI on the airline’s own operations data to recommend how aircraft, crews, and passengers should be rerouted. The team includes veterans of Southwest Airlines operations and QuantumBlack.
Blueprint (Toronto) raised C$1.4M through a16z’s speedrun program to turn text prompts into buildable hardware designs.
CEO David Feldt describes it as “Lovable for hardware.” The team is in San Francisco for the accelerator and plans to return to Toronto.
Me-Z-Scene (Montréal) raised C$875K from AQC Capital, Anges Québec, and Investissement Québec’s Eurêka Fund for Élisa, a generative tool that lets anyone build worlds in Roblox.
The father-son founding team has about 100 test users and plans a full launch this fall.
Floqer (Halifax) raised a $2M pre-seed from Perplexity’s F7 Fund, N49P, Tidal Venture Partners, and Perplexity co-founder Denis Yarats, announced July 8. We missed it at the time, so it gets its catch-up here.
Floqer unifies 100+ external data sources with a company’s own CRM, Slack, and sales-call data into one customer knowledge base for sales teams. Less than two years in, it is past seven figures in ARR, cashflow positive, and serves 1,000+ customers including Perplexity and Wise.
Siftmed (St. John’s) closed a round led by Toronto’s Staircase Ventures, announced July 20, which brings total funding past $10M for its AI platform that analyzes medical records in insurance claims. Another one we missed this summer.
The software cuts claim-review time by 50 to 70 per cent and traces every finding back to the source document. CEO Holly Hill reported 10x revenue growth in 2025.
Pelorus VC and a group of Verafin founders also participated. Good to see the Verafin founder network backing the next generation in St. John’s.
Fisent Technologies (Toronto) raised US$4.3M in its first priced round, led by FINTOP with strategic investor Pegasystems, announced August 11.
Fisent’s BizAI platform turns unstructured documents into automated decisions at banks, insurers, and wealth managers. Revenue grew 206% in 2025, the company landed its first Fortune 50 customer this year, and total funding now stands at US$6.3M.
Light AI (Vancouver) received a Health Canada medical device licence for QuickScan Strep A, announced August 12.
The Cboe-listed company screens for strep throat from a smartphone photo using image-analysis AI.
🏢 Large Companies
Anthropic posted job listings for a compute country lead and an Alberta-based community engagement manager, a signal of plans to bring “gigawatts of compute online in Canada”.
The Logic reported the postings on August 19. The compute lead would own site selection, leasing, and financing, and would scale the buildout “from initial sites to multiple gigawatts.” Anthropic also hired Jacob Glick, formerly of Amazon, as its Canadian public-policy head earlier in August.
No site, dollar figure, or timeline has been committed. These are job postings, and hiring plans can change.
🔬 Research
Tyler Kastner, Nimrod De La Vega, and Amir-massoud Farahmand (Polytechnique Montréal / Mila) posted a fix for neural networks that lose the ability to learn (arXiv, August 18).
Neural networks have a weird flaw: if you keep training one on new tasks, it gradually loses the ability to learn anything new at all. It gets rigid, like a muscle that stops responding to exercise. This is called “loss of plasticity,” and it’s one of the main reasons you can’t just keep teaching an AI system new things forever, a big problem for robots and agents that need to learn continuously in the real world instead of being trained once and frozen. This paper found a specific mathematical cause of the rigidity (some internal numbers in the network drift wildly out of balance over time) and a simple fix: periodically trim the extremes back. Why it matters: continual learning is a bottleneck for the whole “AI that keeps learning on the job” agenda, and the fix here is simple enough to actually be used. Farahmand is a well-known Canadian RL researcher,
Yoshua Bengio and Turing laureate Shafi Goldwasser, with Orr Paradise and Oliver Richardson, posted a paper on auditing AI probability claims (arXiv, August 11).
When a model says “there is a 70% chance this loan defaults,” a single probability can’t be graded against one outcome. The paper works out how an outside checker can verify that a system’s probability claims are honest and self-consistent without trusting the system itself.
Ontario Tech University and the Centre for Designing Change launched PACE Ontario, the first provincial hub for physical AI, in Oshawa on August 20.
Physical AI means systems that operate in the real world: robots, machines, and sensors. Oshawa sits in the heart of Ontario’s auto-manufacturing belt.
🏛️ Policy
All four parties in Quebec’s National Assembly endorsed a code of conduct on AI use in politics ahead of the October 5 provincial election, announced August 24.
The CAQ, Liberals, Parti Québécois, and Québec solidaire commit to transparency, responsible use, security, and prevention, including a pledge against AI-generated content that could mislead voters. The CAQ says it will not use AI in its campaign at all.
IVADO and CEIMIA developed the code under Catherine Régis (Université de Montréal, Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila), Christian Gagné (Université Laval), and Marc-Antoine Dilhac (Université de Montréal).
Alberta’s Technology and Innovation Minister Nate Glubish held the province’s first two town halls on AI data centres, and both turned hostile.
Hundreds packed the August 19 session in Lacombe, where nobody who reached the microphone endorsed the plans. The August 20 session in Redwater sits near Meta’s planned $13B data centre in Sturgeon County, to be powered by a $4.6B gas-fired plant.
A virtual session runs August 27, and Grande Prairie follows September 11.
Quebec’s Ministère de la Cybersécurité et du Numérique signed a $2.1M agreement with Université Laval to build a secure, sovereign testbed for AI in Quebec public services, announced August 21.
The funding runs two years with a possible $1M third-year top-up. Laval’s Institut intelligence et données, led by Christian Gagné, will run the sandbox where public-sector teams test AI use cases.
In a La Presse interview the same day, Minister France-Élaine Duranceau said the province is counting on AI to help balance the budget.
Canada’s expanded SR&ED rules are now fully in effect following Bill C-15’s royal assent in March.
The enhanced 35% refundable credit now applies to the first $6M of qualifying spending per year, double the old limit. Capital expenditures are eligible again, and eligible Canadian public corporations can now access the enhanced rate.
If you run a deep-tech company and have not re-run your SR&ED math since March, it is worth an hour with your accountant.
📰 In brief
ALL IN 2026 revealed its fourth-edition program, September 16-17 in Montréal: 7,500+ attendees, Germany as Country of Honour, and a lineup including Cohere, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Mistral AI (not us :).
I will be there, so reach out if you want to connect!
Osedea, a Montréal AI and robotics consultancy, acquired Sherbrooke business-intelligence firm ventriloc. Both companies say the jobs, expertise, and IP stay in Quebec.
CIBC’s AdvisorAssist, covered here in Issue 20, won an IDC CIO Award Canada for its AI advisor tool.
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— Raif