Good morning! This is the Canadian AI Newsletter. Tuesdays are the weekly rundown; today we’re launching the Canadian AI Index.
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I am Raif Barbaros, Partner at Mistral Venture Partners. Views are my own.
Canadian AI companies raised $3.33B in private rounds in the first three quarters of 2026. That is more than at the same point in 2024 ($2.83B) or 2025 ($2.10B). Given some of the rumoured rounds that might close in Q4, 2026 could be the biggest year on record for Canadian AI.
Q3 ended yesterday. These numbers come from the Canadian AI Index, which I’m launching today.
Why I built it
I started this newsletter in February. Every week I (and a bunch of my AI agents) go through government newsrooms, wire releases, filings, news sites and research papers looking for Canadian AI news. I kept running into simple questions I couldn’t answer. How many Canadian AI companies raised money last quarter? Who is writing seed cheques in Halifax? How much of the funding comes from government programs?
I tried the usual databases first, Crunchbase especially, and kept hitting the same problems. Small rounds and government grants were often missing, and amounts and dates often didn’t match the original announcement. And their categorization missed a lot of companies. I ended up using it as a list of leads to check, not as a source.
The Index grew out of the newsletter. I was already collecting most of this data every week, so I started keeping it in one place. It covers 570 Canadian AI companies, 734 founders and 698 investors, with funding rounds from 2023 onward (since ChatGPT). Every round links to a primary source. It is free to browse and updates every Tuesday with the newsletter.
What Q3 shows
More rounds, and smaller ones. Canadian AI companies closed 33 private rounds in Q3, the most of any quarter this year. Two-thirds were pre-seed or seed, up from about four in ten in Q2, which is why the median fell. I read that as a good sign for the pipeline of new companies.
A busy quarter for government funding. The Index counted 24 grants and government contributions to private Canadian AI companies in Q3, the most in any quarter so far. Most were small, with a median of $250K. Seventeen came from one program, Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions’ Regional Artificial Intelligence Initiative. Sixteen of the 24 companies have no private round on record in the Index.
Well beyond Toronto and Montréal. More than four in ten of this year’s private rounds and grants went to companies outside those two metros. Q3 raisers included TetraGen Robotics in Winnipeg, Floqer, Galaxia and SyncraSys in Halifax, Siftmed in St. John’s, Micrologic in Québec City and Ultimarii in Calgary (Disclosure: Ultimarii is a Mistral Venture Partners portfolio company). The Index has companies in all ten provinces and Yukon, across 47 cities.
How it’s built
A company qualifies if AI is the core of its product and it is Canadian-founded with a meaningful team in Canada or headquartered in Canada. Adding an AI feature to a product that already works without it doesn’t count. There is no size floor on companies or rounds. Every date is the announcement date, taken from a primary source.
The sweeps go back to January 2023. ChatGPT launched in November 2022, so the first quarter of 2023 is the first full quarter of the AI era, and anything older belongs to a different market. The Index records Canadian AI after ChatGPT. Call it year one AC. Companies founded earlier are included when they raised, launched, or were acquired within the window.
Raises by publicly listed companies are recorded on their company pages but excluded from the numbers above, so the figures stay comparable to venture data. Mistral VP portfolio companies are included under the same rules as everyone else.
All figures are in Canadian dollars, with US dollar rounds converted at 1.38. They are as of October 1 and will move as late announcements come in.
What I’m asking
Look up a company you know. If something is wrong or missing, every page has a link to tell me, and I’ll fix it in the next weekly update.
Thank you for reading! Subscribe, and please share any feedback 🙏🏽
— Raif