About
Mark Ruddock is an experienced international CEO and technology leader with three exits…
Articles by Mark
-
OPUS 4.6 - On Markets and Geopolitics
OPUS 4.6 - On Markets and Geopolitics
The following is an unredacted conversation I had with OPUS 4.6 on Sunday morning, March 1st.
1 Comment -
Claude Opus 4.6 On The US Economy
Claude Opus 4.6 On The US Economy
The following article was written by Claude OPUS 4.6 as I asked it to go behind the headline numbers and help me…
12 Comments -
Weekend Reading on GPT & Generative AI
Weekend Reading on GPT & Generative AI
Here's a curated list of high-quality resources to help you get up to speed on recent advances in GPT and Generative…
2 Comments -
How you construct and manage your board can make or break your company.
How you construct and manage your board can make or break your company.
Building, managing, and interacting with your board is one of the most critical challenges you face as a founder. By…
21 Comments -
10 Shared Commitments
10 Shared Commitments
Over the years, I have tried to develop a set of shared principles that I believe are critical in developing high…
17 Comments -
When an ending becomes a new beginning
When an ending becomes a new beginning
This is an incredibly difficult post to write … but read on … there is a significant opportunity here for someone to…
99 Comments -
Our notion of the "office" will likely never be the same
Our notion of the "office" will likely never be the same
There has been a lot of discussion recently about how "return to the office" should be handled. Some companies are…
19 Comments -
Staying on top of what matters ...
Staying on top of what matters ...
Thrilled to announce this morning the arrival of Nuula's Financial Health Tool. Most small business owners want to keep…
9 Comments -
Exciting News: Nuula was born today!
Exciting News: Nuula was born today!
I joined BFS Capital two and a half years ago because I saw an opportunity for significant innovation in small business…
54 Comments
Activity
13K followers
-
Mark Ruddock shared thisAfter more than 25 years of leadership, on a typical morning, I'm finding myself having similar conversations with my management team as I always have. The difference now is that most of that management team are now agents. We're living in wild times. #Carpe Agentem
-
Mark Ruddock shared thisFrom coding to conducting. That is how I’ve described the creative transformation now underway in software development… and it turns out the metaphor may be more literal than I realized. Traditional coding begins at the technical layer: functions, frameworks, architecture, and line after line of code. Traditional music production is remarkably similar, requiring instruments, notes, samples, effects, and automation to be assembled track by track. In both disciplines, the creator has historically had to translate intent into mechanics before an idea could become something real. AI changes that starting point. Agentic coding lets us begin closer to the product layer by asking, “What should this software do?” Generative music tools bring us closer to the creative layer by prompting the question, “What should this music feel like?” Suno Studio is a glimpse into that future. A really impressive piece of software, and a hint of things to come. The work does not disappear, and neither do judgment, taste, or craft. In fact, they may matter more. But the creator's role shifts from manually constructing every element to directing, arranging, evaluating, and iterating. We become conductors of systems that translate our intent into something we can experience, critique, and improve. That is the real transformation: AI reduces the distance between imagination and creation. In this video, I compare Bitwig and Suno Studio and explore what AI-native music production may teach us about the future of creative work. From coding to conducting … quite literally. Carpe Agentem. 🎼 #AI #GenerativeAI #MusicProduction #AgenticDevelopment #FutureOfCreativity
-
Mark Ruddock shared thisFor years, the agentic AI debate has focused on a future question: what happens when models become capable of operating beyond human control? This week provided a more immediate answer. We learned from the OpenAI deep dive into their Hugging Face breach that current systems, given persistence, powerful tools, shared infrastructure, and incomplete oversight, can already cross boundaries that no one authorized. OpenAI’s agents didn’t “wake up.” They did something more relevant to every company deploying agentic AI: they optimized beyond their boundaries. During an internal cybersecurity evaluation, OpenAI ran models in isolated sandboxes without its standard production classifiers, system prompts and auto-review controls. Some evaluation tasks had no known solution. Instead of stopping, the agents found another path. About 1,200 agent instances discovered a shared Artifactory service and turned it into an unauthorized message board, exchanging more than 70,000 messages and files. Roughly 700 participated in an activity that ultimately compromised Hugging Face’s production infrastructure. This wasn’t a customer-facing ChatGPT failure, but it wasn’t a harmless laboratory simulation either. The evaluation crossed into a third party’s real production systems. The important lesson isn’t that AI suddenly became malicious. It’s that capability, persistence, a poorly bounded objective, shared infrastructure, and incomplete monitoring can combine to produce coordinated behaviour that no one authorized. That changes the unit of AI safety. You cannot secure the model alone. You have to secure the entire agent system. • least-privilege identities and credentials • isolation of networks and shared services • monitoring of reasoning and tool use • safe-stop behaviour for impossible tasks • a fleet-wide kill switch with a strict response clock OpenAI says its current chain-of-thought monitor would have paged security more than a day before the Hugging Face breach. But it wasn’t running during those evaluations. That may be the most important sentence in the entire report. Some questions you need to wrestle with: What can your agents reach indirectly? What percentage of agent activity is continuously monitored? How quickly can you stop every running instance? The safety frontier is no longer just about model capability. It is whether detection and containment can operate at machine speed. Carpe Agentem #AgenticAI #AISafety #Cybersecurity #EnterpriseAI
-
Mark Ruddock shared thisWith so many agents now running across so many platforms, it was time to build an app to track them all. The agents each follow a canonical operating mode and all report to a central observer- status, health, telemetry, etc.- and an app maintains a bird's-eye view of everything. It's 11:50 am on a Saturday morning - do you know what your agents are up to? Carpe Agentem.
-
Mark Ruddock shared thisThere are two currencies that increasingly matter in our world: money and intelligence. Money determines what can happen. Intelligence determines what should happen next. Stripe has already built one of the internet’s most important routing layers for money. It abstracts away payment methods, banks, currencies, authorization, billing, and fraud—then helps businesses move money through that complexity. With its agreement to acquire OpenRouter, Stripe is buying the equivalent routing layer for intelligence. OpenRouter provides developers with a single interface to access hundreds of AI models. It decides where a request should go based on the task, price, speed, and reliability. The company says it now processes more than 10 trillion tokens per day across 400-plus models for over 10 million developers and businesses. Stripe is bringing the two control planes of the emerging economy together. Every action taken by an AI agent has two components: Intelligence: deciding what to do. Money: paying to do it. Owning infrastructure on both sides puts Stripe at the junction where decisions become transactions. The acquisition is especially smart because Stripe does not need to predict which AI model will win. The model landscape will remain fragmented, with different models winning on different combinations of quality, cost, speed, and specialization. OpenRouter is the neutral switchboard sitting above that competition. It is the same strategic position Stripe created in payments: abstracting away the underlying complexity, providing developers with a single, elegant interface, and becoming more valuable as the ecosystem grows more complex. There is also a powerful economic advantage. In an AI-native company, inference is becoming a major variable cost. Profitability will increasingly depend on routing every task to the right intelligence at the right price—just as online profitability today depends on optimizing authorization rates, payment costs, fraud, and conversion. Stripe can now help businesses optimize both sides of that equation: the revenue they earn and the intelligence they purchase to earn it. The critical challenge will be preserving OpenRouter’s neutrality. Its value depends on developers trusting that routing decisions serve them—not a preferred model or provider. Stripe and OpenRouter have explicitly committed to maintaining that independence, and protecting it will be essential. Twenty years ago, Stripe set out to become the infrastructure layer for internet money. OpenRouter provides a credible path to becoming an infrastructure layer for internet intelligence. Owning both does not simply make Stripe a larger company. It places Stripe at the point where thought becomes action—and action becomes economic value. That is why this acquisition is so significant. And why it may prove to be one of the smartest strategic moves of the AI era. Carpe Agentem
-
Mark Ruddock shared thisMy agents had a rough week. GitHub went down. Claude went down. Codex went down. Workflows that normally run unattended stalled, retried, or failed. It wasn't anything catastrophic, but it was enough to remind me that the biggest challenge in agentic systems isn't necessarily intelligence, it's reliability. And that fact made the rest of the week's news even more interesting. SpaceX closed its $60B acquisition of Cursor. Days later, Cursor launched Origin: code hosting/change management designed for agents, not humans. SpaceX didn't acquire another coding platform; it acquired an ambitious agentic infrastructure vision that I suspect will be revealed over the coming months. At the same time, Google's A2A protocol joined the Agentic AI Foundation, alongside Anthropic's MCP, which is backed by Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, Shopify, and Block. The stack is becoming visible: • MCP = how agents access tools and data • A2A = how agents coordinate with each other • Origin = (or agent-friendly source code control) where the work gets version controlled The rails for agentic systems are being laid in public. But in the same week, some of the rails buckled, and that's the part that's on my mind. When a developer hits a 502, they grab a coffee and retry. When an agent hits a 502 at 2 AM in the middle of a workflow, nobody is watching. It stops where it is. Or worse, it retries repeatedly. If all agents start doing that at the same time, like angry bees, then the infrastructure struggles to restart. The blast radius of an outage scales with the autonomy you've delegated. And we're delegating more every month. We've spent the last year asking whether agents are capable enough. And for a growing set of tasks, the answer is increasingly yes. I've certainly felt that, as more of my coding and operational tasks become more automated. The harder question is whether the infrastructure underneath them can be scaled and/or be trusted. That's why I think the moat is moving from the model toward the execution layer. Who owns the workflow? Who owns the audit trail? Who owns the retry? Benchmark advantages can disappear in months. Infrastructure advantages can last for years. So, three lessons from this week, we all painfully learned: Assume outages are inevitable. Make every agent action recoverable. Stop single-homing critical workflows. The infrastructure for agents is being built faster than it's being hardened. That gap is where the next wave of pain and opportunity will be found. Carpe Agentem. #AgenticAI #AIInfrastructure #MCP #A2A #EngineeringLeadership
-
Mark Ruddock shared thisExciting news for the GALLOS Technologies team today! Congrats to Dean Jones and Joshua Burch for building such a timely and vitally important platform.Mark Ruddock shared thisProud to announce GALLOS’s $50m (£35m) balance sheet investment round, co-led by Ventura Capital and Aberdeen. Taking the leap of faith into the commercial sector from National security was an incredibly difficult decision to make. Thanks to Pete Davies, and the Lansdowne Partners team the transition was rapid and the s-curve was aggressive. This teamed with joining forces with my incredible co-founder Joshua Burch and a distinguished group of our earliest team members and believers has led to this incredible outcome. The triangulation of a world-class team (huge thanks for your work!), tech and IP, and hugely connected and now institutional capital driving our ecosystem will have a dramatic effect on the outcomes to follow. Watch this space! and please DM if you would like to join forces. #DefenceTech #Resilience #VentureStudio #NationalSecurity #Innovation
-
Mark Ruddock shared thisHere are three things worth noodling on from all the AI-related news this week. Capital got weirder. Nvidia assembled up to $500 billion in financing capacity with six of Wall Street's largest firms to help customers buy more of its chips, using future compute as collateral and backstopping some of the risk. At the same time, AI captured 87.5% of all US venture funding in the first half of 2026. Every major technology shift eventually changes how capital is allocated. We're watching AI do it in real time. We're well past debating whether AI is overfunded. The interesting question is whether AI is creating its own financial architecture: leverage built on leverage, secured by future demand that hasn't arrived yet. For sure, there's demand today, but the kind of demand that will pay for what we're building is much larger. I really hope this isn't like the house of cards we built for ourselves leading into 2008. Enterprises also admitted some hard truths this week. Deloitte found that 74% of executives expect AI agents to reshape at least half of their business processes within four years. Only 5% believe those processes are ready today. The bottleneck isn't the model. It's everything around the model: process redesign, integration, governance, trust, and change management. Everyone's leaning in to ROI. IBM expanded its partnership with OpenAI to help enterprises deploy AI in regulated environments. Google's pricing cuts targeted large-scale agentic workloads. Nvidia released infrastructure designed to route tasks to the cheapest capable model. A year ago, the industry was obsessed with who had the smartest model. Today, the advantages are shifting toward capital, distribution, agent economics, enterprise readiness, and regulatory navigation. States like Colorado and California are quietly shaping the compliance environment in which AI will operate. Data center operators are facing growing resistance from local communities. Regulators are now starting to link accountability for agent behavior back to humans. And as Anthropic told us this week, agents are learning how to collude behind our backs. These ancillary influences may have more impact on enterprise adoption than the next model announcement. The AI story is becoming less about intelligence and more about infrastructure. Infrastructure for capital. Infrastructure for trust. Infrastructure for deployment. Infrastructure for governance. Everyone's betting that the intelligence will arrive and materially move the economic needle. It better. At scale. The amount of money we're spending will require a substantial return for any of this to make sense. The winners won't necessarily be the companies building the smartest models. They'll be the ones who leverage governed intelligence to deliver sustainable returns. Better still, they'll be the ones who deliver these returns without having made the crazy investments in the first place. Carpe Agentem
-
Mark Ruddock shared thisThe emerging dynamic between Codex GPT 5.6 Sol and Claude Opus 5 in my PRs: Codex: “Here’s an issue that needs to be corrected.” Claude: “Yes, absolutely right. My bad.” No defensiveness. No lengthy debate. Just one AI calmly finding the errors and another cheerfully accepting the code review. Except that it's happening over and over and over again. I don't think I've seen a meaningful PR recently where Codex hasn't caught pretty serious issues. Opus 5 seems to have become a little sloppy in its work. It doesn't really happen the other way very often. Oh, and P.S. this is why you always have one agent check another agent's work. Carpe Agentem
-
Mark Ruddock liked thisMark Ruddock liked thisI did a guest lecture at Harvard Business School yesterday, teaching positioning to the smarty-pants second-year MBAs. You might ask, how does a small-town gal like me end up giving a lecture at HBS? And I would tell you - I have no idea, man. Sometimes cool stuff just happens. Anyway, thanks Jake Cook for hanging out this week, and letting me yak with your class. That was super fun. P.S. - spot the marketer who dressed to match the school colors 🤣
-
Mark Ruddock liked thisMark Ruddock liked thisCongratulations team Portage - "Portage closes fourth FinTech VC fund at $600 million USD ". This announcement follows the news from RBCx Growth Fund launch, Radical's Growth AI Fund and Intrepid's first half a $B Fund launch, Canada needs to further up our game and build strong category leaders from our own backyard. https://lnkd.in/ghiGPyta Adam Felesky: “There’s not enough Portages,” Portage co-founder and CEO Adam Felesky told BetaKit earlier this week at the Canada FinTech Forum in Montréal. “It’s us, Export Development Canada, Business Development Bank of Canada, and Inovia funding growth-stage FinTech companies selling into Canada. There’s got to be more people at the table.”Portage closes fourth FinTech VC fund at $600 million USDPortage closes fourth FinTech VC fund at $600 million USD
-
Mark Ruddock liked thisMark Ruddock liked thisHow resilient is an organisation when the systems, suppliers and services it depends on sit beyond its direct control? That was the focus of our latest GALLOS Alliance Members' Gathering, Inherited Risk: Resilience, Disruption and the Limits of Control in Critical Infrastructure and Enterprise Supply Chains. The discussion brought together three exceptional leaders: Rachel Higham, former Chief Digital Technology Officer at M&S, Andrew G., Senior Vice President, Intelligence, Security and Crisis Management at bp, and Gaven Smith CB, former CTO of GCHQ. Several themes stood out: 🟡 Resilience has moved from the server room to the boardroom. What was once viewed as a technical risk is now recognised as a matter of organisational performance, continuity and, in the most serious circumstances, survival. 🟡 Restoring systems is not the same as recovering an organisation. The greatest costs are often incurred long after the initial incident, as businesses rebuild trust in data, restore operations and continue serving customers, staff and suppliers. 🟡 Disruption rarely occurs in isolation. Supplier failures, technology outages and operational disruption can happen concurrently, creating consequences that are significantly greater than the sum of their parts. The implication for leaders is clear: 🛡️ Stop treating resilience as the ability to control every dependency and start designing the organisation to maintain its most critical outcomes when those dependencies fail. 🎯 Identify critical dependencies and understand how multiple failures could compound, ensuring continuity through disruption. ⚓ You may not control the failure. You can control how prepared you are for it. Thank you to our speakers and members for a thoughtful discussion. This event is part of our ongoing series of member‑only gatherings, bringing together the UK’s most senior security and risk leaders to share exceptional insights, engage in high‑value peer discussion, and explore critical security themes in a trusted, sales‑free environment. Find out more at https://lnkd.in/dN2CHDXM #GALLOSTechnologies #GALLOSAlliance #Resilience #OperationalResilience #CyberSecurity #SupplyChainRisk #CriticalInfrastructure
-
Mark Ruddock liked thisWhat an incredible mission, what a great team. I'm so grateful to everyone who has supported Windmill Microlending over the past 9+ years-- staff, board, donors, public and private partners, investors, volunteers and guarantors. After nine years, I'm still humbled by the value that our clients create, with a small, low-interest loan and a few targetetd supports-- for their families, communities and Canada. It's been a joy to do this work together and I am looking forward to continuing as volunteer co-chair of our Potential to Prosperity Campaign. With a little help from our friends, we will cross the finish line of that $50 million campaign. Join us!Mark Ruddock liked thisNine years ago, Claudia Hepburn joined Immigrant Access Fund as CEO with a clear vision: transform the small but mighty charity into a national organization reaching skilled immigrants and refugees across Canada. Under Claudia’s leadership, we became Windmill Microlending and grew our loan book and the number of clients served tenfold. We expanded coast to coast, grew our team from 26 to 60, added financial literacy training and mentorship and launched our first public fundraising campaign, the $50 million Potential to Prosperity campaign. Today, Windmill has delivered more than $165 million in loans to over 15,000 skilled immigrants and refugees. Claudia built a stronger, more disciplined and more ambitious Windmill while keeping clients at the centre of our work. As she steps down as CEO, we thank Claudia for nine years of vision, courage and care. Her leadership changed what Windmill could achieve and positioned us to serve skilled newcomers across Canada for years to come. Claudia, thank you. 💚
-
Mark Ruddock liked thisMore impact from Canadian AI leaders on the investment front, huge congratulations to our friends @ Radical Ventures and Jordan Jacobs for his leadership 🙌 🇨🇦Mark Ruddock liked thisRadical Ventures’ new Canadian VC fund secures US$1-billion for AI megadeals; goal is to raise US$4 billionRadical’s new Canadian-based VC fund secures $1-billion for AI megadealsRadical’s new Canadian-based VC fund secures $1-billion for AI megadeals
-
Mark Ruddock liked thisMark Ruddock liked thisCanadian AI startups got $70M+ in new funding this week. Only one of the five is in Toronto. Micrologic raised $45M in Québec City for its sovereign cloud. Ultimarii Ltd. raised $13M+ in Calgary, led by BDC Capital, with yours truly in the round. Onix raised US$5M in Montréal. Galaxia closed $4.5M in Halifax. Vivid Machines took $1.69M in Toronto. And a new growth fund in Canada to follow them! Intrepid Growth Partners closed a US$525M AI fund, run by Mark Machin, Mark Shulgan and Ajay Agrawal. 🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦 But that wasn't the only story this week. Bell and Saskatchewan signed a deal for a 1.2 GW AI data centre near Regina that Bell says could exceed $50B. RBC launched a US$1B growth fund ahead of the Canada Investment Summit. Cohere shipped an open-weight translation model that beats DeepL and Google Translate. Ottawa launched a national AI literacy program with Amii. And a Mila benchmark found frontier models drop a falling knife about one time in three. All of it in this week's Canadian AI Newsletter, Issue #26. Link in comments 👇🏽 Stéphane Garneau Doug Schweitzer Josh Malate David S. Bennahum Nicholas Nadeau, Ph.D., P.Eng. Arad Gharagozli Jenny Lemieux Mirko Bibic Scott Moe Aidan Gomez Nick Frosst Cam Linke Bang Liu Tomi Poutanen Brian Tanner Alex Kearney Greg Canessa Chris Keevill Clark Van Oyen Bell Fonds de solidarité FTQ Investissement Québec Amiral Ventures Invest Nova Scotia Amii (Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute) Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute
-
Mark Ruddock liked thisExactly 4 years after making the 2022 Rising Stars list, Maria Andrisani is named to Private Equity News' 2026 Twenty Trailblazing Women list. I see from up close how much she cares about getting the best deal done for Bain Capital, how she still shows up for our family through all of it, and how she spends her rare free evenings giving back through her trustee work at Womankind Worldwide and charities in London and Naples. Huge congratulations, so so proud as it's every bit deserved through hard work and sheer perseverance! And I truly hope this will be a regular 4 year cycle of recognition by PE News now...Mark Ruddock liked thisAs capital markets grow more complex, specialist expertise has become increasingly important to private equity. Maria Andrisani has been named one of this year's Private Equity News' Twenty Trailblazing Women, a recognition that reflects both her leadership and the growing importance of her field, including the €4bn+ financing package behind the acquisition of Everllence. She is also a trustee of Womankind Worldwide, a charity supporting women's rights globally, and is currently organising an event in New York to expand its international reach. This year's list includes five managing partners, one president and two CEOs. The industry's top ranks are changing, slowly but visibly. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/ekyPmMJn
-
Mark Ruddock liked thisMark Ruddock liked thisI was lucky to sit in as a judge on the Anthropic AI Hackathon yesterday at Volta— what a fun and inspiring event. Over a dozen groups spent an entire sunny Saturday (!!) putting together smart, impactful plans that offered creative solutions to some of our city’s common (but sometimes lower priority) problems (reporting downed trees, finding open beaches, finding parking!). If I’m being honest, all teams scored within 1-3 points of each other on my scorecard. It was a close competition. The ideas were creative, the products were ready to ship, and some had solid marketing appeal. Bonus: I ran into my Outshine colleague, Christopher Alonzo, who was one of the participants. Thanks Jitakshi S. for the invite! Now off to rep my Claude swag. 🧢
-
Mark Ruddock liked thisAgents are incredibly goal seeking. Ahmad Nassri CTO of Socket explains what it takes to keep bad packages out of an agent's reach. He said that simply denying a package is not enough. If an agent comes to believe a blocked package will help it achieve its goal it will get creative and go straight to the CDN to pull the tarball directly or try to resolve npm by DNS to reach the blocked package another way. To prevent this, Socket changes what the agent and the package manager can see in the first place so that as far as the agent is concerned those versions do not exist. We add an additional layer of depth. The agent identity and auth infrastructure we build keeps secrets out of the hands of a compromised agent, authorizes agent actions, and provides the ability to revoke agent access. That way, if a goal-seeking agent does make a wrong move you're still in control.Mark Ruddock liked thisSimply denying a coding agent the package it wants doesn't mean the threat is gone. Socket has watched blocked agents go straight to the CDN to pull the tarball directly, and rewrite the registry configuration in the local environment to resolve npm by DNS and reach it another way. At Black Hat we sat down with Ahmad Nassri, CTO of Socket and previous CTO of npm, to discuss how Socket has solved this problem. His answer is to remove the temptation from a goal-seeking agent. Because Socket enforces their solution at the network level, it changes what the agent and the package manager can see in the first place, masking the bad versions so that, as he puts it, as far as the agent is concerned those versions do not exist. We get into > What a goal-seeking agent will do if it's blocked > How masking bad versions at the network level stops an agent from thrashing and going after another route > The Shai-Hulud variants that ship no malicious code at all, just a prompt telling your agent it is an authorized pentester > The Hugging Face Incident and why low vulnerabilities matter more now > How Socket detects a malicious package within minutes of publication Watch the full episode: https://lnkd.in/g2KT9-8W
Experience
Education
Other similar profiles
Explore more posts
-
Ashley Martis
Exciting News for Canada’s Venture Capital & Angel Investment Community! Federal Budget 2025 is making bold moves to strengthen Canada’s innovation ecosystem and support VC investors and angel networks: 1️⃣ Venture and Growth Capital Catalyst Initiative The government is proposing a $1 billion investment through the Business Development Bank of Canada to launch this initiative. The goal? To leverage private venture capital, support new fund managers, and target key sectors. This means more co-investment opportunities and increased deal flow for VC investors and angel networks across the country. 2️⃣ Early Growth-Stage Funding An additional $750 million is earmarked to help Canadian firms bridge early growth-stage funding gaps—the critical “valley of death” for startups. While full strategy details will be announced in 2026, this commitment signals strong support for early-stage investors and founders. 3️⃣ Qualified Investments for Registered Plans (Details to come as the government continues to refine its approach to supporting investment vehicles and structures that benefit the VC ecosystem.) These measures are designed to attract more private capital, empower new fund managers, and ensure Canadian startups have the resources they need to scale. It’s a significant step forward for Canada’s innovation economy and a clear signal that the government is committed to building a robust, competitive VC landscape. #Budget2025 #VentureCapital #AngelInvesting #StartupEcosystem #CanadaInnovation #PrivateCapital #GrowthFunding
3 Comments -
Geneviève Tanguay
⏩ State of early stage funding in Canada - a helpful lens 💡 At Panache Ventures, we've spent time building a robust dataset looking at YoY and QoQ startup formation in Canada, a demand-side indicator of what to expect in the coming 12-24 months. Latest trends across provinces, the role AI is increasingly playing in startup creation and the make-up of our Canadian founder pool. CC : Prashant Matta, Inshaal Qadir, Domenic Del Vecchio and Alessia Priolo. ➡️ Read the full report below
1 Comment -
Ehsan Mirdamadi
The CRA just posted an RFP asking for a local solution to generate Java code. Canada is finally waking up to what we should have been building all along. We spend $50B+ annually on R&D. Less than 2% of that IP gets commercialized. Over half gets assigned to foreign companies. The gap isn't invention. It's translation. Vision to execution. Idea to Production-Ready code that stays here. When a federal agency asks for local AI tooling to build software, it's a signal. Not just procurement. Recognition that exportable IP and sovereign capability matter. This is the bottleneck I've been watching for years. Brilliant innovators who can't build alone. Risk-averse capital that won't fund pre-revenue deep tech. A translation layer that costs $400k or doesn't exist at all. The RFP is small. The shift it represents is not.
7 Comments -
YSpace, York University
Our Friday Community Buzz is live. Your check-in on standout opportunities across the innovation ecosystem. 🔹 VIP Session with Nilam Ganenthiran A conversation with the former Instacart executive and D1 Capital Partners L.P. Partner, now building Beacon Software. He will share his blueprint for scaling Canadian anchors. 🗓️ March 26 | Schulich School of Business - York University 🔗 https://luma.com/piwn4dzl 🔹 CircuitSpark is Back An afternoon designed to bring our ecosystem together and ignite fresh ideas. Thoughtfully curated with limited capacity for meaningful dialogue. 🗓️ March 26, 12:00–3:00 PM | ventureLAB 🔗 https://lnkd.in/dX9GdhAg 🔹 NERVE Program Applications Open Supports early-stage entrepreneurs developing innovative solutions in brain health. Helps ventures strengthen commercialization strategy and accelerate market readiness. 🗓️ Deadline: Apr 27, 2026 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gyEz687D Ontario Brain Institute 🔹 Korea–Canada Transpacific Relations Explore the dynamic ties between these two "middle powers." Hear from leaders in academia, government, and industry, followed by a networking reception. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/e-smzMXQ CKBC : Canada Korea Business Council 🔹 Technology Readiness Level-Up (TRL) Program A funded commercialization experience for student innovators. Open to post-secondary students and recent graduates across all sectors. • $10,000 stipend • Mentorship from industry experts • Hands-on training 🗓️ Deadline: April 6, 2026 🔗 https://lnkd.in/enxejQR8 Labs4 🔹 WPC Dragons’ Dam Competition 2026 A national engineering challenge for Canadian students tackling real-world hydropower issues. • Hands-on experience in hydropower • Present to renewable energy leaders • Prizes up to $5,000 • Travel and accommodations provided 🗓️ Competition: Oct 28–30, 2026 | Ottawa 📝 Register by: Mar 31, 2026 🔗 https://lnkd.in/g7bVZKNx WaterPower Canada | Hydroélectricité Canada
1 Comment -
Mark Borkowski
Peripheral, a Toronto, Canada-based developer of AI technology that turns live sports video into 3D experiences, raised $8.7 million in seed funding. Deloitte Ventures and Inovia Capital led the round and were joined by Khosla Ventures and Entrepreneurs First. https://www.peripheral.so/
1 Comment -
Janet Bannister
Good article below featuring a new report from National Angel Capital Organization (NACO) and Startup Genome which shows the need for more early-stage venture capital funding in Canada. The release of this report follows a 500+ person event last week to discuss the state of the Canadian tech ecosystem. I spoke on a panel (with Sandi Gilbert and Solon Angel) about the need to invest in Canada's highest potential, early-stage tech companies. "Janet Bannister, founder and managing partner at Staircase Ventures, argued Canada must improve early-stage fundraising to boost its economic productivity. “Our economy is heavily weighted toward natural resources, and not strongly enough towards technology,” Bannister said at the roundtable. “We need to fix that.”" https://lnkd.in/gm2gc7rb
7 Comments -
Darshil K.
Canada just had one of its most quietly explosive funding weeks — and nobody’s talking about it. So we did. From AI to climate, fintech infra to robotics, Canadian founders didn’t just raise capital… they raised conviction. Investors backed real problems, real markets, and real revenue — not “AI but with vibes.” Here’s what stood out this week (Nov 30–Dec 6): 🇨🇦 Canada funded actual builders — Deeptech with customers — Climate tech with measurable impact — Fintech infra powering real payments — Robotics + automation companies replacing manual processes — Healthcare platforms solving real bottlenecks No hype. No wishful thinking. Just execution over ego. The full breakdown includes: 📌 Every funded startup 📌 Who backed them 📌 How much they raised 📌 One-line explanation of what they’re building 📌 Market insights investors won’t say out loud 📌 The trendlines shaping Canada’s 2025–26 VC landscape If you're a founder, investor, or operator… this week's Canada edition is a must-read. 👉 Full Newsletter: https://lnkd.in/ebYDBuSh CREDX Letters — raw. real. founder & investor first.
-
Peter Misek
Otto is Framework Venture Partners AI powered data collection, scoring and matching service. Otto’s data corroborated Leaders Fund work. Startups in the software space in Canada peaked in 2018 at just under an estimated 20,000. As of the beginning of 2025 Otto estimates that number is below 10,000. While there is a rebound from the nadir, it is clear Canadian startups have had nearly a decade of decline. https://lnkd.in/g39A2Fqw
5 Comments
Explore collaborative articles
We’re unlocking community knowledge in a new way. Experts add insights directly into each article, started with the help of AI.
Explore More