Can Canada successfully scale AI companies?

In our third and final conversation from Scale AI’s ALL IN conference this September, our focus is on… well, scale.

“The development of AI is racing ahead from most large corporations’ ability to keep up with it. What does that mean? There’s a nice gap there. There’s a beautiful gap to create products and go fill that gap.”

This year at the annual AI event, held in Montréal, I was tasked with navigating the current landscape for Canadian AI companies from a variety of perspectives: financing, product development, and go-to-market and scaling. It’s a lot to cram into 45 minutes, but thankfully I was flanked by a portfolio of Canadian AI founders—Hongwei Liu (Mappedin), Sarah Legendre-Bilodeau (Videns Analytics), Sam Ramadori (BrainBox AI), and Pape Wade (Airudi)—in addition to BDC’s Dwayne Dulmage, in the unfortunate position of proxy speaker for all government-backed initiatives and commitments (sorry Dwayne!).

Now, it’s a rule of thumb that any collection of Canadian founders will eventually begin griping about the lack of support for homegrown entrepreneurs (it’s the elephant beside the 600-pound beaver in the room). It’s also generally accepted that Canadian companies struggle with commercialization, scale, and procurement. But the extent to which these struggles are exacerbated in the AI sector—according to these founders—was compelling.

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For example, on this podcast you have Airudi CEO Pape Wade claiming Canada will lose a significant amount of AI companies in the next five years if they can’t find a way to own and commercialize their IP. Going one step further, you have BrainBox AI CEO Sam Ramadori claiming the company has “frankly given up” on selling to the home market because of how far behind Canadian corporate customers are on R&D and risk.

It’s not quite doom and gloom, with many of the founders offering a tactical roadmap for how they’ve scaled (i.e., go south), but it does run counter to what CIFAR executive director Elissa Strome told me about the success of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy in driving commercialization. This is perhaps an unfair comparison but I still feel worthy of note.

So where does the “beautiful gap” lie for Canadian tech companies to make an impact in AI? Let’s dig in.

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The BetaKit Podcast is hosted by Douglas Soltys & Rob Kenedi. Produced by Jess Schmidt. Feature image courtesy ALL IN.