Plus: An innovation agenda for the next election.
Canada has a new prime minister, with immediate impacts on Canadian tech.
Mark Carney wasted no time, putting a bullet in his party’s controversial capital gains tax inclusion rate changes last Sunday during his acceptance speech as Liberal leader.
In his first day in office, Prime Minister Carney appointed two new ministers at key cabinet positions for Canadian tech. You can read Madison McLauchlan’s stories on both decisions below.
How long will he have the job? My DMs indicate a federal election could be called very soon, possibly before the next delivery of this very newsletter.
In a fit of civic duty, I sat down with CCI’s Ben Bergen on The BetaKit Podcast to discuss the policy planks Canadian innovators need in the next election. We also rate the likelihood the two leading parties will adopt them.
Our democratic process is important stuff, but do not let it overshadow all the good good Canadian tech news this week: two early-stage Canadian companies took home prizes at SXSW, beating out a horde of international competition; for the first time ever, Cohere holds pole position in the global LLM race; and autonomous vehicle startup Waabi invented a new metric to measure reality.
You can read all of it (and more!) below. While you do so, I’ll stay here at my keyboard, waiting for the writ to drop.
Douglas Soltys
Editor-in-chief
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TOP STORIES OF THE WEEK
Anita Anand named innovation minister, Champagne moved to finance in new Carney cabinet
Canada’s newest Prime Minister, Mark Carney, announced the makeup of his cabinet after being sworn in on Friday. Notable shakeups include former Transport Minister Anita Anand taking on the innovation portfolio from François-Philippe Champagne, who will take over as Minister of Finance.
Earlier in the week, Carney replaced former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as leader of the Liberal Party, securing an overwhelming 85 percent of the party nomination vote. In his acceptance speech, Carney effectively put a nail in the coffin of the controversial capital gains tax rate changes his own party put forward in last year’s budget.
“We will stop the hike in the capital gains tax because we think builders should be incentivized for taking risks and rewarded when they succeed,” Carney said on stage.
Cohere says Command A model edges out LLM competition in speed and energy efficiency
Is it Canada’s turn for a DeepSeek moment?
Canada’s leading large-language model developer Cohere has unveiled its new Command A model, which the company claims is faster and uses less computing power than other global competitors.
The company noted that Command A’s efficiency is especially key for its enterprise clients, some of whom may be looking to cut costs.
Clio acquires UK-based ShareDo to move into serving large law firms, fuel global expansion
Burnaby, BC-based Clio has acquired fellow legaltech company ShareDo, of Manchester, United Kingdom, to accelerate its expansion upmarket and begin serving large law firms.
Clio co-founder and CEO Jack Newton claimed that the transaction is the biggest of Clio’s five acquisitions to date in terms of both the amount it paid and ShareDo’s employee count.
“We saw an opportunity through this acquisition to really unlock that enterprise opportunity for Clio” and cater to law firms of all sizes, Newton told BetaKit in an interview.
Québec’s dismal seed-stage performance could spell trouble for province’s startup pipeline
A recent report led by Réseau Capital indicates that seed-stage venture deals in Québec dropped by more than half year-over-year, with dollars invested dropping by a sharp two-thirds.
The early-stage slowdown reflects a national trend that Canadian Venture Capital Association CEO Kim Furlong said “presents concerns about the long-term pipeline of high-growth startups.”
Xatoms and Knead take home top prizes amid strong Canadian showing at SXSW pitch competition
Toronto-based Xatoms and Calgary-based Knead Technologies have taken home top prizes in their respective categories at this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) pitch competition in Austin, Texas.
Including the winners, only five Canadian companies participated in the competition amongst an international cohort of more than 70 finalists and alternates, leaving Canada with an impressive winner-to-participant ratio.
Waabi develops realism metric to gauge reliability of autonomous vehicle simulators
Toronto-based autonomous vehicle (AV) startup Waabi is calling for the industry to follow the road it has forged by developing a framework to measure the realism of AV simulators.
Waabi founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun outlined in a blog post this week how the company’s newly developed realism metric works, saying that transparency and accountability are “absolutely paramount” for building public trust in AV technology.
Web Summit Vancouver 2025 speaker lineup includes CEOs of Bluesky and Clio
The organizers of Web Summit Vancouver 2025 have revealed the first 25 speakers for the major technology conference, including a mix of in-the-moment tech celebrities along with prominent business leaders, with a few key guests hailing from Canada.
A rebrand of tech mega-conference Collision under the parent company’s name, Web Summit Vancouver will take place at the Vancouver Convention Centre from May 27-30.
Why Simon De Baene keeps killing his own products
At TechTO’s Toronto event this month at MaRS Discovery District, Workleap co-founder and CEO Simon De Baene described how his team spent two years in the late 2000s building a software product, but the product was too complicated. Customers struggled to use it, and instead of fixing that core issue, the team kept layering on more functionality.
So, they started over.
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Weekly Canadian Deals & Dollars 🇨🇦
- CAN – Canadian government opens $300M AI Compute Access Fund
- CAN – US-based FinTech Zolve planning Canadian expansion
- VIC – Redbrick acquires New York-based Paved
- RCH – General Fusion takes major step for Canadian fusion reactors
- VAN – Novarc Technologies raises Series B round
- VAN – Deloitte Canada acquires Pocketed for undisclosed amount
- TOR – Online pharmacy Phoenix closes $50M in equity and debt
- TOR – Augmenta secures additional $14.4M in seed funding
- TOR – Softchoice taken private by US firm for $1.4B
- TOR – Vertu Capital appoints Eric Kafka as partner
- GAT – Telesat to take on Starlink with new $25M campus
- STJ – Kraken Robotics to acquire 3D at Depth for $24.5M
The BetaKit Podcast — An election primer on what Canadian innovators need
“One of the things that I think we’ve got to critically think about in our country for the future is that we’ve got to begin using those dollars effectively, like the $4 billion in SR&ED.”
CCI’s Ben Bergen joins to discuss items innovators hope will be on the agenda in the forthcoming federal election before ranking what programs (VCCI, SR&ED, etc.) and policies (AI regulation, open banking, etc.) the next government in power might adopt, drop, or move forward.
The BetaKit Quiz — This week: Carney’s first cut, Cohere finds speed, and Severance’s real HQ
Think you’re on top of Canadian tech and innovation news? Time to prove it. Test your knowledge of Canadian tech news with The BetaKit Quiz for Mar. 14, 2025.
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