Money continues to flow into 小蓝视频 artificial intelligence companies as the sector matures, networking between executives, researchers and investors intensifies and tangible corporate growth starts to materialize.
Government funding is available while private investors and venture capital firms vie for footholds in AI-related companies.
It has been a red-hot investment climate for ventures that include AI as part of their core offerings, and even for companies that use AI to generally improve performance.
“There’s a lot of momentum,” AI network in 小蓝视频 (AIn小蓝视频) executive director Rob Goehring told BIV.
“Last year was a big year for AI and I think this year will be bigger.”
Conferences and networking events are helping the sector forge connections.
AIn小蓝视频 and others hosted the in early November, when hundreds gathered to listen to 45 speakers discuss technology. Networking sessions and parties surrounded that summit.
Vancouver then hosted the global Top global researchers in AI and machine learning descended on the city, representing companies such as OpenAI and Nvidia Corp.
More than 25 local companies then attended a showcase gathering to demonstrate their products, Goehring said.
Some firms jockey for investments; others outpace the need
Aspect Biosystems CEO Tamer Mohamed told BIV his company was this month despite a dismal investment climate for biotech ventures.
Its appeal may have in part been that it has a human-tissue development system, which uses AI.
“This is the worst funding climate for biotech in an entire generation,” Mohamed told BIV. “It’s a bloodbath out there.”
Aspect’s overall corporate performance and its partnership with pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk helped lure the funding round led by Dimension, a technology and life sciences investment firm, Mohamed said.
Aspect uses AI, however, when it .
Mohamed’s aim is for surgeons to eventually operate on patients and insert credit-card-sized pieces of liver tissue under skin, or pancreas tissue in abdomens.
The plan is not to rebuild those organs, but rather to provide functioning tissues in other places in patients’ bodies to replace the missing functions of certain organs.
Other CEOs at companies that use artificial intelligence in core offerings say the funding climate is strong for AI-enabled ventures.
It is also leading to acquisitions.
Ontario-based workforce development company Uvaro on January 14 .
Uvaro CEO Joseph Fung told BIV he was impressed with Lighthouse’s AI-related skills development training and wanted to own it to broaden Uvaro’s AI-related curriculum offerings.
He would not reveal terms of the transaction.
“If you look at funding in technology, AI has drawn the lion’s share of it,” said Variational AI CEO Handol Kim.
“It’s kind of like the 1990s and the Internet, where that attracted an outsized percentage of venture funding.”
Variational AI has a partnership with multinational drug developer Merck. It uses AI in its platform that helps drug makers quickly create recipes for specific molecules.
“Obviously we want funding,” Kim said. “I can’t comment on anything specific right now.”
Variational AI CEO Handol Kim's technology uses the language of chemistry to create recipes for molecules that drug makers need when creating products | Rob Kruyt
Small companies such as Broadsight Technology Corp. are looking ahead to funding rounds.
New CEO Steve Lowry told BIV last week that and perhaps a larger venture-funding round later in the year.
Its AI-based technology helps communications teams track marketing campaigns and, for example, the effectiveness of specific press releases with journalists.
Vancouver’s in late 2023 to help it expand its AI-driven platform.
CEO Chad Gaydos, who , told BIV that the company’s platform enables about 1,000 clients to manage around US$30 billion in spending and procurement.
AI helps those clients manage spending so bills can be paid quickly and accurately, he said.
“We operate in a fashion where we do not need, at this time, additional funding,” Gaydos said. “It changes every year, as we evaluate the business, the opportunities in the market and strategies that evolve.”
Venture funding rounds can expand a company’s number of outstanding shares and therefore dilute the equity stakes of early investors.
This is why companies may want to hold off on accepting new investments as they grow fast enough to not need it.
Procurify’s revenue is in the tens of millions of dollars and Gaydos said he was brought in to help sales surpass US$100 million, although he would not provide a timeline for that growth.
Government money is up for grabs
The federal government is actively supporting AI development through that was announced in its 2024 budget.
It also has other ways to fund 小蓝视频 companies that aim to commercialize AI-related products.
Ottawa sends tens of millions annually from different departments to , according to CEO Sue Paish. Four other superclusters are based across Canada, operate separately and similarly act as funding sources for businesses.
Paish’s organization gets hundreds of proposals each year from companies across Canada, and it partners with less than half of those that apply, she said.
Digital’s areas of focus include AI and health, natural resources and talent, she said.
Approved partners must invest at least the same amount of money that Digital provides, Paish said.
A consortium led by Richmond-based Ideon Technologies, for example, last year received $16 million over three years. Ideon by taking information gleaned from old maps, old rock-sample data, images and other sources to create a more fulsome map of sub-surfaces.
Vancouver-based Metaspectral uses AI to automate how clients can sort consumer plastics, improving efficiency, reducing costs and increasing the quality of recycled materials. It leads a consortium that received $2.6 million from Digital in 2023.
Vancouver-based health-care provider and technology developer , over three years, for a $44-million project to develop artificial-intelligence (AI) technology that performs tasks such as screening patient medical records and suggesting possible diseases, which saves doctors time.
Of the federal government’s $2.4 billion earmarked to support AI, Canadian regional development agencies are delivering $200 million through what’s called the .
Pacific Economic Development Canada (PacifiCan) is the dedicated federal economic development agency for British Columbians, and it is delivering 小蓝视频’s share of that money: $32.2 million mostly in interest-free loans.
“They have already been overwhelmed with applications—probably more than 200,” Goehring estimated.
PacificCan stopped accepting applications from entrepreneurs and corporate executives on Jan. 17 but is continues to accept applications from non-profit corporations, according to its website.
Approved Pacifican-funded projects must start on or after April 1.
Much of the rest of that $2.4 billion in earmarked funding is set to boost Canadian computational capacity.
Big AI data models need expensive computing infrastructure when they are trained and deployed.
As a result, in December, Ottawa announced that $2 billion would finance the computational resources required for Canadian AI systems to perform tasks.
That includes $1 billion to build public supercomputing infrastructure, $700 million to mobilize private-sector investments to increase AI-compute capacity, and $300 million to create an AI-compute access fund to buy AI-compute resources from Canadian innovators and businesses.
“There’s a sovereignty element to this,” Goehring said.
“Someone in another country, the U.S. for example, could say, ‘We’re no longer going to allow the exporting of our compute resources, or allow Canadians or people in foreign countries to access this high-power compute.’ That would put Canada at a disadvantage.”
Typically, Canadian companies use computing infrastructure from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, he said.
Canada has supercomputing infrastructure projects, however, such as one at Simon Fraser University, he added.
empowers Canadian researchers to tackle large, difficult problems and conduct research investigations while dramatically speeding up research—offering processing speeds thousands of times faster than that on a traditional desktop computer.
