Hootsuite founder Ryan Holmes is back in the CEO chair, replacing outgoing CEO Irina Novoselsky. Holmes and Novoselsky announced their respective appointment and departure in a pair of LinkedIn posts on Monday morning. BetaKit has reached out to Hootsuite for comment. Novoselsky wrote that both she and the company’s board “believe this is the right…
We are so back. After a short break to focus on a most ambitious endeavour, The BetaKit Podcast has returned with a banger, laser-targeted on one of the spiciest topics facing Canadian tech today. “We have a collective action problem. Somebody has to take the first step and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to deploy a…
Nicole Shokoples is toasting a new position—at Toast. The former Alberta Innovates executive announced today that she is taking on the role of COO at the Calgary-based recruitment platform. Founded in 2022, Toast is a woman-focused talent and recruitment platform aimed at helping women find roles in STEM fields, closing the gender pay gap, and…
Toronto-based Harmix Group got its start building an algorithmic search engine for the music industry. Along the way, the team was enamoured by another technical problem: fixing data fragmentation for small businesses using AI. Harmix was an early entrant to the field of multimodal AI, or applying machine learning principles to different media. Founded in…
Vancouver-based pH7 Technologies has closed its Series B round at nearly $32 million USD, after securing another $6.2 million to commercialize its critical mineral extraction technology. The company has layered on $7.5 million in venture debt from RBCx—its second facility of this kind from the bank. This gives pH7 more than $39 million in total…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Most people have two main places: home and work. The idea that you need a third sounds obvious the moment you hear it, which is maybe why sociologist Ray Oldenburg felt the need to write a whole book about it in 1989. That book, The Great Good Place, named…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM After a flood, a pipe break, or a contamination event, one of the most pressing questions is also one of the hardest to answer fast: is the water safe? Standard microbiological testing takes hours, sometimes a full day. In that gap, people make decisions without good information, and public…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Americans spend a lot on hair. Serums, supplements, special shampoos, salon treatments: the list of things promising better hair is long and expensive. But five dermatologists say there is something most people are skipping entirely, and it costs nothing at all. Regular cardio exercise appears to support hair health…
Episode Description: In honor of National Pet Day, Arielle sits down with Erica Psaltis, founder of senior dog rescue Silver Linings Rescue Ranch in Bend, Oregon. They talk about what actually goes into running a rescue like this: the intake process, the misconceptions people have about older dogs, the losses, and how Erica keeps showing…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM In February 2026, two French birders in Chad photographed a rusty bush lark. The species had not been recorded in 94 years. It was the most dramatic entry in a year of rediscoveries that have brought the Lost Birds List from 163 species down to 120 since 2022. The…
It was an emotional end to the finale of Startup TNT’s spring agriculture investment summit on Thursday. Along with announcing this year’s winners, community development lead Jesse Wiebe also announced a departure: his own. “The best investors are not the ones with the most money, they’re the ones with the most curiosity, the ones that…
