Vancouver-based home electrification startup Jetson has raised $50 million USD ($69 million CAD) in Series A financing as it looks to sell more energy-saving electric heat pumps across North America. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Eclipse Capital, which backed Canadian-founded chipmaker Tenstorrent, led the round, which Jetson announced today. US investors 8VC and Activate Capital also participated,…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM It’s the start of a new year, and your air fryer is probably still sitting proudly on the kitchen counter, waiting for its next round of sweet potato fries. But if your resolution was to “eat healthier” in 2026, you might want to ask yourself: Is your air fryer…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM When New Mexico rolled out its landmark universal child care program, most headlines focused on working parents. But tucked into the policy is a quieter, deeply meaningful change: grandparents who are raising their grandchildren can now access free child care, even if they are retired or no longer in…
After being sued for an alleged contract breach, Toronto-based legaltech startup Alexi has fired back with counterclaims against Fastcase and its parent company Clio. Alexi calls the original suit “sham litigation” and says it’s an attempt to bring down a competitor. Fastcase, a subsidiary of Burnaby, BC-based legaltech firm Clio, filed suit against Alexi on…
In July 2024, online infrastructure came to a screeching halt when CrowdStrike pushed a buggy update for its ubiquitous cybersecurity software, causing bank, healthcare, and travel systems to crash worldwide. That type of crash is one that Toronto-based DevCycle hopes to help developers avoid, by isolating software errors before they can enter the history books….
Techstars is looking to return to Toronto, two years after it paused programming amid the departure of long-serving managing director Sunil Sharma. According to a December LinkedIn post, the global, early-stage technology startup accelerator and investor is recruiting for “a new chapter” in Toronto. In the post, Techstars Toronto indicated that over the coming months, its…
For Eliot Pence, founder and CEO of Dominion Dynamics, this year’s changing geopolitical circumstances and a flood of federal defence money aligned perfectly with his plans to found Canada’s “defence neoprime”—an explicitly Canadian competitor to big-name defence contractors like Lockheed Martin or Raytheon. “Political access, funding, and management of ecosystems win.” Eliot Pence Pence’s Ottawa-based…
It seems like every day a mindblowing new AI feature is released. And in that newness, it’s easy to overlook that a lot of AI features are kind of slow. Maybe you haven’t experienced that slowness, or perhaps you’re simply too enamoured with talking to AI to notice. I suggest switching over to a voice…
Vancouver-based Hootsuite is providing its social media management and monitoring technology to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) at a time when DHS is facing criticism over its violent immigration enforcement tactics. DHS has committed $1.1 million USD and spent more than $454,000 of that amount to date as part of this contract, which could…
Canada’s space race has a new contender that’s looking to reduce the country’s reliance on foreign rocket launches. Toronto-based Canada Rocket Company (CRC) emerged from stealth on Friday with $6.2 million CAD in seed funding from entirely Canadian investors, supporting its mission to deliver sovereign, medium-lift space launch capability. “Canada relies on other nations to…
