Toronto-based Tailscale is on the cusp of surpassing 40,000 paid business clients—twice the number the secure networking technology startup had in November. Avery Pennarun, Tailscale’s co-founder and CEO, attributes the company’s accelerating growth to its virality and rising AI demand, including among AI agents, which he said began heavily recommending, buying, and deploying Tailscale earlier…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Forty-eight teams. Sixty-four matches. A final played yesterday at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. And a victory for Spain, the country taking all the glory home. The 2026 World Cup was the most expansive in the tournament’s history, and for US, Canadian, and Mexican fans, the first played on…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Cancer immunotherapy has transformed treatment for some patients. For the 60 to 80 percent who don’t respond, the problem often isn’t the killer T cells at the end of the immune chain. It’s the cells responsible for training them. A new UCLA study published in iScience identifies creatine, the…
Like most workplaces last week, the soccer-obsessed founding team of Venford Technologies was consumed by the final matchup between Spain and Argentina of the FIFA World Cup. Unlike most workplaces, Venford felt it had the means to predict the outcome. The Toronto-based startup is developing digital twin software for policy planning. The platform helps policymakers…
Vancouver-based personal training app Flex AI is shutting down, BetaKit has learned. Flex AI co-founder and CEO Amin Niri informed employees and contractors that the AI-powered fitness tech startup was winding down operations in a March 24 email obtained by BetaKit. In that email, Niri indicated that his efforts to secure an acquisition had failed…
Canadian-founded, Palo Alto-based software startup Ollama has secured $65 million USD ($91 million CAD) in Series B funding to enable AI’s “personal computer moment.” The news: Ollama allows developers to download and run open-source large language models (LLMs) directly on their own computers. The 14-person AI infrastructure company claims it has amassed nearly nine million…
Episode Description: Greece just launched the world’s first satellite constellation built specifically for wildfire detection. It can spot a fire measuring only a few feet across, a huge improvement on conventional satellites, which start flagging fires when they’re already the size of a cruise ship. Ten solutions this week with Arielle and Karissa, including the…
Quebec’s AI institute is partnering with a Halifax-based company to use AI to forecast sea-ice levels in Canada’s High Arctic. The news: Mila announced it is entering into a partnership with PolArctic Canada to bring the research institute’s AI expertise to sea-ice monitoring in Canada’s northern waterways. The partnership was announced on Thursday at Mila’s…
While Canada’s lagging innovation performance is nothing new, the ongoing US trade war and economic crisis have made addressing it a more urgent concern. During a MaRS Discovery District panel Thursday morning, leaders from Blue J, the Canadian Shield Institute, the University of Toronto (U of T), and North South Ventures unpacked some of their…
Faced with a tech industry built on extraction, Indigenous technologists are exploring ways to build tools while protecting cultural and data sovereignty. At the Indigenous AI Gathering at Montréal AI institute Mila this week, Indigenous scholars, tech workers, and AI researchers delved into the tension between generative AI’s significant use of data and the ways…
