As frontier AI model providers increase their prices, some Canadian startup leaders that rely on them are evaluating alternatives to alleviate the high costs. The news: Leaders from a handful of Ottawa-based companies talked about the quirks of building in the AI era in a panel discussion at AccelerateOTT on Thursday morning. The founders of…
Russia is claiming that Canada is a “warmonger,” following a recent deal between Hamilton-based Sentinel R&D and Ukraine’s Airlogix. The news: Earlier this week at a press conference in Moscow, Russian officials labelled Canada a “warmonger” in the wake of a deal between the Department of National Defence (DND), Canadian defencetech company Sentinel R&D, and…
Canada’s privacy watchdog found that social platform X (formerly known as Twitter) violated Canada’s federal private-sector privacy law when it launched an AI image generation tool that was used to create sexualized images of people without their consent. The Privacy Commissioner of Canada released a report Thursday summarizing the findings of a months-long investigation of…
Canadian challenger bank Koho Financial has secured $130 million CAD in Series E financing as the FinTech company continues its quest to obtain a federal banking licence. The all-equity round, which Koho closed in recent weeks and announced on Thursday, provides the initial capital base the company requires to become a federally regulated bank, and…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Learning to read does something to the brain beyond teaching it to decode text. A new study in Cortex found that adults with formal reading education recruit a distinct region on the right side of the brain when processing unfamiliar spoken sounds. Adults who never learned to read show…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Monterey Park voted 86 percent to 14 percent last Tuesday to permanently ban data centers from the city. It is the first US city to do it through a ballot initiative. Campaign organizer Steven Kung called it “a landslide victory.” On the reasons: “The noise pollution, the air pollution,…
Canada’s federal government outlined the details of its newly proposed Safe Social Media Act today, which includes a ban on social media for users younger than 16. Ottawa announced Bill C-34, which has not yet been debated before parliament, at a press conference on Wednesday afternoon with Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture Marc Miller….
Canadian companies General Fusion and Eavor are the top two best-performing cleantech companies in the world, according to Time Magazine’s Top GreenTech Companies of 2026 list. The news: The second-annual list, released on Tuesday with the help of data firm Statista, ranked the world’s top 250 best-performing companies developing or providing green technologies. Vancouver-based General…
Montréal-based online mortgage lender Nesto has secured a nearly $1.5-billion CAD valuation as part of a new Series E funding round meant to bring AI into the lending process. The news: Nesto announced the fresh funding, which included $107 million in primary capital and $195 million in secondary capital, on Wednesday morning. Nesto said it…
One year on from the inauguration of Montréal innovation hub Ax.c, the space has secured renewed funding from the city as it looks to help its startups expand internationally. The news: Ax.c, an office and event space in Montréal’s business district operated by École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), announced on Tuesday evening a renewal of…
