A new Canadian defence company has formed under the banner of a very old name. Former CEO of National Bank Louis Vachon and a group of investors announced yesterday the creation of Marconi Technologies, a newly Canadian-owned defence company headquartered in Montréal. The company plans to sell hardware and communications technology to the Canadian government…
Toronto-based FinTech startup Relay announced on Tuesday that it has closed $50 million USD ($69 million CAD) from Silicon Valley’s General Catalyst to accelerate customer acquisition. This money comes out of General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF), which Relay co-founder and CEO Yoseph West said provides non-dilutive growth capital tied directly to customer acquisition performance. …
AI agents are playing an increasing role in software development. They are also creating a host of new security concerns. Toronto-based 1Password has expanded its work with Silicon Valley AI giant OpenAI in an attempt to help businesses deploy autonomous AI agents to securely build products. “As coding agents take on more of the software…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Every year, The Earth Prize asks teenagers across the world the same question: what environmental problem would you solve, and how? Every year, the answers come from young people who live closest to the problem. After five years and more than 21,000 students across 169 countries, that’s less a…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM This is part two of our Earth Prize 2026 coverage. Part one covered four regional winners from Ireland, Kenya, Gaza, and India, including Tala and Farah Mousa, whose Build Hope Palestine project we first wrote about earlier this month. Here are the remaining three. Thailand: nests for hornbills, and…
The Government of Canada announced on Tuesday $6.8 million in funding to help five organizations connected to Alberta improve productivity and commercialize AI. Eleanor Olszewski, the minister responsible for Prairies Economic Development Canada, made the announcement on the opening day of Upper Bound, Edmonton’s largest AI conference. “I think [Upper Bound’s] growth says a lot…
There’s a saying that gets memed a lot. It starts with “inside of you there are two wolves” and often comes with a punchline superimposed on photorealistic wolf illustrations reminiscent of gas station t-shirts. The saying actually goes that inside each of us are two wolves doing battle; the one you feed wins. The proverb…
Toronto-based AI scaleup Cohere has acquired yet another German-rooted company in Montréal and Berlin-based Reliant AI. The acquisition is meant to help push Cohere’s flagship AI product into a new vertical: healthcare. Cohere announced the acquisition of the biopharmaceutical data processing startup on Tuesday morning. It marks Cohere’s second acquisition deal in a month, following…
The difference between AI that works and AI that doesn’t sometimes comes down to a single second of latency. Éric Pinet’s team learned this while testing a voice AI prototype for medical clinics across Québec. The system is designed to free up nurses for clinical care by answering and triaging patient calls. When responses came…
When every university student can have an AI chatbot whip up an essay draft for them, how can professors ensure students are still learning critical thinking? The new capabilities are pushing educators to explore different means of assessment—with and without AI—cracking the classroom door open for edtech companies to step in and suggest new ways…
