Brad Sorenson doesn’t believe in coincidence, but he does believe in providence. So much so that the biotech entrepreneur named his company after it. Sorenson founded Providence Therapeutics, a Calgary-based company focused on developing mRNA-based medicines and vaccines, in 2015, on the heels of his 13-year-old son Adam’s cancer diagnosis. “The original mission of the…
Ian Crosby is on his third accounting startup, and he’s not even sure if this one is possible. After co-founding Vancouver-based business bookkeeping software Bench Accounting in 2011, and then the “Stripe for accounting” with Teal in 2023, Crosby is back with Synthetic and a big bet: that he can make the future of bookkeeping…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM There is something that happens in a dream that never happens anywhere else. A familiar place, a workplace or a school corridor, becomes somehow wrong, layered with elements that don’t belong, approached from a direction that doesn’t exist. That sense of wrongness is, it turns out, the point. New…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM For the first time in history, a country is on the verge of eliminating a form of cancer entirely. Australia is on track to reach that milestone by 2035, and possibly sooner, through a combination of widespread HPV vaccination and a screening system that has been rebuilt from scratch….
Top Down Ventures has now closed what might be the first institutional venture capital (VC) fund dedicated to early-stage managed service provider (MSP) software and AI startups. To date, Top Down has backed 12 companies through Founders Fund I. The Vancouver VC firm announced the final close of Founders Fund I at $28 million USD…
Richmond, BC-based last-mile delivery company UniUni is reportedly planning to go public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). According to The Globe and Mail, the deal would see UniUni merge with MAK Acquisition, a Toronto Stock Exchange-listed SPAC led by ex-Dye & Durham CEO Matthew Proud, and value the combined entity at…
Two leaders in sustainable AI have left their tech jobs to start a new venture that aims to help companies mitigate AI’s environmental footprint. The Sustainable AI Group (SAIG), which launched on Wednesday, is led by Sasha Luccioni, Hugging Face’s former AI and climate lead, and Salesforce’s former head of AI sustainability Boris Gamazaychikov. The…
Montréal-based Developer Capital (DevCap) has closed another $5 million CAD to invest in early-stage AI startups in what co-founder and CEO Jordan Steiner referred to as a “seed” round. DevCap operates differently from most venture capital (VC) firms. Born out of Montréal-based full-stack software development consultancy Monadical in 2023, the firm is an evergreen investment…
Canadian venture capital (VC) saw the lowest deal count of any quarter since 2017 in Q1 of this year, according to the Canadian Venture Capital Association’s (CVCA) quarterly market overview report. However, the deals that did take place were largely early-stage rounds. The CVCA said the first quarter of 2026 closed with $936 million CAD…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM In long-term studies where people had their cognitive ability tracked from youth into old age, one finding keeps standing out. “One of the most important factors explaining someone’s cognitive ability at age 70 is their cognitive ability when they were 11,” researchers noted in a recent article in The…
