Calgary-based Neo Financial is the latest Canadian FinTech to gain access to Interac’s payment rails responsible for e-transfers, giving it more control over payment options for customers. Interac, Canada’s main debit and digital payment network, announced this morning that Neo had joined the Interac e-Transfer platform as an official participant. Co-founder Jeff Adamson says the…
Kitchener-Waterloo-based software startup Mappedin has secured $24.5 million in Series B financing to map indoor spaces at scale. The growth equity round, which MappedIn announced this morning, was led by Nashville’s Edison Partners with participation from Hong Kong-based Betatron Venture Group. “Indoor spaces are where people spend 90 percent of their time, but they’re still…
A pair of Amazon Web Services (AWS) employees are taking their experience building the cloud operator giant’s energy systems to a new venture. Vancouver-based energy intelligence platform Soma Energy emerged from stealth last week with $7 million USD ($9.7 million CAD) to help data centres optimize their electricity use. The company’s AI-powered platform manages how…
After interning as a reliability engineer at a BC shipyard for just a few months, Hooman Pirouz saw that welding errors create a huge backlog of work. So he and fellow University of British Columbia grads Sophia Millar and George Hollo created Sonibel, a startup with a simple mission to make it faster to find…
If you have a smartphone, there’s probably troves of video data lying dormant in your camera roll. Montréal-based GridBank wants to turn that data into passive income for users, and a 2026-ready marketing strategy for brands. “Everybody in the world has videos sitting on their phone. How on earth has no one built an economy…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM In all honesty, the numbers do not fully support the panic that seems to be spreading over the “male loneliness epidemic”. When researchers look at loneliness rates across the lifespan, men and women report similar levels of isolation. A 2019 meta-analysis of nearly 400,000 people found no meaningful difference…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM In February 2024, sixteen scientists gathered at the University of Lodz in Poland, surrounded by snow, to spend a week examining creatures from the floor of the Pacific Ocean. The animals they were studying lived at depths of around 13,000 feet (roughly 4,000 meters), in near-total darkness, in a…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM For years, cardiologists and neurologists have largely worked in parallel, treating cardiovascular disease and cognitive decline as separate concerns. A new set of guidelines released in 2026 is changing that, and the shift is more practical than it might sound. The C-CHANGE/CMAJ 2026 guidelines, developed through the Canadian Cardiovascular…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM A base tan provides roughly SPF 3 of protection. Dermatologists recommend SPF 30 every single day. Those two numbers are worth sitting with before you start “easing into” sun exposure this spring. The logic behind the base tan feels intuitive: build up melanin gradually before summer, and your skin…
Ryan Gariepy has been building Canadian robots for nearly two decades. He has also been an outspoken advocate for how they should and should not be used in a military context. Gariepy co-founded Kitchener-Waterloo’s Clearpath Robotics in 2009, co-leading the company as CTO until its acquisition by US industrial automation giant Rockwell Automation in 2023…
