The University of British Columbia (UBC) and provincial government-backed InBC Investment Corp. have teamed up to establish a new fund for British Columbia (BC) startups. The UBC Catalyst Ventures Fund will back innovative spinouts created from licensed UBC research discoveries, as well as businesses established by UBC faculty, staff, students, and recent graduates. InBC and…
The Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) and Vancouver-based AI startup Caseway AI have settled their copyright dispute. In November 2024, CanLII filed a lawsuit in the British Columbia Supreme Court alleging that Caseway created a business by wrongfully taking CanLII’s work through a bulk and systemic download from its online database, without permission or compensation….
A group of University of Calgary (U of C) researchers looking to make clean energy technology more efficient and affordable has received $4.25 million from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI). Announced last Friday, the funding will support the recently-formed Centre for Far-From-Equilibrium Nanostructured Cleantech Materials (CeFar), which consists of 10 labs across the university’s…
Last year, Black-led startups in Canada received only $10 million in venture capital (VC), spread across just 11 businesses, according to the 2026 Black Startup Funding Report. BKR Capital hopes to change that. Thanks to new funding, the VC firm is now armed with $20 million to help close the funding gap for Black founders…
Montréal travel technology company Hopper’s relationship with its largest client is evolving. Hopper, which built and managed Capital One’s online travel booking portal for credit cardholders, confirmed earlier this week that, after four-and-a-half years, the American financial services giant is bringing the Capital One Travel platform and the employees behind it in-house. “They were our…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Somewhere near you, a coyote may be nursing a litter of pups right now. She chose her den carefully: tucked under a fallen tree trunk, wedged inside an old burrow, or backed into a pile of abandoned concrete. One priority guided the choice: keeping you from finding it. New…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM On a Tuesday morning in Naples, a guide named Chiara Locovardi ran her gloved fingers across a marble surface that has baffled art historians for more than two centuries. She was describing what she felt to the group around her, all of them blind or partially sighted, all of…
Episode Description: This week, Arielle and Karissa cover a tiny African island paying locals to protect its rainforest, the lion DNA case that just sent two poachers to prison, and new research on music, overthinking, and quitting smoking. Oh, and the hummingbirds are on their way. If you have questions, comments, feedback, suggestions, or just…
Ecolab announced today it is acquiring Calgary’s CoolIT Systems, a leader in liquid cooling technology for data centres. “This acquisition expands our role in serving the AI ecosystem.” Based in Minnesota, Ecolab, which has traditionally provided products relating to commercial and industrial water treatment and sanitation, will pay approximately $4.75 billion USD ($6.52 billion CAD)…
Several important Canadian companies made big announcements this week that highlighted their partnerships with chip giant Nvidia. The announcements, which ranged from Cohere’s custom models for Nvidia’s architecture to Kepler Communications’ Nvidia-powered satellites, came as part of Nvidia’s GTC conference, which wrapped up in San Jose on Thursday. Nvidia’s dominance makes its GTC conference a…
