“ The company fascinates me… because they have such interesting concepts internally. One of them being ‘treat the company as a future adversary,’ which I have never seen anywhere in my career." Bluesky's head of trust and safety is a Canadian working out of Dublin. In town to speak at the BetaKit Town Hall for Toronto Tech Week, Aaron Rodericks fir…

“I want to put ambition in people’s hands. You say it doesn’t exist—you’re going to hold it, you’re going to flip through it, you’re going to see it.” BetaKit CEO Siri Agrell joins to discuss today’s launch of BetaKit’s Most Ambitious: our first-ever print issue, telling stories of bold ambition in Canadian tech. Consider this your Most Ambitious d…

“ Subversiveness is a way of changing the system. And I think what we're seeing right now is that all systems are changing.” Entrepreneur and Startupfest founding partner Alistair Croll has co-authored a new book, Just Evil Enough: The Subversive Marketing Handbook. If you’re wondering why your company is so bad with its go-to-market execution, or …

“ That's what we wanna change, right? For future companies, more Canadian investors on the cap table so that we can see those benefits come back through investment, through mentorship.” Jill Earthy, CEO of InBC Investment Corp—a provincial Crown corporation with $500 million of direct and indirect capital to deploy—joins to discuss the state of Can…

“Be a customer of Canadian startups. This is the thing that every company needs. Nobody died from having too many customers.” The CEO of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, Cam Linke, joins to discuss the next phase of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy and how Amii stands apart from other national AI institutes, Vector and Mila. Recorded live fr…

“ Companies have spent a lot of time and money creating really great user experience for humans. And now there's kind of this race to create a really good experience for AI agents.” Erik Reppel, head of engineering for the Coinbase Developer Platform, joins to explain why the x402 open payment standard he helped create might plug one of the oldest …

“ I think every ecosystem is different, but we can learn a lot from Silicon Valley, and we can merge what we have here.” Faire co-founder and Chief Architect Marcelo Cortes explains his journey from Brazil to Canada, how working in Kitchener-Waterloo connected him to Silicon Valley, and the process of applying the lessons learned there to his compa…

“Bad actors are weaponizing AI faster than governments and enterprises are using AI to combat it.” New data shows that more than half of all internet traffic comes from bots, and a third of those bots have malicious intent. Koat.ai co-founder Connor Ross joins to discuss the impact of the disinformation and defamation campaigns these bots run, how …

“I feel like doing this is one of the greatest gifts of my life. Working with these people energizes me.” Joe Canavan, principal at Canavan Capital, is Canada’s 2025 Angel of the Year. Recorded live at the NACO Summit in Ottawa, Canavan discusses his passion and enthusiasm for investing in tech after a career in finance, and what Canada should do t…

“I think for any entrepreneur that’s navigated the last five years, I don’t know if there was a worse time to be building a company.” Clutch found a new gear for its business after a post-pandemic lull … just in time for tariffs to hit. Dan Park (CEO) and Stephen Seibel (COO) join to discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated online car retail, …

“ Toronto Tech Week belongs to everyone. Toronto Tech Week is by definition a platform, and it succeeds or fails by the virtue of all the hosts and all of the ecosystem in Toronto wanting to participate.” Filling the summer event gap that Collision left in the city, Toronto Tech Week plans to host 10,000 people attending over 100 events this June. …

“ At the end of the day, I really wanted a Pebble. It didn't exist. No one was building anything remotely like it. So I, without really knowing what I was doing, decided to go and make it.” Almost 10 years after Pebble’s demise, Eric Migicovsky is back building smartwatches. The Canadian behind some of the largest Kickstarter projects of all time e…

“ It's worth it. Because this deserves to live. We've gotten it far enough that this deserves to actually come to fruition. I don't think there is another company in the world today that actually is closer to this sci-fi dream.” Revisiting BetaKit’s January interview with SRTX founder Katherine Homuth about her company’s ambitious goal to modernize…

“ By the time these companies are ready for B and C [rounds], their cap tables are super clean, too. So it doesn't really make sense that we're not putting money into them.” In a time of global uncertainty, a new report by the Canadian Food Innovation Network (CFIN) shows that Canada lags other countries in foodtech funding, relying too much on pub…

”Apple won't use user data to develop and train AI. And Apple lives in a world where AI is going to be table stakes in any software or hardware moving forward.” Call it counter-programming. A tech palate cleanse for all the election and trade war talk. This week, Rob and Doug tackle the latest AI developments: vibe coding, Cohere’s (temporary?) LLM…

 ”One of the things that I think we've got to critically think about in our country for the future is that we've got to begin using those dollars effectively, like the $4 billion in SR&ED.” CCI’s Ben Bergen joins to discuss items innovators hope will be on the agenda in the forthcoming federal election before ranking what programs (VCCI, SR&ED, etc…

“I don’t know what Canadian DOGE is. You know what I know? That everyone is projecting both their hopes and fears onto this thing.” Ex-Shopify VP Daniel Debow joins to discuss his Build Canada initiative, what it’s attempting to achieve, what it isn’t, and his frustration regarding ongoing associations with ‘Canadian DOGE’. The BetaKit Podcast is p…

“It feels like my inclusion was optional, and that is a scary message to be told. ‘We were doing you a favour by letting you in the room.’” AccessNow founder and CEO Maayan Ziv has been working in the accessibility space for over a decade—long enough to know that progress is slow and takes a fight. With DEIA currently being blamed for “everything f…

“Once you’ve cornered that beaver, look out. We are a vicious beast.” Rob and Douglas review the latest dispatches in Canada’s impending trade war with the United States, specifically how Canadian tech is responding. Did someone poke the beaver and unleash Canada’s quiet patriotism? A 3-2 overtime hockey win points to yes. The BetaKit Podcast is pr…

“ You're going to see Coveo starting to invest quite aggressively actually to be a market taker. We're not a disrupted company. We're a market taker in AI.” Coveo's current CEO and future executive chair, Louis Têtu, joins to discuss the applied AI company's earnings performance and where the market is heading in the face of customer fatigue and De…

“Part of the magic of the games industry here is that it’s not one thing.” Canada must diversify its economy. Why not start with gaming? Entertainment Software Association of Canada (ESAC) president and CEO, Paul Fogolin, joins to discuss video games’ $5.1 billion contribution to Canada’s economy and the results of his organization’s latest study o…

“ Subversiveness is a way of changing the system. And I think what we're seeing right now is that all systems are changing.” Entrepreneur and Startupfest founding partner Alistair Croll has co-authored a new book, Just Evil Enough: The Subversive Marketing Handbook. Why are Canadian companies so bad with their go-to-market execution and is now real…

“This is worth the pain of attempting to figure out how to do it. But attempting to figure out how to do it required us to basically rethink everything about that traditional outsourcing model.” SRTX founder and CEO Katherine Homuth explains how attempting to solve one problem with tights led her company to attempt solving for all problems related …

 ”It does make me increasingly nervous that one of them really wants to move to Mars and the other one has a legit bunker. Like, what are they preparing for?” Social media expert Amber Mac joins to discuss why two of the world’s richest men, collectively responsible for over 3 billion monthly users, are so quick to blame everyone else for the probl…

“ I'm sure if there's one takeaway here is that we can all trust Enron to solve the world's energy problems.” “With a mere human-sized egg.” A cleantech crisis? The end of VCCI? The rise of centaurs? FinTech IPOs? Quantum leaps? BetaKit reporters Madison McLauchlan and Josh Scott join to review 2024’s biggest tech questions before offering a fresh …