Author: Editor-in-Chief

Canada’s FinTech leaders say they are worried the country and its entrepreneurs aren’t taking bigger swings on priorities like open banking, payments modernization, and stablecoins—or implementing the systems to support them. At the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy’s third annual The Future event this week, some of the most influential names in Canadian FinTech gathered to take stock of where FinTech stands. Speakers discussed why action is needed now and expressed optimism that shifting geopolitical conditions have created an opportunity for Canada. “Somehow and somewhere along the way, we started coasting, we started assuming…

Canada is becoming increasingly anti-competitive and unproductive due to overregulation, industry heads and officials told attendees at Canada’s Competition Summit this year. Hosted by Competition Bureau Canada, the annual event brought together business leaders and regulators to discuss market competition issues in Canada. Industry minister Mélanie Joly set the tone when she told the room the government would be “hawkish” on competition. The comment lived on throughout the day’s programming and conversations as an encouraging sign that the government recognizes the importance of a competitive market. Most of the afternoon, however, focused on what the government is doing wrong. “Incumbents…

OpenText is selling off its eDOCS unit to Utah-based NetDocuments for $163 million USD ($227.3 million CAD) in cash. The Kitchener-Waterloo-based company began exploring the sale of its “non-core assets” in August to focus on its core business of information management for artificial intelligence. The eDOCS business, which helps legal professionals with document management, contributed approximately $30 million in revenue to OpenText’s latest fiscal year. The deal includes integrating the eDOCS software and its associated customer contracts, services, and employees into NetDocuments. BetaKit has asked for details on the number of impacted workers. The transaction is expected to close by…

New PitchBook data illustrates how dramatically AI is dominating startup investment, with 2025 on-track to become the first year when AI accounts for more than half of all VC money invested. PitchBook reports that VCs have poured $192.7 billion into the industry so far this year, out of a total $366.8 billion, according to Bloomberg. In the most recent quarter, AI accounted for 62.7% of the money invested by U.S. VCs, and for 53.2% of money invested by global firms. Most of that money is going to marquee names like Anthropic, which announced a $13 billion Series F in September.…

Agriculture is a thirsty industry, consuming 70% of all fresh water used worldwide. In some countries, like India or Chile, it can be more than 90%. For Mario Bustamante, who lives in Chile, the problem hits close to home. “Lack of water is a big issue here,” he told TechCrunch. Bustamante is betting that AI can help slash water use in farms across the world. His startup, Instacrops, was originally founded to deploy internet-of-things (IoT) sensors on farms to warn farmers about damaging frost conditions, but as the hardware became commoditized, the company pivoted to software and water use. Now,…

Tesla has been hit with an enforcement action by California’s Department of Insurance (CDI) for routinely denying or delaying customer claims despite years of warnings from the state regulator, according to a new pair of filings. Tesla’s insurance arm, along with its partner State National Insurance Company, engaged in “willful unfair claims settlement practices” including “egregious delays in responding to policyholder claims in all steps” of the process and “unreasonable denials,” CDI wrote. This has allegedly caused “financial harm” and “distress to policyholders.” CDI first approached Tesla about these issues in 2022, according to the filings, yet it claims things…

Rivian is changing the door handle design on its upcoming R2 SUV after employees and customers raised safety concerns, according to Bloomberg News. The automaker is one of many that has leaned into electronically latched door handles over the last few years. While this allows for sleeker presentation and more aerodynamic design, it often results in the automaker tucking the manual emergency door releases away in hard-to-find places. On the R2, which comes out next year, Rivian will now put the interior manual releases in a “more clearly visible” location closer to the electrically powered door handles, Bloomberg reports. The…

Welcome to YC Arena, which is not a top secret fight club for Y Combinator founders but rather a suite of games that give you a vague sense of what it’s like to be a partner at YC. Created by a student in Berlin, YC Arena’s YC Partner Simulator game shows you a publicly available pitch video from a company that applied to YC, along with the year of their application. You click “accept” or “reject,” and then find out if you made the same choice as YC. IMAGE CREDITS:YCARENA It’s a lot harder than it looks. YC is estimated…

Zehra Naqvi, 26, grew up as an obsessive fan girl in the 2010s. This was the era of Tumblr and Twitter. She would stay up all night breaking down the release dates of Marvel movies or analyzing the movements of One Direction members. She eventually gained a collective 250,000 followers across the two platforms. “Those early internet rabbit holes taught me how magical it felt to not just consume culture but to contribute to it,” she told TechCrunch. She went on to start a company at 12, study art history at Columbia, and then became a consumer investor at Headline Ventures.…

Silicon Valley is full of comfortable offices with gleaming meeting rooms and on-site baristas. So when early HappyRobot engineer Ari Polakof decided to strike out and start his own company, he didn’t exactly expect to wind up tapping on his laptop in a service bay alongside mechanics. “Very noisy, impossible to concentrate,” he laughed. But that’s part of the story of how Polakof’s new AI-for-car-dealerships startup Flai got off the ground last year. Founded by Polakof and his brother Alen (also from HappyRobot) at Y Combinator, along with former Netflix data scientist Juan Alzugaray, Flai is one of a number…