Author: Editor-in-Chief

While quick commerce in India has become synonymous with 10-minute deliveries — and the hottest play for startups and investors — FirstClub is taking a slower, more curated route. Yet just three months after launching its app, the 8-month-old startup has tripled its valuation. At a post-money valuation of $120 million, the Bengaluru-based startup has raised $23 million in a Series A round (comprising more than 90% equity and the rest in debt) co-led by returning investors Accel and RTP Global. The round also saw participation from Blume Founders Fund, 2am VC, Paramark Ventures, and Aditya Birla Ventures. This new…

“Your market is really niche.” Those were the words Rachel Bartholomew repeatedly heard from potential investors when she pitched them on her startup, Hyivy Health. Hyivy’s product, a pelvic rehabilitation vaginal dilator, could potentially help a third of all women in the world who experience pelvic health issues at some point in their lifetime. “If you haven’t had your time yet, either you or your daughter or mother will be impacted by this.” Andrea Guest, Femtech Canada “I also had a lot of investors saying, ‘Can you talk to my wife, to my sister, or to my daughter to confirm…

Hugo Larochelle has been appointed the new scientific director of Mila, Montréal’s artificial intelligence (AI) institute, filling a role once held by his former academic supervisor, Yoshua Bengio. Larochelle succeeds Laurent Charlin, associate professor at HEC Montréal, who took over as interim scientific director in May after Bengio moved to an advisor role. The new director is an adjunct professor at the Université de Montréal and the former head of the Google Brain research lab in the city. “I view AI as a key for bringing more intelligence into our economy.” Hugo Larochelle In an interview with BetaKit, Larochelle said…

The federal government is pledging millions of dollars to support Black entrepreneurs in Southern Ontario. The Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) says it will invest $2.4 million in Toronto’s Black Creek Community Health Centre to support the Black Entrepreneurship Alliance’s (BEA) incubator programs. The renewed federal investment will support the addition of new BEA programs, including an 11-week business process improvement training program and a 12-week program helping businesses become export-ready, according to FedDev. The funding will also support an annual forum for Black-led businesses to share new ideas. “Black entrepreneurs are a testament to Canadian…

Ten years ago, founder and managing partner Randy Garg spun Vancouver investment firm Vistara Growth out of a Beedie family office fund he was running at the time. The plan was to go after a gap in the private credit market by continuing the strategy he had deployed for Beedie since 2010 as a standalone entity, and Garg brought on Vistara partner Noah Shipman shortly afterwards to support those efforts. “We set out 10 years ago with a strategy … and we haven’t deviated from that.” Since 2015, Vistara claims it has raised more than $900 million CAD to date…

Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst says throwing more computing power at large-language models (LLMs) won’t necessarily get the world any closer to so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI). On the 20VC podcast, hosted by Harry Stebbings, Frosst took a contrarian spin on industry hype around AGI. The computer scientist and indie musician called out OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for both touting the technology’s power and raising concerns about its potential threat to humanity. Frosst doesn’t believe that pure scaling could create AGI, a nebulous concept which he defines as “treating a computer like a person.” “I think that was academically disingenuous…

As the feds prepare to accelerate defence spending, Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) president and CEO Isabelle Hudon says that the Crown corporation is gearing up to serve the country’s defence tech sector in “a less shy” and “more aggressive way.” “We are getting ready—the whole bank—to make this sector a strategic one to support,” Hudon told BetaKit in an interview about the bank’s latest annual report. “It’s a 360-[degree] project at the bank.” Isabelle Hudon, BDC Those fiscal 2025 results state that the federal government-funded BDC increased venture capital (VC) investments while once again marking…

The United States’ (US) NASA is bringing the 2025 Space Apps Challenge to Canada on Oct. 4 and 5, and will hold the Toronto event at Bombardier Centre for Aerospace and Aviation at Centennial College’s Downsview Campus. As in recent years, the annual hackathon tasks both in-person and virtual participants with solving Earth- and space-related problems using NASA’s open datasets. The space agency aims to foster collaborations between creatives, developers, scientists, and students to allow them to bolster their portfolios and professional networks. NASA says the Toronto event is the largest Space Apps Challenge in Canada. NASA stresses that entrants…

Toronto-based legaltech startup Bench IQhas raised $5.3 million USD ($7.3 million CAD) in seed financing to help expand its artificial intelligence (AI) platform that says it can analyze judicial rulings for lawyers. Bench IQ said it plans to expand its coverage to US state judges and Canadian judges. The round closed earlier this year, led by Inovia Capital and Battery Ventures, and included $1 million USD of debt. Other backers included CIBC Innovation Banking, MVP Ventures, Maple VC, and Haystack VC. The startup said this brings its total funding to $7.4 million USD. Bench IQ’s platform claims to help lawyers…

Over the last several years, fusion power has gone from the butt of jokes — always a decade away! — to an increasingly tangible and tantalizing technology that has drawn investors off the sidelines. The technology may be challenging to master and expensive to build today, but fusion promises to harness the nuclear reaction that powers the sun to generate nearly limitless energy here on Earth. If startups are able to complete commercially viable fusion power plants, then they have the potential to upend trillion-dollar markets. The bullish wave buoying the fusion industry has been driven by three advances: more…