A global merger. A billion-dollar funding round. An unprecedented public company debut.
The high-growth tech companies making these moves each trace their roots to the University of Toronto – and all of them remain anchored in Canada.
This week, their founders will take the stage at Toronto Tech Week, a city-wide gathering where innovators, investors and policymakers will ask what it takes to build the next Cohere (AI for enterprise), Xanadu (quantum computing) or Waabi (self-driving technologies).
U of T sits at the centre of many of the more than 500 events spilling across the city, kicking off Monday with a marquee town hall featuring Xanadu founder and CEO Christian Weedbrook and a fireside chat between Waabi founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun and U of T President Melanie Woodin.
On Tuesday, the university hosts the Desjardins Speaker Series at Convocation Hall, with Databricks co-founder Reynold Xin and Ada CEO Mike Murchison, followed by a lawn party showcasing U of T-founded companies.
The high-profile gathering comes at an auspicious time for Toronto’s blossoming tech scene, as a rising cohort of U of T-connected founders make the case that Canada can be a global launchpad for innovation, not a layover.
“It’s a moment for Canada to bet on ourselves,” says Jon French, director of U of T Entrepreneurship. “It’s a moment for our large industries to be early adopters of new technologies.”
Toronto now hosts the third-largest tech talent pool in North America, behind only the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle, according to CBRE. The commercial real estate firm reports that Canada’s tech talent grew by 5.9 per cent in 2024, outpacing the U.S. rate of 1.1 per cent.
Much of that talent flows out of U of T. The deep-learning breakthroughs led by University Professor Emeritus and 2024 Nobel Prize-winner Geoffrey Hinton are widely credited with sparking the modern AI era – and a generation of researcher-founders at U of T.
Among them are Cohere co-founders Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst, who is a headliner at Toronto Tech Week’s mainstage event Wednesday.
Cohere, which builds AI systems for corporate customers, recently announced a transatlantic merger with Germany’s Aleph Alpha that was billed as a sovereign AI alternative to U.S. and Chinese giants. Last week, it deepened its push into the life sciences sector with the acquisition of Reliant AI.
Meanwhile, Xanadu – founded by former U of T postdoctoral researcher Weedbrook – became the first pure-play photonic quantum computing company to go public in March, listing on both the Nasdaq and the Toronto Stock Exchange. It also struck a deal to raise an additional US$300 million last week.
Self-driving startup Waabi, led by Urtasun, a U of T professor of computer science, raised up to US$1 billion in January, backed by a deal with Uber to deploy a fleet of robotaxis.
For decades, Canadian-grown tech talent has contributed to Silicon Valley’s success. For example, Ilya Sutskever, one of Hinton’s former graduate students, went on to co-found OpenAI after co-authoring one of the most cited academic papers of this century.
Where the country has historically struggled, however, is lining up the capital necessary for talented entrepreneurs to scale up their ideas at home. “U of T is and continues to be a tremendous innovator in AI in the physical world, and what we’re missing is the opportunity to transform that in terms of economic value and driving progress,” Urtasun says.
That may be starting to change. Recent U.S. turbulence has sparked keen interest from researchers, faculty and senior tech talent in moving north.
“We’re at this inflection point,” says French. “International partners are looking to Canada and trusting Canada more than our neighbours.”
Ottawa has signalled it sees the same opening. The federal government’s $2-billion Sovereign AI Compute Strategy backs both Cohere ($240 million) and an expansion of U of T’s AI compute infrastructure ($42.5 million). The federal government is also expected to launch an updated AI strategy soon, while the Ontario government said in its most recent budget that it’s working on an industrial AI strategy to be released this summer.
French hopes Toronto Tech Week will push the conversation further.
“We need to lean into where we’re strong as a university, and recognize the value of building in Canada,” says French. “We excel at the research and we want to commercialize it and keep the talent and the financial benefits in the country.”
With files from Rahul Kalvapalle
