Most Ambitious

Using AI and quantum chemistry, Xatoms identifies new photocatalysts: molecular compounds that can purify water with sunlight. The company’s “materials discovery engine” mines thousands of research papers to isolate key chemical structures, allowing Xatoms to rapidly accelerate its mission to purify the Earth’s water.

Fusion is often referred to as the holy grail of clean energy. General Fusion believes it can make fusion energy available within a decade. In just 16 months, the company built its LM26 machine, which has already formed the magnetized plasmas needed for fusion.

Reimagining residential heat pump installation to make electric homes as ubiquitous as electric cars. The company handles financing, permitting, and installation through a seamless, software-powered platform that slashes upfront costs and installation times.

Squashing the world’s reliance on plastic by dramatically accelerating the manufacturing sector’s transition to sustainable biomaterials. Erthos uses AI to create and deliver custom-designed, biomaterial-based plastic alternatives to consumer packaged goods and materials companies.

Plant-based foods have never replicated the unique, flaky texture of fish.  But New School Foods has pioneered a whole-cut salmon alternative made of seaweed, algae, and soy that mimics the texture, flavour, and experience of real salmon—including the same levels of Omega 3.

Mushroom fashion has arrived, and it’s coming for your leather. Using mycelium—the root-like structure of a fungus—MycoFutures creates fully biodegradable, leather-alternative products, proving that luxury can be sustainable.

As the world remains focused on digital layers, Cobb is optimizing places people actually live. Her Shorefast Network for Place-Based Economies will use technology to map local economies, identify opportunities, and increase the flow of financial capital, keeping small towns viable.

An oil and gas company in reverse, looking to help undo the process of climate change. To get there, about 10 billion tons of CO2 need to be removed from the atmosphere per year by 2050. 

Installing fast-charging EV stations that minimize strain on the electrical grid. Jule’s Level 3+ station can charge an electric vehicle in less than 30 minutes.

Fruit flies have helped produce Nobel Prize-winning research into Alzheimer’s, autism, and diabetes. Now, a husband and wife team are using the pests to cheaply and sustainably produce recombinant proteins, an essential ingredient in life-saving medical research.

Creating a valuable resource from industrial carbon emissions, the technology captures CO2 and binds it to industrial byproducts created in coal-burning power plants. The result is an advanced material like concrete, already being deployed at cement plants around the world.

Developing the world’s most affordable and reliable long-duration energy storage solution. With zinc as its base metal, e-Zinc’s batteries are cheaper than lithium, can hold energy for multiple days, and perform in temperatures ranging from -30°C to 60°C.

Connecting food-rescue organizations with large-scale donors, simplifying the logistics of food waste. Deployed at last year’s NFL Draft and the winner of SXSW’s 2025 pitch contest in the AgTech & Food category.

Transforming greenhouse gases into industrial chemicals without using fossil fuels. The company sequesters more than three tons of carbon dioxide for every tonne of ethylene it produces, with plans to mitigate half a gigatonne of annual emissions.

If Amazon defined itself by making it easy for the world to shop, Shopify is undoubtedly making it easier for the world to sell. The global commerce platform reduces the barrier to entry for aspiring entrepreneurs and defined a market for enabling other people’s success.

It wasn’t just about indestructible tights. The SRTX founder planned to reduce our dependence on offshore labour, by making energy the base cost of manufacturing. SRTX might still achieve this goal, but not with Homuth as its leader. Her new company, Oomira, will index organizational memory.

Right now, 6.5 million Canadians lack access to a family doctor, and emergency rooms are overwhelmed. MedEssist’s ultimate goal is to turn pharmacies into a layer of the health-care system that is accessible and connected, unlocking the capacity our health-care system desperately needs.

While Google Maps owns the globe’s outdoor terrain, Mappedin’s goal is to map the indoors, turning floor plans into 3D interactive maps for the spaces we navigate inside. This year, it will map the inside of every building in Manhattan for the New York Fire Department.

Her startup, Hyivy, is looking to end the uncomfortable reign of the vaginal dilator, a crude device developed in 1938, which remains the only clinical option to address long-term pelvic side effects from cancer treatment. Bartholomew also launched Femtech Canada, focused on women’s health care innovation.

Closed the largest fundraising round in Canadian software history with its platform for the legal community, which performs client intake, contact management, calendaring, document management, timekeeping, billing, and trust accounting.

Helping the helpers, Jane surpassed $100 -million in revenue last year with its practice management software for independent health and wellness clinics.

With three million users and over $70 billion in assets under administration, Wealthsimple is focused on becoming its clients’ primary financial relationship. It wants to be something “better than a bank,” collapsing the financial stack—investing, saving, crypto, mortgages and more—into one super slick platform. The company has set a goal to reach $100 billion under management by 2028.

Crypto markets need more than coins to function. They need pipes. Aquanow provides the behind-the-scenes infrastructure to move digital assets for more than 300 global companies, from startups to established financial players. The Vancouver-based firm acts as the backend engine that is being used to onboard the next 100 million users onto crypto.

Launched in 2020 as a Halal mortgage platform, Manzil has significantly expanded its range of Sharia-compliant FinTech offerings. Today, the startup offers a range of financial services tailored to the Muslim community, which prioritizes ethical and interest-free banking solutions in line with Islamic law. Canada has a Muslim population of 1.7 million, with collective assets estimated at $100 billion.

Koho is the only Canadian startup looking to secure a Schedule 1 banking licence, and aims to build a fully regulated, digital-first institution that makes everyday banking faster, cheaper, and fairer for the next generation. The company recently launched a suite of internal AI tools to automate and expedite fraud detection, protecting Koho’s primary demographic of paycheque-to-paycheque households.

Canadian businesses waste time and money every day wrestling with clunky financial systems built for another era. Float is modernizing corporate cards and expense management. Venn is automating payables to give companies back their focus. Loop is helping businesses move money globally without hidden fees or delays. Each gives Canadian companies financial infrastructure built for speed and scale.

Founded by the team behind SkipTheDishes, the Alberta-based company’s investors include Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lütke, Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield, PointClickCare co-founder and executive chair Mike Wessinger, and Roblox co-founder and CEO David Baszucki. Neo tracked 154,022 percent revenue growth between 2020 to 2023.

Head Of Trust And Safety, Bluesky

Laying down the guardrails for a new type of social media, where users, not algorithms, shape the experience.

Co-founder, Anthropic

After stints with Google Brain and Open AI, his company decodes how AI models actually think.

CEO, Variance

Arming digital platforms with tools that detect threats and make the Internet safer by design.

General Partner, a16z

At the firm with the most assets under management, she believes every company will be a FinTech company.

Co-founder, Safe Superintelligence

At OpenAI, he helped kick off the AI arms race. Now, he’s trying to fight it responsibly.

CEO, Substack

Letting writers own their audience and make money in a world of algorithmic media.

CEO, Xero

The newest co-owner of the Toronto Tempo and former Google exec is building the world’s most trusted financial platform for small business.

Co-founder, Cloudflare

Scaled a Harvard Business School project into a public company, enhancing the security and performance of websites worldwide.

CEO, Roblox

Shaping youth culture through the shared joy of creation, with more than 80 million daily users.

Founding Member, XAI

A former student of Geoffrey Hinton bringing Elon Musk’s Grok to the masses.

CEO, Inworld AI

Former DeepMind researcher building the only AI framework powering massive scale consumer applications and games.

Corporate Vice President of Commercial Solution Areas, Microsoft

Twenty-six years after joining as an intern, she’s building what businesses actually need from the cloud.

Can you train an LLM to speak whale? Whale Seeker’s product, Möbius, uses AI to detect marine mammals faster, more frequently and with more accuracy than the human eye. Its bigger goal is to become “the data layer of the ocean,” facilitating better decisions related to vital priorities like trade, security, communications, and climate.

Bringing Pebble back from the dead, this product reboot is a smartwatch that will show the time, basic message notifications, and not much else—with batteries that last forever, because they aren’t trying to be a smartphone on your wrist.

Customer service agents that never sleep and crave interaction

Reading construction blueprints to cost out materials and ensure compliance

Automating the second- hand retail craze

A “hedge-fund-in-a-box” that claims to outperform traditional trading

Intuitive 3D robot control for human-machine collaboration

Affordable, 3D-printed prosthetic arms, powered by vision

Home builder robots to help increase the housing supply

Robotic devices for safe, dignified patient transfer

Contact lenses that protect and enhance your vision

Detecting low bone density and reducing fragile breaks with AI that reads X-Rays

A smart chewable, because oral health shouldn’t be a hassle

Safe, portable, and pain-free breast imaging

Identify verification platform used around the world

The market-leading password manager

The design+tech team behind Dropbox’s new brand

Long-lasting, compostable glow sticks, bulk purchased by NASA

Turning ideas into reality with AI photos

Ad-free word puzzles from former Electronic Arts developers

The glowing wristbands lighting up global stadiums

One of the oldest and most popular social media management tools

A student-led community that runs small, high-trust group events, where any kind of creative work can thrive. Socratica has quickly attracted the attention of investors and sponsors, and its spirit has proliferated across more than 30 nodes around the world.

Canada’s largest student-led investment fund, FRV is currently active on more than 25 campuses in Québec, Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta. Since its launch in 2016, FRV has raised over $6 million and invested in more than 50 Canadian startups, which have collectively raised over $200 million in follow-on capital.

In 2023, Kids Help Phone had more than 4.7 million interactions with young people in crisis, the highest service volume in the organization’s history. Created to unlock the power of this data, acceleratorKHP is looking to transform how digital mental health solutions for youth are built, tested, and scaled.

With an acceptance rate of less than two percent, the Cansbridge Fellowship awards 15 annual undergraduate fellows with a $10,000 scholarship to complete a self-directed internship in Asia, and take part in an intensive one-week bootcamp in Silicon Valley. Alumni have founded Xatoms, Tuuli, Avo, Mosaic Manufacturing, V2, smartARM, Juniper, and Onova.