Checking in

Good morning. Uber has released its annual Lost & Found Index, diving deep into the items left behind in rides across Canada last year. As always, phones, wallets, and bags are the most commonly forgotten personal items, but they are far from the most interesting. 

Some unusual things found in backseats last year included an aquarium fish, a full set of goalie pads, a single bed leg, an old smoke alarm, and a 15-pound frozen turkey (no word on whether this particular slip-up ruined Thanksgiving dinner).

Today’s reading time is 6 minutes.

Markets: Canada’s main stock index hit a record closing high yesterday, surpassing the 35,000 mark for the first time. The milestone was powered by a surging energy sector — which went up 2.4% on the day — and tech company Celestica, which saw shares rise 11%.

If your startup pitch deck has the letters “A” and “I”, the feds would like to hear from you.

What happened: As part of its new AI strategy, the federal government will launch an investment fund focused on backing promising Canadian AI startups, per The Globe and Mail. The full AI strategy is expected to be announced later this week. 

Why it matters: The new investment fund will aim to tackle one of the biggest challenges facing Canada’s startup ecosystem: founders leaving for the U.S. to get funding. When American firms fund Canadian startups, they take equity, control, and a bigger chunk of the eventual payday. 

Why it’s happening: Canada has fewer deep-pocketed investors and a VC culture that many view as more risk-averse, making it harder for startups to scale. American investors, on the other hand, are often more willing to back riskier, long-term bets. 

Our take: Canada has the tech talent pool (some argue one of the best in the world) to build high-value AI startups at home. The real question is whether this new federal startup fund will put up enough cash to make a dent in the Canada-U.S. funding gap and overcome other, less tangible advantages enjoyed by tech startups in the U.S.—LA

Ottawa formally recommends a 16-year CUSMA renewal. Canada-U.S. trade minister Dominic LeBlanc officially requested that the North American free trade pact be renewed, though the Trump administration has signalled that recommitting to CUSMA under its current terms is a non-starter. The U.S. is widely expected to use the CUSMA negotiations to push Ottawa for concessions, including on auto exports and dairy market restrictions. LeBlanc met yesterday with the U.S.’s top trade representative, Jameson Greer, who has said as recently as last week that tariffs are a new reality that Canada will have to live with. (CTV News)

One of Canada’s top VCs is expanding. Vancouver-based Version One Ventures has raised $108 million for two new funds, its first fundraising round since 2021. Version, which specializes in early-stage startups, was one of Canada’s earliest investors in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space, turning major profits betting on Canadian firms like Clio, Jobber, and Ada. (Globe and Mail)

The White House is increasing its oversight of AI companies. Donald Trump signed an executive order asking top AI firms to share their new models with the government 30 days before releasing them to the public. Anthropic has already shared its newest model, Mythos, with government agencies across more than 15 countries, including Canada’s national cybersecurity agency, citing fears it could hack even the world’s most sophisticated computer systems. (NBC News)

What else is on our radar: 

A space to think. Anthropic keeps conversations with Claude ad-free: no sponsored links, no advertisers shaping answers, no paid product placements you didn't ask for. When you bring your hardest problem to an AI, you shouldn't have to wonder who it's working for.

Learn more.

🤝 Meet Peter van der Velden. He’s the Executive Chairman of Lumira Ventures, Canada’s largest dedicated life sciences venture capital firm. Lumira recently launched the Cancer Breakthrough Fund in partnership with the Terry Fox Foundation to invest in innovative cancer companies. We asked Peter about where he sees opportunities in the space, the cutting edge of cancer treatment today, and the most promising advances in cancer treatment coming in the future.

Is deal flow solid for the sort of companies you’re looking for in Canada?

The deal flow pool in Canada is actually very deep and our team is diligently engaged with many of those companies to evaluate which offer the best mix of: patient need and impact, market opportunity, technology differentiation, clinical development plan, risk, mission driven leadership, and the ability to raise capital today and in the future to support the development plan.

What are some promising innovations or advances in the cancer care space that have already happened that you’re excited about?

One of the most exciting innovations that we have backed is histotripsy as deployed by our portfolio company HistoSonics. HistoSonics is a medical device company, and while we don’t typically think of medical device companies as leaders in Cancer innovation, it has developed and is now commercializing a non-invasive robotic ultrasound system (histotripsy) to non-invasively destroy targeted tissue. The technology has already been FDA-cleared in liver tumours and a week ago the company filed for approval in kidney as well. This is one of the fastest growing robotic surgical platforms in history and the impact on patients is nothing short of transformative 

Where do you think the biggest advances in cancer treatment will come in the next 5-10 years? 

In our view the biggest advances in cancer treatment are likely to come from: immunotherapy (especially next-gen cell therapies and T-cell engagers), personalized/precision medicine (focused ultrasound, genomics, protein degradation), smarter radiotherapy and radiopharmaceuticals, and technologies that improve drug delivery into tumours.

Read the full Q&A with Peter on our website.

People can change their vocations, and so can 13-storey buildings.

Driving the news: Construction will begin later this year on converting an office building in Vancouver’s Central Business District (CBD) into a boutique hotel that will provide 150 to 200 new rooms to a city that really needs them. It’s expected to open in early 2029. 

Zoom out: Office-to-hotel conversions are rare because it’s hard to find buildings where you can maximize space and also because getting them up to code can be more expensive than building a hotel from scratch. This particular building just happens to have an ideal layout. 

Why it matters: Vancouver has a hotel deficit, with the highest room occupancy rate for a major Canadian city — hitting 78.2% in 2024, and more than 90% during the busy summer season. Per Destination Vancouver, the city must add 10,000 rooms by 2050 to keep up with demand.

Our take: While office conversions are unlikely to play a major role in relieving Vancouver’s hotel stress — or adding to Canada’s hotel capacity in general — they represent the type of creative thinking that we’d like to see more of when it comes to building dwellings.—QH

🛜 85%. Share of the Canadian cloud computing market that is controlled by Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft, according to a new report. The reliance on the three U.S. Big Tech firms has prompted Ottawa to invest more in sovereign cloud infrastructure, though researchers argue the transition will be a difficult one because of device compatibility issues.

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Without further ado, today's mini crossword, the daily sudoku, Codebreaker, and Who’s Who!

Also, we mistakenly put the wrong link in for yesterday’s Who’s Who, so here it is. We apologize for the mix-up.