New unicorn

Good morning. Reports of Hockey Night in Canada’s death have been slightly exaggerated. Even though the CBC’s flagship hockey broadcast has been shut out of NHL rights, it will return for its 90th season airing Professional Women’s Hockey League games on Saturdays.

We’re sure this is a decision that will receive absolutely no sexist backlash from online hockey commenters.  

Today’s reading time is 5½ minutes.

Markets: Canada’s main stock index fell to a nearly two-month low yesterday, hurt by careening gold prices and 10-year Canadian bond yields reaching highs last seen in October 2023.

There’s a newly minted Canadian AI unicorn in town, but its business case is a little different than your typical LLM provider.   

What happened: Toronto-based Biossil raised a US$153 million funding round led by none other than OpenAI, achieving a $1 billion valuation in the process. The all-equity deal will be used to expand Biossil’s clinical development capacity and to purchase drug candidates.

Catch-up: Biossil is the biotech equivalent of a carpenter who snags furniture off the trash heap and refurbishes it. The company uses OpenAI models to sift through drug candidates that failed in late-stage clinical trials and pick ones that show the potential to be repurposed.

Why it matters: As public opinion about AI has soured, expect to see an influx of announcements like this as companies try to replace the ‘our product will end humanity’ line of argument with a much more optimistic ‘our product will cure all diseases’ slant. The upshot is that (fingers crossed) we might actually see some pharmaceutical breakthroughs. 

Zoom out: This month, Anthropic announced its Claude-powered drug lab. The company is already hyping up its first discovery (and making bold claims about curing Alzheimer's).—QH

Nvidia says it's created an antidote for rogue AI agents. The chipmaker launched a tool that can monitor AI agents in real time and disable them if they take suspicious actions they weren’t instructed to. Nvidia said the tool would have stopped OpenAI agents from hacking Hugging Face. CEO Jensen Huang has largely dispelled AI doomsday fears as an engineering problem, and the company claims that AI labs can safely test even their most powerful models with this system. (TechCrunch)

Canada’s competition watchdog opens new grocery probe. The Competition Bureau launched an investigation into the grocery sector’s minimum advertised pricing policies, which prohibit retailers from marketing products below a certain price point — even if they charge a lower price in store. The watchdog argues the policy, which is primarily meant to protect suppliers' brand value, has made it harder for Canadians to find deals on groceries. (The Canadian Press)

SpaceX launches the largest rocket ever built. The space/AI/social media company successfully sent its 400-foot Starship rocket into orbit yesterday — a milestone for the reusable rocket SpaceX has spent US$15 billion developing. As the company winds down its current fleet of smaller Falcon rockets, it's betting Starship can take over its NASA contracts and, eventually, take humans to Mars (for those of us who are down for the nine-month trip). (Reuters)

📡 What else is on our radar: 

Remember when the family plan meant splitting a phone bill? New RBC research finds that it can now include many more life expenses, like rent.

Nearly one in three Canadian parents with kids aged 18 to 40 say those kids aren't financially independent yet. And it doesn't stop at 30: 19% of parents with children aged 35 to 40 are still helping out.

More than half of parents chipped in over the past year, averaging $6,151. Where it goes:

Half say it's simply "what parents do". A third say the cost of living leaves no other option.

RBC's new Family Plan Era research digs into why the runway to independence got longer, and what both sides can do about it, with practical guidance from personal finance expert Melissa Leong.

See the full findings and Leong's playbook.

When Docusign launched in 2003, it turned signing a contract from a ceremony into a tap on a screen, with about as much friction as dismissing a cookie banner. More than two decades and a billion users later, Docusign has become the world’s filing cabinet — one that understands everything you shove inside of it. In today’s story, Vass Bednar, the managing director of the Canadian Shield Institute, wonders what we gave up in the name of convenience, and what kind of aggregate data Docusign has on us.

Read the full story here.

What they’re saying: “Let’s not forget that the Mag Seven, the hyperscalers, whatever you want to call them, part of the reason to say they’re magnificent is because they made magnificent amounts of cash and didn’t spend any of it. That’s why they were magnificent,” Michael Hartnett — the economist who coined the term Mag Seven to refer to Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla — said on the Master Investor podcast. 

Why it matters: The underlying principle of this group of seven stocks, at least according to Hartnett, is no longer a thing. These companies have all drastically boosted their capital expenditures for the AI buildout. With global AI investment expected to surpass US$1 trillion this year, the Mag Seven need to start posting ROI on it to justify their spots atop the market.

In what sounds like a White Lotus plotline, designer brands are now taking rich people on handbag-buying retreats. 

Driving the news: Luxury fashion houses like Prada, Chanel, and Louis Vuitton are spending millions to bring their wealthiest buyers — known as very important customers (VICs) — on swanky trips and experiences, from private viewings of Leonardo da Vinci exhibits to snorkelling expeditions in French Polynesia.  

Why it’s happening: The luxury fashion industry is in the midst of its first slowdown in 15 years, as the aspirational customers who have long driven growth pull back on spending. With those buyers hesitant to splurge on a $1,000 belt, fashion houses have pivoted to the buyers who don’t typically ask about the price. 

Why it matters: It may seem extreme to fly out customers for snorkelling trips to convince them they need a new dress, but Prada’s CEO said that for every €1 the company spends entertaining its VICs, they spend about €7 with the brand. Other fashion houses that adopted this schmoozing strategy earlier are getting a 10:1 return on their VIC investments. 

Yes, but: This focus on the 1% of the 1% has also alienated a huge chunk of customers. After a three-year period that saw average prices jump 20%, an estimated 50 million customers left the luxury goods market altogether.—LA

Canada plans to invest more than $1 trillion in defence over the next decade. Today’s choices will determine how much becomes Canadian jobs, companies, technology and intellectual property.

A new report from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s Business Data Lab identifies key areas where businesses can compete, from maintenance and Arctic infrastructure to AI and advanced manufacturing. It examines the barriers Canada must overcome to turn this historic investment into stronger domestic capacity and globally competitive industries.

Read the report here!

📈 US$150 billion. Value of the shares that Nvidia is planning to buy back, the largest buyback in corporate history. The buyback surpasses the previous record of $110 billion set by Apple in 2024. Nvidia, now the world’s most valuable company, has seen its stock jump over 1,200% since ChatGPT launched in 2022.

^{*This is sponsored content.}

In need of some fun? Play today’s mini-crossword, the daily sudoku, Codebreaker, and Who’s Who!