Three American tech companies and one Toronto-based company are expanding their Montréal offices to enhance their French-language product offerings and draw from the city’s “intellectual firepower.”
“We’re looking for people who want to work at a fast-growing company, who are customer-centric and want to get stuff done.”
Giovanni Iacovino
Alexa Translations
The United States (US)-based firms—Terzo, SafelyYou, and Ampliwork—and Toronto-based Alexa Translations are looking to hire for 220 roles in Montreal over the next three years. Each company is looking to boost the reach of its commercialized AI product by recruiting regional talent.
Stéphane Paquet, the CEO of economic development agency Montréal International, made the announcement at the World Summit AI in Montréal on April 15.
Toronto-based Alexa Translations, which uses machine learning to provide legal and financial translation services to large companies in Canada, is adding 10 people to its Montréal team to refine its offerings in Québec French and help power its new Infinite MT large-language model (LLM).
“We’re looking for people who want to work at a fast-growing company, who are customer-centric and want to get stuff done,” vice president of technology Giovanni Iacovino said.
Alexa Translations’ Infinite MT model is a new, generative option designed for “high-stakes” translations in legal and business contexts. The company’s machine learning model, Neural, is still offered as a go-to for high-volume content such as financial statements and contracts.
Alexa Translations says Infinite MT adheres to rigorous translation standards across English, French, Arabic, and Spanish, but continuously improves while providing more nuance and flexibility.
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In the fall, CEO Gary Kalaci told BetaKit that it was “dangerous to use” the company’s previous model indiscriminately “without professional intervention.” Human intervention will continue to be a key part of deployment for Infinite MT across model training, data acquisition, and quality assessments, according to Mark Vecchiarelli, vice president of marketing.
“Human translator supervision is used in all steps of our development stages while we are implementing this model,” Vecchiarelli told BetaKit.
US companies see attractive environment
The US companies said Montréal offers benefits such as a wealth of research talent and attractive tax credits, making it a natural avenue for expansion. The announcement comes as Canadians look to support domestic companies amid an ongoing trade war with the US.
Boston-based Ampliwork (formerly Ampliforce), which builds custom AI agents for client companies, is hiring 150 Montréal-based roles over three years to boost its global research and development (R&D) efforts. Founder and CEO Marco Buchbinder said that a strong talent pool and R&D tax credits, such as for Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED), provided incentives to expand in the city.
San Francisco-based SafelyYou, which sells an AI-powered monitoring system for senior living and care facilities, is recruiting up to 50 AI experts for R&D. Its product includes a hardware sensor component for detecting falls. The startup, which raised a $43-million USD Series C earlier this year, has more than 450 senior living communities in North America, including a handful in Québec.
Loïc Juillard, CTO at SafelyYou, told BetaKit that Montréal was a target for SafelyYou because its university research community offers expertise across hardware, software, and AI.
“This is a really great ecosystem from a talent perspective for us,” Juillard said.
For Los Angeles-based Terzo, which offers an AI-powered financial intelligence platform, Montréal is an ideal conduit to grow multilingual offerings and land large European clients. Terzo plans to recruit a dozen engineers, analysts and researchers by the end of the year.
Feature image courtesy World Summit AI.