Québec’s LabHost crackdown, Poilievre’s tech endorsement, and Blue Origin’s star-studded spaceflight

Katy Perry was among the star-studded Blue Origin crew, which also included legendary broadcast journalist Gayle King and Lauren Sánchez, who is the fiancée of Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos.

The group that formally endorsed Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre in the upcoming federal election is calling itself the Friends of Free Enterprise in Canada.

Maverix Private Equity founder John Ruffolo, serial tech entrepreneur Amar Varma, Impression Ventures founder Christian Lassonde, and Leaders Fund co-founder David Stein represented the tech sector on the endorsement letter.

Elon Musk will not join Social Capital’s Chamath Palihapitiya, NVIDIA’s Sanja Fidler and local tech CEOs Raquel Urtasun of Waabi at Homecoming, hosted at Toronto’s Evergreen Brickworks on June 24. The mainstage event will also feature Shopify leaders Tobi Lütke and Harley Finkelstein, Michael Katchen of Wealthsimple, and Cohere’s Aidan Gomez.

Concerns about fund performance were top of mind among Canadian VCs at Elevate’s recent CIX Summit in Toronto.

While the impact of tariffs and the global trade war has dominated VC discussions since then, the Investor Forum focused largely on tensions between investors and their limited partners and narratives about poor VC performance.

Embed 4 is Cohere’s latest embedding model, which it says offers superior search and retrieval functions for AI agents. The new model powers intelligent search platform Compass and integrates with the company’s AI enterprise platform, North.

Cyclic Materials has developed a supply chain aimed at sustainably recovering rare earth elements from electric vehicle motors, wind turbines, MRI machines, and electronic waste from data centres.

The company, which just extended its Series B round, aims to create a circular supply chain by taking landfill-bound products and recovering their critical metals through its magnet recycling processes.

The Crown corporation was formed in 2020 to provide bridge financing to large Canadian employers affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and will now support Canadian enterprises having trouble accessing traditional financing due to US tariffs and Canada’s countermeasures.

OpenAI is working on its own social network expected to be a competitor to X, formerly known as Twitter, according to reporting from The Verge. The report comes amid a bitter rivalry between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who purchased X in 2022.

Xaba’s low-code software serves as a robot’s brain, according to CEO Massimiliano Moruzzi. The startup, which closed $6 million USD in funding this week, has developed a program that will feed the robots with information about their own structure and mechanical capabilities.

LabHost is believed to be one of the world’s largest providers of phishing scams. Authorities allege that two-thirds of LabHost’s 2,600 identified users are in Quebec, and that the platform targeted one million Canadians, including 292,000 in Quebec, by mimicking financial and government websites to steal sensitive and banking information.