#1. What did one Canadian FinTech leader have to say about the prospect of open banking under Mark Carney?
Wealthsimple vice-president of payments strategy and chief compliance officer Hanna Zaidi told BetaKit she thinks “Carney is the guy.” Carney was formerly Governor of the Bank of England, where he helped modernize the United Kingdom’s payment system and implement open banking. “He’s seen what is possible and what the outcomes are,” Zaidi added.
#2. The Southern Alberta Institute of Technology is getting a new energy research lab thanks to which company?
Imperial Oil donated the $37-million lab to the local college to help expand applied research in the energy sector. Imperial, majority owned by ExxonMobil, will continue to use the lab to lower the environmental impact of its business.
#3. What major market index did Shopify announce it would join this week?
Shopify announced it will join the Nasdaq 100 Index on May 19. The Nasdaq 100 follows the exchange’s biggest listed companies outside of the financial sphere, including Apple, Amazon, and Nvidia. Share in Shopify jumped 18 percent immediately following the announcement.
#4. Which incubator has the first VC fund to be backed by a Canadian university endowment?
Velocity Fund II, spun out from the University of Waterloo’s Velocity incubator, is the first venture fund backed by a Canadian university endowment. Fund II secured an initial close of $14 million CAD this week. The University of Waterloo pledged $5 million CAD of its endowment fund initially, and has delivered $2.8 million CAD for this close.
#5. SRTX founder and former CEO Katherine Homuth is launching a new startup focused on what?
Homuth this week launched Oomira, an organizational memory software startup that aims to build companies a “queryable” archive of every decision they’ve ever made.
“We’re running companies with amnesia,” Homuth wrote in a recent Substuck post. “Founders forget the lessons they swore they’d never repeat. Teams re-pitch failed ideas like they’re new. People rerun tests they already buried.”
#6. Evan Solomon was chosen by Prime Minister Mark Carney to serve as Canada’s first-ever Minister of what?
Toronto Centre MP Evan Solomon is taking on the role of Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation.
He will be responsible for seeing through Carney’s campaign promise of $2.5 billion for broadband and data centres, on top of existing Trudeau-era initiatives, including the $2-billion Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy.
#7. In 2023, Canadian wildfire emissions exceeded the annual emissions of which industry?
In 2023, carbon dioxide emissions from Canadian wildfires were higher than the emissions from all three industries, as well as the emissions from buildings, heavy industry, electricity, and waste.
The BetaKit Guide: Wildfire explores the response to the wildfire crisis powered by tech, traditional knowledge, and the pressure to act.
#8. Data from the CVCA found that this hit a pandemic-era low in the first quarter of 2025:
In Q1 2025, seed deals were at their lowest point since 2020, while pre-seed activity hit the lowest dollar level invested in a quarter since 2021. “A weakening at the foundation threatens the innovation economy we’ve worked hard to build,” CVCA CEO Kim Furlong wrote in the report.
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