Mai Trinh and her team wanted to build a community for the city’s Gen Z tech scene to rival those in Silicon Valley. But when it came time to build her own AI startup, she decamped to San Francisco instead.
“The US lets us test, ship, and scale faster before bringing those capabilities back into Canada the right way.”
Trinh, a graduate of Simon Fraser University, says she faced an easier pathway to citizenship and fewer barriers to building a company in the United States. So this fall, she sunsetted Red Thread Club and moved to San Francisco to work on her startup, Internet Backyard. She and Internet Backyard co-founder Gabriel Ravacci have now raised $4.5 million USD ($6.2 million CAD) in a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) at a $25-million USD ($34.5-million CAD) valuation.
The pre-seed round was led by US firm Basis Set, with participation from Crucible Capital, Breakers, Operator Collective, and Maple VC. Angel cheques came from entrepreneurs Ian Crosby (co-founder of Bench Accounting), Jay Adelson (co-founder of Equinix) and Geordie Rose (co-founder of D-Wave and former CEO of Sanctuary AI).
Trinh told BetaKit in an interview last month that she initially came to Vancouver from Vietnam for her undergraduate degree and ended up working at robotics startup Sanctuary AI. Hoping to get more integrated into the tech community, Trinh attended Web Summit Vancouver in the spring, which she told BetaKit was “the most uninspiring tech event” she’d ever been to.
She channeled her frustrations into Red Thread Club, hosting her own events for the tech community over the summer. But she said Red Thread snowballed into a time-consuming project.
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Meanwhile, Trinh was also preparing to apply for permanent residency in Canada. She even planned to learn French to boost her application score. But working on a startup instead of a more secure job that would better align with PR requirements complicated things.
“I was working from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. every night,” Trinh told BetaKit.
Trinh says her lawyer told her and her co-founder that their best move would be to leave Canada. After raising venture capital, it was relatively straightforward to satisfy the criteria for an appropriate US visa, Trinh said.
A fresh approach for a “dinosaur industry’
As the process unfolded, Trinh was also working to build Gnomos, Internet Backyard’s first product. Gnomos is a data-centre financing platform that uses AI agents to provide dynamic snapshots of key metrics—like usage, energy consumption, and cost—for operators to use. Trinh says the product will help fledgling startups have a more transparent view of their compute usage, which can get shockingly expensive once they run out of free credits from hyperscalers, or massive cloud-computing centres, she said.
Trinh says Internet Backyard aims to bring a fresh, AI-driven approach to the “dinosaur industry” of data-centre finances. Trinh told BetaKit that the data-centre operators she spoke with were managing finances on spreadsheets, email, and other legacy software that is ill-matched for the explosion in demand for compute.
“No one has the metrics of their building, their usage, their heat, their liquid, their capex [capital expenditure],” Trinh said. “So we’re building that.”
Gnomos also aims to automate quotes, bills, payments, and dispute resolution. Trinh is targeting clients like mid-market data centre operators and those entering the space for the first time. Despite the US move, one of Internet Backyard’s very first customers is a Canadian data centre operator based in Vancouver called AxiNorth.
The path of least resistance ends in the US
Trinh says she had hoped to stay in Canada. But it wasn’t just immigration status that informed her decision: it was finding the path of least resistance for what she was building. For example, she claimed Canada’s fragmented financial regulatory landscape is more difficult to navigate compared to US regulations.
“US customers are more comfortable piloting. In Canada, procurement cycles are slower, and people wait for regulatory certainty,” Trinh told BetaKit. “So the US lets us test, ship, and scale faster before bringing those capabilities back into Canada the right way.”
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Trinh is far from the only Canadian tech leader who has chosen to build their tech company in the US. According to data compiled by Toronto firm Leaders Fund, only 32.4 percent of the Canadian-led “high-potential” startups (companies that have raised more than $1 million USD) created in 2024 were headquartered in Canada, while almost half were located in the US.
After her Red Thread Club journey was first featured in The Logic, Trinh said, she received an influx of messages from young founders in Canada dealing with a similar immigration situation: wanting to stay in Canada but worrying about clearing the PR points system.
Although she maintains strong ties to Vancouver’s startup scene, Trinh’s singular focus now is building Internet Backyard—no matter where it takes her. “I don’t really care about being a founder,” Trinh told BetaKit with a smile. “I just care about fixing the problem.”
Feature image courtesy Internet Backyard.