Canada’s quantum dark horse, DoorDash gets Zesty, and Queen’s Nvidia recruit

Onstage at this year’s Slush conference in Helsinki, Osika said his company’s ability to scale was linked to his decision to ignore investors’ calls to relocate to Silicon Valley.

Lovable launched in 2024 and has already surpassed $200 million in annual recurring revenue, according to TechCrunch.

The government will explore how it can deploy Québec City-based Coveo’s AI-powered enterprise solutions in its operations through a new, five-year memorandum of understanding. 

Coveo executive chairman Louis Têtu said its tech could be used to make more government services “self-serve,” or help government call centre employees give accurate answers to citizens. 

Karlin has worked on El Capitan, the world’s most powerful supercomputer.

Queen’s snagged the US leader in the high-performance computing space to help build a Canadian supercomputer and catch up in the global compute race.

Amiral managing partner Frédéric Bastien told BetaKit he was consistently “disappointed by the lack of leadership in the VC ecosystem in Canada.”

Amiral aims to fill that leadership gap by almost exclusively leading rounds, Bastien said.

GPTZero, a startup behind an AI detector, found that the submissions contained at least one “obvious” AI hallucination—a citation that was dreamed up by AI.

Some of these citations, submitted to the leading academic conference that focuses on the deep-learning branch of AI, were written by non-existent authors, incorrectly attributed to journals, or had no equivalent match at all.

The self-described “dark horse” of the Canadian Quantum Champions Program is Anyon Systems, according to founder and CEO Alireza Najafi-Yazdi.

The new federal program is part of a push to keep promising quantum firms in Canada as a US military-backed initiative courts Canadian firms.

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer listed the above demands regarding a new CUSMA deal this week, except for a moratorium on AI regulations. 

Greer did take issue with Canada’s Online Streaming Act, provinces pulling US booze off the shelves, and Canada’s dairy market, as negotiations for a renewed free trade agreement are set to take place in 2026.

Zesty is DoorDash’s new AI-powered social app designed to help users quickly find local restaurants. 

Available for now in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York, users prompt the AI chatbot what they’re in the mood for to receive personalized recommendations.

The Canadian Space Mining Corporation has rebranded to the Canadian Strategic Missions Corporation to reflect a broader mandate.

Founder and CEO Daniel Sax said the rebrand is about “crystalizing” its years-long focus on critical and strategic technologies.

The San Francisco-based data analytics and AI software company is raising over $4 billion USD in Series L funding that would value it at $134 billion.

The new round comes just three months after a Series K funding valued it at $100 billion.