Toronto-based venture studio AXL will help companies find new ways to use artificial intelligence (AI) through a new partnership with technology service provider Compugen.
Compugen claims to be Canada’s largest privately-owned technology solution provider. Through this partnership, which was announced today, Compugen and its customers will gain direct access to AXL’s AI commercialization and research experts, as well as its prototyping and venture environment, meant to expedite turning ideas into real-world AI applications.
In a statement, AXL co-founder and CEO Daniel Wigdor explained that Compugen brings the industry knowledge, while AXL brings the design and engineering expertise needed to turn a pain point into a scalable, applied AI solution.
“Together, we can identify the highest-impact opportunities, build and validate solutions quickly, create outcomes that Compugen can deliver at scale, and zero-in on opportunities for great Canadian AI startups to found together,” Wigdor said.
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Compugen and its customers are leaning on AXL’s venture studio format, where it identifies business problems, consults academic research, and then assigns entrepreneurs to solve the problem with AI. AXL struck similar idea-pipeline partnerships with RSM Canada and Dillon Consulting last year. Wigdor has committed to launching 50 AI companies over the next five years through AXL to help slow Canada’s brain drain, though he might define it differently.
“We’re not creating 50 AI companies,” Wigdor said in a breakout room session at SAAS NORTH in November. “We’re creating 50 companies that solve real problems that use AI as an enabling technology to do something we could never do before.”
Wigdor, an entrepreneur and former director of Meta’s Reality Labs Research, has hammered the importance of building in the application layer of AI, particularly as a way for Canada to get ahead. At SAAS NORTH, he lamented the “brain dead” approach of some companies that strive to replace workers with AI and advocated for finding creative applications for the technology. Going into 2026, Wigdor predicted that Google and Microsoft will dominate the AI race “because they’re actually shipping AI products,” while pure LLM players like OpenAI and Anthropic will “fall into a race to the bottom.”
Feature image courtesy AXL.