On a May evening in 2019, Edmonton’s Myrna Bittner watched as a 6.7-magnitude earthquake tore through Santa Clara, Calif.
Labelled a nine on the Mercalli scale—an index measuring the intensity of earthquakes—the quake levelled buildings, upended roadways, and plunged the city of more than 100,000 into darkness. As the trembling settled, splintered gas lines spewed methane into the air; rogue sparks from downed power lines along busy US Route 101 ignited those fumes into flames that crescendoed across the city.
“There were a lot of amazing advancements being made, and we dove in.”
It was a mesmerizing sight to behold, or so it seemed to Bittner as she watched about 5,000 of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest raise their phones to record the disaster simulation as it played out on a 180-foot screen at the Internet of Things World Expo’s 2019 keynote demonstration.
It was a seminal moment for Bittner and her husband and co-founder, Dean Bittner, who founded Run With It Synthetics (RWI). RWI is an Edmonton-based tech company that builds synthetic environments. These environments are digital twins of real places, people, and things used to model potential futures across metrics as diverse as disaster response, climate resiliency, or heart disease.
“It was a big a-ha moment for us,” Myrna said. “Just how important it is for people to be able to understand and experience things that haven’t happened.”
RWI’s faux earthquake played out as a series of alerts, icons, and status reports across a bird’s- eye view of a synthetic replica of Santa Clara. Leveraging AI, neural networks, and aggregate data sets years before they would bloom into the global consciousness, RWI was able to populate that replica with real-life-accurate infrastructure and more than 100,000 agentic, AI-powered “people” representative of the actual populations living in the Bay Area.
In other words, the scenario happening on the stage was simulated, but the outcomes were real.
Humble beginnings
To understand how RWI predicts potential futures, you need to look at its past.
Back in the 1990s, decades before AI and data centres would become part of the public lexicon, Myrna and Dean were laying the foundation for what would later become RWI in the basement of their rural home near Elk Island National Park in Alberta. Just a few years out of university, where Dean had studied honours math and Myrna had earned an MBA and a BA in sociology and English literature, the married couple were bootstrapping their first startup, a software company called Bittco Solutions.
Bittco was developing a platform called Co-motion. An early contender in the groupware category, Co-motion was a live conference and issue resolution software, featuring a boon of tools easily recognizable in most SaaS platforms today; things like video conferencing, voice-calls, and a chat feature the Bittners affectionately called “the toilet paper roll.”
“We had some customers who were super jazzed about this small panel on the right-hand side of our … video conferencing screen,” Myrna said. “It’s actually what most chats look like now. It had little bubble text boxes and everything.”
The Bittners didn’t see the toilet paper roll’s potential.
“We considered it unstructured, you know? Not really useful as a course of communication compared to the rest of what we were offering. Yet a lot of our customers, even if they were in the next office, would use that to communicate,” Myrna said. “So, we laugh and say we missed the chat boom.”
The philanthropist
While nascent social media moguls they were not, the Bittners’ work did attract attention, including from a wealthy Australian engineer named Graham Dawson.
Dawson, now in his 90s, was then founder of Optum Group Pty. Ltd., a since-defunct Australian company initially started to meet the information management needs of Western Australia’s oil and gas industry.
In the late 1990s, Optum partnered with Bittco Solutions, eventually taking a cross-shareholding stake in Bittco to develop new software products. BetaKit was not able to reach Dawson for comment on the decades-old partnership.
As the Bittners tell it, Dawson was interested in how early advances in machine learning might be applied to navigating complex, large-scale documents. “He was very interested in artificial intelligence and looking at how it could help him navigate large sets of unstructured construction documents,” Myrna said.
Dawson eventually sponsored the couple’s work, funding research and development and spawning a new entity distinct from Bittco, dubbed NeuralVR Technologies.
“It was a rather new landscape at that point,” Dean said. “There were a lot of amazing advancements being made, and we dove in.”
Dean and Myrna were tasked with creating synthetic intelligence environments for complex systems where failure in the field would be catastrophic. By creating synthetic realities, the duo could test those systems again and again, configuring different scenarios and circumstances to gauge potential outcomes.
With Dawson’s backing, the Bittners were in no rush to commercialize their work. They spent the next six years with NeuralVR developing intellectual property that the couple would retain when Dawson later cashed out of the company. Much of that IP would later be used by RWI when the Bittners formally founded the company in 2014.
“We developed a lot of intellectual property and expressions of that in neural networks and 3D visualization,” Dean said. “At the time, compute was still next to nowhere—you know, bare hardware. So we developed the proficiency of being able to do extraordinary things with extraordinarily minimal hardware—and that’s served us very well.”
That IP has translated into what is today called the HoloDeck, a virtual platform that marries the company’s generative and agentic AI with a high-fidelity, six-dimensional, GIS-based map. The platform is capable of replicating infrastructure and systems that exist in real life, all the way down to demographically representative “people” complete with behavioural patterns, psychologies, and health predispositions.
What users are left with is a “living” synthetic environment that can be adjusted across metrics to tailor scenarios, observe outcomes, and, crucially, to provide strategic insight for real-life decision making.
Running with it
Since its seismic debut in Santa Clara, RWI has previewed many more potential futures, including other disaster scenarios. Following the World Expo, the company was approached by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., EPRI is a nonprofit organization that conducts research on electricity generation, use, and delivery.
RWI was accepted into the EPRI’s Incubatenergy Labs (IEL), a program that connects early-stage startups with global utilities to conduct demonstrations. Through the IEL program, EPRI wanted to use RWI’s synthetic modelling to run a “black sky” scenario—a prolonged downing of a regional power grid In essence, RWI would plunge a replica of the city of Phoenix, Ariz. into a summer heatwave, using its predictive capabilities to determine use patterns, load demands, and, ultimately, when and how the grid would fail in a prolonged disaster.
Then, COVID-19 hit. Suddenly, there was a whole new dimension to contend with, a variable for which there was no historical record, no aggregate data to speak of.
“All of a sudden, the energy behaviour changed like it’s never changed before, overnight. So [EPRI] was like ‘Okay, now make COVID-19 happen,’” Myrna said. “That was an ask for us. We had to become epidemiologists; we had to use, translate, and attribute COVID-19 to these synthetic populations … and to show them what those load curves for each address in the area of Phoenix and Maricopa County would be, so they could use that information to translate into load purchasing.”
Load purchasing refers to the process of buying the necessary energy—in this case electricity—needed by a public utility to meet consumer demand. COVID-19 lockdowns augmented human behaviour and mobility, impacting the energy demands from residents.
Predictive analysis, also called strategic forecasting, of the kind RWI has engaged in isn’t in and of itself new. Governments, commercial organizations, and communities have for years sought to use data to shed light on potential future outcomes. But advancements in machine learning and AI have led to ever more capable modelling, with AI systems now being used in the majority of strategic forecasting scenario development, according to a report by the World Economic Forum and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). That increase in capability has, in turn, led to rising global demand.
“We had to become epidemiologists; we had to use, translate, and attribute COVID-19 to these synthetic populations.”
A report published in June 2026 by Grand View Research tracks the global marketplace for strategic forecasting as being around $49.5 billion USD ($70 billion CAD), but predicts that number will explode to $328.5 billion USD by 2033. That growth, according to the report, is being fuelled by rising demand across a widening cohort of industries from manufacturing and government to healthcare, energy, and utility companies all looking to “future-proof” their systems, communities, and assets.
In the years since COVID-19, RWI has been involved in all manner of other simulations and synthetic environments. It modelled wildfire egress routes and the workforce impact of a hydrogen transition in Alberta, quantified the healthcare repercussions of expanding tele-health services to remote and rural communities, synthesized graduation rate changes for at-risk youth, and modelled energy demands for Calgary as far out as 2050. The company has even gone so far as to craft synthetic twins of both Canada and Earth.
But it’s what RWI gleaned from those early COVID-19 scenarios that’s really made RWI’s tech stand out.
During its time modelling blackouts in Arizona, RWI collaborated with the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC), a US nonprofit that collects consumer data on utility use. RWI was able to integrate SECC’s data into the platform’s synthetic populations, enabling simulations not only to show infrastructure impacts but human ones, too.
“We had some profound opportunities to express—because we can survey the synthetic populations—how they were feeling,” Myrna said. She added that RWI’s platform could quantify timelines for when trust in a utilities provider would begin to drop off, when widespread public discontent would start to build, and when happiness levels of individual households would start to plunge amid the confines of a sweltering, dark, locked-down southwest.
Ethical considerations
Today, RWI has grown to more than 30 employees and has earned international recognition for its work around climate resiliency modelling. Its capabilities attracted clients from some of the world’s most sensitive industries, including the US Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy, FEMA, and NASA. In Canada, RWI has worked with Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Canada (ISED), the National Research Council’s IRAP, and the private sector, including deals with Toyota’s Mobility Foundation, Itron, ENMAX, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
As recently as last month, the company partnered with the University of Waterloo’s FamilyPsycle Lab to launch the Synthetic Waterloo Intelligent Futures Technology (SWIFT) hub, where RWI will bring its predictive modelling to the lab’s work around mental health and population wellbeing. Just prior to that, on May 19, the company was selected as one of nine included in MaRS Adaptech Accelerator for ‘26-’27 with a focus on accelerating climate change resilience.
Myrna Bittner, RWI
“Defence isn’t just about equipment; it’s about people, infrastructure, communities, economic capacity, and that’s something that we have here.”
For most entrepreneurs, this kind of name-dropping is cause for celebration. But the Bittners have been quiet about their successes, shunning Silicon Valley for the bucolic prairies of Central Alberta. They’ve also been steadfast in their ethics, even when it means losing business.
“We did work in the US in defence, but we are no longer active in the US at this moment,” Myrna said.
That was a conscious decision by the company, a response to geopolitical changes south of the border that they feel are neither ethically tenable nor business-savvy.
“There was a bit of a sense of endangerment,” Dean said. “There’s always the threat of business disruption, even at that level. A climate contract could change—one day it exists, and the next day it doesn’t … a lot of [US] federal agencies are undergoing dramatic shifts.”
Instead, the company is focused on building defence partnerships domestically, bringing its expertise to Canada’s newfound sense of sovereignty, while continuing to build out a repertoire that takes aim at some of Canada’s biggest obstacles like housing, nationbuilding, climate, and healthcare.
“We’re really interested in engaging in Canada. The capability that we have to participate … because defence isn’t just about equipment; it’s about people, infrastructure, communities, economic capacity, and that’s something that we have here,” Myrna said.
BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.
All images courtesy Run With It Synthetics.