Ottawa-based Backboard.io says it has raised a “substantial” pre-seed round to cure large language models (LLMs) of their “amnesia.”
Founded by Assent co-founder Rob Imbeault in April 2025, Backboard is trying to address the bottleneck of limited portable memory in generative AI tools.
“Building Assent taught me that unsexy infrastructure is where real enterprise value is created.”
Rob Imbeault, Backboard.io
In an email to BetaKit, Imbeault claimed that most LLMs are great at generating text in the moment but bad at remembering what happened yesterday, last week, or even earlier in an ongoing session. That can make them feel “shallow” and force users to repeat themselves. Blackboard lets users pack up their interaction and plug the “memory” of their chats into more than 2,000 different LLMs, so they’re not locked into a single vendor, the company claims.
“A real memory layer turns AI from a stateless tool into a system that can build context over time, understand users, track decisions, and operate across multiple sessions and use cases,” Imbeault said. “That is what enables things like long running agents, enterprise assistants, and products that actually improve the more they are used rather than starting from zero each time.”
Today, Backboard announced it has raised an undisclosed pre-seed funding round led by Mistral Venture Partners, with participation from N49P, DevCap, Garage Capital, and two undisclosed angel investors. Garage’s investment comes after it scored a big return on an early investment into another AI infrastructure startup, Groq, when Groq struck an acquisition-like deal with chip giant Nvidia. Imbeault told BetaKit in an email that while it is not disclosing the amount of the round, he claimed it was “substantial from a Canadian sense,” and one of the largest pre-seed rounds in the country in the last few years.
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Imbeault said that 40 percent of the funding will be used for core product development, while the remainder will be allocated across its go-to-market, infrastructure, customer success, and operations efforts.
Mistral partner Raif Barbaros said in a statement that backing Imbeault was “an easy decision.” Imbeault’s old company, Assent, has achieved a “unicorn” valuation and the “centaur” revenue milestone as one of Ottawa’s largest companies. In 2018, Imbeault left Assent to spend more time with his family.
“Building Assent taught me that unsexy infrastructure is where real enterprise value is created,” Imbeault said in a statement.
Imbeault told Canadian Affairs in early 2025 that he wanted to build another unicorn company, but was planning to do so in Arizona following the federal government’s now-scrapped capital gains tax rate hike. His plans to move now appear to be scrapped: Backboard’s team is made up of four people, all based in Ottawa, and that is “quickly broadening,” Imbeault said, as the company looks to more than double its size.
“While tax considerations were part of the conversation at the time, I ultimately chose to stay and build in Ottawa because family comes first, and I want my two young daughters to see that those priorities guide my decisions now and going forward,” Imbeault told BetaKit.
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Aerps.com.