Canadian Robotics Council creates committee to boost investment in domestic robots

The Canadian Robotics Council (CRC) has established a committee of banks and venture capital (VC) firms to help draw more capital to the country’s robotics sector.

While Canada is strong when it comes to robotics research and early-stage innovation, the CRC says that companies in the sector typically require a lot of money to scale and significant technical due diligence on the part of their investors. With its new Capital Committee, the nonprofit advocacy group aims to foster stronger connection between domestic capital providers and the rest of the robotics ecosystem, and encourage greater investment as a result.

“An AI strategy which does not extend to physical AI will bring only incremental benefits to the Canadian economy and society.”

“The CRC has seen a rapid increase in the amount of Canadian and international robotics startups, as well as a similar increase in businesses and countries who are looking to robotics to increase their productivity,” Ryan Gariepy, chair of the CRC’s board of directors, told BetaKit over email. “We want to help Canadian companies ride this wave while making sure that as much of the financial returns as possible stay in Canada.”

In addition to Gariepy, the committee features leaders from some of Canada’s largest technology investors. Its other six founding members are BDC Capital Industrial Innovation Venture Fund managing partner Aditya Aggarwal, Garage Capital co-founder and general partner Mike McCauley, Inovia Capital partner Karamdeep Nijjar, RBC Dominion Securities associate investment advisor Andrew Dienst, Two Small Fish Ventures co-founder and general partner Eva Lau, and Version One Ventures general partner Angela Tran.

The group has a track record in the space: according to the CRC, their firms have already deployed more than $150 million into exited or scaling Canadian robotics companies like Avidbots, Clearpath Robotics, Haply Robotics, Kindred Systems, and Waabi, among others.

They have agreed to provide time and expertise to support the CRC and its members, which currently include 84 robotics companies, universities, academic research labs, and government partners, the vast majority of which have joined over the past 12 months.

The committee launches with three specific priorities:

Increase funding for robot makers and industries adopting automation;
Provide investors with the technical framework to evaluate robotics startups;
Match entrepreneurs with supply chains, early adopters, and specialized financing.

“To start with, we’ll be building better connections between capital providers and the rest of the ecosystem in order to ensure that entrepreneurs, investors, and other members of the community are able to share knowledge and opportunities at a much greater rate than what we’ve seen previously,” Gariepy said.

Despite relatively low adoption rates, the two percent of Canadian companies leveraging robots are responsible for an outsized share of domestic jobs and sales—7.5 and 11.5 percent, respectively—according to a 2024 Statistics Canada report. That study also found those firms were nearly twice as likely to introduce new or improved products or services to the market compared to non-adopters.

In a recent interview with BetaKit, Gariepy, who co-founded Kitchener-Waterloo-based autonomous robot maker Clearpath, argued Canada is leaving a lot of opportunity on the table with regard to robotics.

Since its founding, Gariepy said the CRC has believed that Canada needs a national robotics strategy, referring to its lack of one as “a critical gap in Canadian policy.”

“Given the current makeup of our economy, an AI strategy which does not extend to physical AI will bring only incremental benefits to the Canadian economy and society,” Gariepy said. “It will not bring the transformation Canada needs.”

Feature image courtesy Avidbots.