When Halal Meals joined ventureLAB’s Critical Industrial Technologies (CIT) initiative last year, the Toronto-based meal-subscription service thought it had an algorithm problem. The company delivers thousands of ready-to-eat halal meals across Ontario and Quebec each week, and has built an AI recommendation engine to help customers choose dishes that fit their tastes and dietary needs. But it wasn’t working.
Support from the Markham-based innovation hub, which paired the team with advisor Zvonimir Fras and provided access to GPU compute, revealed a different issue: the algorithm wasn’t the bottleneck; there just weren’t enough meals available on the menu. Halal Meals brought in a nutritionist, expanded its offerings, and relaunched with a refined model.
Zvonimir Fras,
“Some companies use AI as a placeholder for magic that solves their problem. We try to extract pure AI from the things that don’t need to be AI, and use AI as the glue between those systems.”
ventureLAB
“They blew their sales numbers in a single day,” said Fras, who brings experience spanning early-stage startups and Fortune 100 engineering teams.
It’s the kind of outcome CIT is designed to produce. CIT has enabled over 400 projects to unlock more than $108 million in investment and support nearly 400 companies working at the forefront of critical technologies.
The initiative helps Ontario SMEs clear what Fras and colleagues call the “last mile” of AI adoption—moving smoothly from a working pilot to a system that holds up in real-world operations. Closing that gap, Fras noted, takes more than compute and code. It takes the right hardware, specialized expertise, and a partner who can help founders understand how and where to apply AI to solve the right problem.
“Some companies use AI as a placeholder for magic that solves their problem,” he said. “We try to extract pure AI from the things that don’t need to be AI, and use AI as the glue between those systems.”
Defining the problem
CIT is one of several programs run by the Ontario Centre of Innovation (OCI), where ventureLAB is a delivery partner. It’s built for SMEs in agri-food, manufacturing, mining, construction and other traditional sectors looking to layer AI and other critical technologies onto an established business. Through the CIT Development and Commercialization program, SMEs can access ventureLAB’s Technology Development Site’s cutting-edge facilities and benefit from live, expert feedback in dynamic testing environments. VentureLAB is one of ten sectoral and technology-focused Technology Development Sites available to CIT SMEs.
What many companies typically bring to the program is operational data, domain expertise, and a problem they want AI to help with. But they often lack the specific technical skills to make it work. That’s where ventureLAB’s advisors come in. Fras is one of several experts matched with CIT participants based on the problem they’re trying to solve.
“Most established companies don’t have a dedicated AI team,” he explained. “Some of them have very good engineering teams, but they lack the know-how of setting up the pipelines, curating data and building an AI infrastructure.”
Cost is the other obstacle to success. The specialized GPUs and high-speed memory that AI models depend on have surged in price as demand for the technology has surged. Memory costs alone have quadrupled in recent years. For small businesses running a months-long pilot, that’s enough to kill an AI project before it starts.
Through CIT, participants get free access to compute power they can use to stress-test AI workloads, without locking themselves into a single cloud or chip vendor before they know what their AI needs. Advisors can also help participants navigate the thousands of existing open-source datasets and pre-trained models, identifying ones that can be adapted to their specific project rather than built from scratch. It’s a shortcut that can save months of work.
CIT is built to support companies wherever they are in their AI journey. Masterly, for example, an Ontario AI company building ESG intelligence tools for the agri-food industry, arrived in the recent cohort with an experienced AI team already in place and mainly needed compute. Most companies need more help, from strategic guidance in defining the problem to engineering support in making the solution work reliably and efficiently. In regulated industries, the support also extends to compliance.
“Even if you’re not sure how exactly to do it, that’s fine,” Fras said. “CIT is going to connect you to someone who has that type of knowledge.”
By empowering SMEs in these critical sectors to scale their technology, Ontario is accelerating industrial productivity and securing a more resilient, competitive economic future.
“Ontario’s future competitiveness depends on our ability to help businesses adopt and scale critical technologies in practical, impactful ways,” said Claudia Krywiak, OCI President and CEO.
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Visit the Critical Industrial Technologies Initiative website to learn how ventureLAB is helping Ontario companies commercialize AI.
Feature image courtesy ventureLAB.