What if there was a technology brand that had the best engineers on the planet, a workforce that spoke every language in the world, exceptional customer service, and financial backers with a careful eye to due diligence?
Would you bet on its success?
“There’s talent in Canada, there’s ambition in Canada. It’s time to spread some great news.”
Isabelle Audette, Inovia Capital
This is the thinking behind a new “Canadian Roots. Global Mindset” brand campaign launched this week by Inovia Capital, the Canadian venture capital firm with a portfolio of companies including Cohere, Certn, Gaiia, Hopper, Lightspeed, and Wealthsimple.
Inovia is not looking to promote one of its own brands. Instead, it hopes to help brand Canada as a place with a distinct competitive advantage in the shifting global technology marketplace.
“We hear a lot about challenges at this moment in time,” said Inovia’s Vice President of Marketing and Communications, Isabelle Audette. “We need to talk about the strength of the Canadian tech ecosystem. There’s talent in Canada, there’s ambition in Canada. It’s time to spread some great news.”
The idea of doing a brand campaign was conceived during Inovia’s CEO Summit in June. Less than three months later, the firm is releasing a series of 17 videos featuring its portfolio’s CEOs answering a series of questions about building in Canada.
Shot by videographer Piece a Cake Films, the campaign features the leaders of Cohere, Flare, Vessel, Hopper, WorkJam, Jaide Health, AlayaCare and others. Since they began filming, the CEOs of Medeloop, Certn, Fellow, Vasco and Symend have also shown interest in participating and are currently filming content.
In the first video, released today, Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst extols the benefit of having the company’s largest office in Toronto, a city with global diversity that supports the development of large language models in every language.
“Having a workforce that speaks all the languages of the world has been super helpful,” Frosst said.
Frosst also mentions Nobel prize winner Geoffrey Hinton as another distinct Canadian success vector. Before founding Cohere, Frosst studied and worked under the Toronto-based godfather of AI.
“The people he has educated are the best engineers on the planet.” Frosst said of Hinton.
Inovia plans to release two videos a week throughout September and October, with each founder offering a unique perspective on Canada’s strengths, and how building from Canada has benefited their company.
Adrian Schauer of AlayaCare talks about the potential for Canada to attract “socially minded researchers.”
“In 2025, the Canadian brand, our flag is a very good banner to fly under internationally,” he said.
In another video, Kristine Steuart, founder and CEO of customer engagement platform SIX, spoke about a distinctly Canadian personality trait—being nice—that gives companies a competitive advantage.
“I do think we have a distinct differentiator in Canada, which is our people,” said Steuart. “It comes through in how we service our customers, how we engage with our customers and deliver value. This is uniquely Canadian and something that keeps us very competitive.”
At Inovia, Audette said the company is always looking for new ways to support its portfolio, and that the company plans to record more videos with founders, including potentially those outside of its portfolio.
To its credit, the firm doesn’t shy away from asking its founders about venture capital, or its relationship to Canadian success.
In his video, Frosst describes Canadian investors as principled and less inclined toward group think than their US counterparts. But he is quick to point out that the US has more capital, and a higher threshold for risk, but that there are pros and cons to that.
“I like that Canada is principled. I like that we do the due diligence and understand what we’re looking at,” he said. “Canada as a country wants to watch where things go and then do things well. It’s made this an excellent place to found a company. But if we want to get through what is going to be a pretty weird time over the next few decades, we need to be a little bolder.”
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Watch all the Inovia videos here. New ones will be posted every week.