Does corporate VC have an advantage in AI investments?
Plus: Omnirobotic reborn and Flinks moves in for the kill.
fintech
Middleware land grab: Flinks wants to kill screen-scraping and make APIs king
Montréal FinTech hopes to cement “special position” in North America’s financial ecosystem.
Finix launches integrated payments offering in Canada
US FinTech firm offers a single integration for omnichannel payment acceptance.
Four Canadian companies selected to Comcast SportsTech Accelerator
Canada lead the pack with the highest number of companies in the global cohort.
Helcim closes $27 million CAD to bring payment stack to underserved SMBs
Startup’s full-stack payment offering puts it up against FinTech giants like Stripe.
Is AI Canada’s productivity saviour?
Plus: Late-stage VC funding continues to drop, but seed-stage is Golden.
Helius raises $12.8 million CAD to help devs build blockchain apps on Solana
The Web3 startup was founded by former Coinbase and AWS software engineers.
H|T: The Healthtech Times – Healwell CEO dishes on evolution from clinics to AI
Plus: Newfoundland wants to be a biotech hub.
R|T: The Retail Times – Dax Dasilva returns as Lightspeed CEO, Shopify drops on strong earnings
Plus: Investors fooled by Lyft typo.
Golden Ventures closes nearly $140 million CAD for fifth seed-stage VC fund
Despite a tough market, Golden remains “long Canada” with strong support from existing LPs.
Profitable payments startup Zūm Rails closes $10.5-million Series A
Founded by Flinks, Versapay alums, Züm is looking to ramp its US expansion.
A|I: The AI Times – OpenAI debuts Sora, a hyper-realistic text-to-video generator
Plus: How Vector Institute is reversing Canada’s AI brain drain.
S|W: The SaaS Weekly – Prodigy’s got a new plan, a new CFO, and a leaner team to boost growth
Plus: It’s getting (slightly) easier to sell software.
Levr.ai closes $1-million seed round for AI-powered loan platform for small businesses
Startup serves companies that “big banks struggle to service and tech startups often ignore.”
Love troubles? There’s an AI chatbot for that.
Plus: #CDNtech startups pivot and refocus in 2024.