Salesforce might rebrand, Shopify gets agentic, and SpaceX’s unexpected beneficiary

At the Fortune Brainstorm AI summit in San Francisco, Intrator dismissed concerns that the AI industry resembles a snake eating its own tail, saying companies are trying to address a “violent change” in supply and demand by “working together.”

Critics have questioned if the small number of powerful AI companies investing in each other could cause problems for the industry’s long-term economic stability.

Last week, after a Salesforce employee remarked to Business Insider, partly in jest, that the company might change its official corporate name to Agentforce, Benioff told the publication, “that would not shock me.”

Agentic storefronts allow Shopify merchants to sell their products across popular AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot. 

The new offering was released as part of the winter edition of the biannual Shopify Editions newsletter, called “the RenAIssance edition,” which largely focused on new AI features for sellers.

Peters said his “saving grace” was Manitoba’s Small Business Venture Capital Tax Credit, which, combined with moving fast with the product, allowed his startup to raise “just enough” funding to stay alive in the beginning.

After navigating the tribulations of Winnipeg’s small tech ecosystem, ConstructionClock has raised a $2-million CAD seed round.

Trinh told BetaKit that, after raising venture capital, it was relatively straightforward to satisfy the criteria for a US visa. 

Trinh hosted tech community events in Vancouver through the Red Thread Club, but she says working on a startup instead of holding a more secure job complicated her permanent residency application process in Canada.

The Walt Disney Company is making a $1-billion USD equity investment in OpenAI and will allow its users to make videos with its more than 200 copyrighted characters from across Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars on its Sora video-generation app.

PenderFund returned to invest in General Fusion’s latest round with the expectation that it would look to go public as soon as possible, according to The Globe and Mail. 

General Fusion is Canada’s entrant in the global race for commercially viable nuclear fusion power. The latest funding round marks the firm’s second capital infusion in four months after staving off a cash crunch in early 2025.

Kitchener-Waterloo-based advanced materials startup Nfinite wants to make “paper that performs like plastic.”

The University of Waterloo spinout recently secured a $4.6-million CAD grant from the federally funded National Research Council of Canada via its Industrial Research Assistance Program.

Following a $900-million investment in 2015, Google‘s stake in SpaceX is expected to be worth around $111 billion if the Musk-led firm follows through with plans to go public next year at a valuation of $1.5 trillion.

Google already reported an $8-billion gain from its SpaceX holdings earlier this year, according to Bloomberg, which represented 25 percent of its net income for Q1 2025.