The Products

BetaKit Most Ambitious

A data layer for the ocean

Whale Seeker (Montréal, QC)

Can you train an LLM to speak whale? That’s what Emily Charry Tissier wondered when she found her husband in the living room, looking for narwhals.

As a marine biologist, Barnard Charry had been hired to analyze 20,000 aerial images of the arctic, and manually identify the horned, magical creatures within an expanse of whitecaps, ice, and rock formations.

“You zoom in and then you scan it,” she recalled. “It’s like Where’s Waldo but for whales.”

Her husband was charging by the hour, and Charrier Tissier was struck by the lack of scientific rigour in the process.

The images were taken by a plane that had to fly at just the right altitude and speed. The image formats weren’t standardized, the observer himself was an uncontrolled variable, and narwhals could only be spotted if they were at the surface.

“Governments and commercial enterprises are spending millions of dollars to do aerial surveys that are assessed manually,” she said. “I thought, ‘Good lord, the data that we’re basing all these decisions on is crap.’”

Soon after, the couple founded Whale Seeker, a Montréal-based company that combines marine life expertise with software design and AI.

Their product, Möbius, uses AI to detect marine mammals faster, more frequently and with more accuracy than the human eye. It’s the first certified B Corp in the world using AI technology in the service of wildlife.

Knowing the location of whales and other marine life is surprisingly important to governments and an array of high-stakes ocean-based businesses.

Cargo vessels and cruise ships kill approximately 20,000 whales each year, as they ferry people and goods across the ocean. Offshore wind and drilling operations are also at risk of “a body count,” as Charrier Tissier characterizes it, which could put them in increased conflict with environmental groups.

And the location of whales can also have an impact on Canadian fisheries, which are shut down by government order for weeks at a time if a North Atlantic right whale is migrating nearby.

“They’re using a sledgehammer when you really just need a scalpel,” said Charrier Tissier. “We can locate large mammals at a much more specific spatial and temporal scale, so we can close a fishery for just two days or just close a section of it.”

Whale Seeker products unlock insights beyond the location of whales and other sea life.

The company now finds itself awash in the so-called “blue economy,” where Charrier Tissier sees a unique opportunity for Canada to lead.

She wants her company to become “the data layer of the ocean,” facilitating better decisions related to vital priorities like trade, security, communications, and climate.

Canada holds a unique opportunity to lead the capture and monetization of this ocean based data, according to Charrier Tissier, and to create a new “blue asset class” that includes reefs, fishing stock, and other natural capital.

Whale Seeker has received funding through the National Research Council of Canada’s Industrial Research Assistance Program, but Charrier Tissier said the funding has not translated into calls from the government asking how the product could be used to the nation’s advantage.

“They’ve invested but there’s no mandate to use it,” she said. “I would love for Canada to be able to tell the story of how they’re leveraging the investments they’ve made in their entrepreneurs and their IP—especially in AI.”

By Canadian

Building with art and craft.

AI for everything

Ada
(Toronto, ON)

Customer service agents that never sleep and crave interaction.

Bild.AI
(Vancouver, BC)

Reading construction blueprints to cost out materials and ensure compliance.

SnapWrite
(Toronto, ON)

Automating the second-hand retail craze.

TruthSayer AI
(Vancouver, BC)

A “hedge-fund-in-a-box” that claims to outperform traditional trading.

Robots for everything

Haply
(Montréal, QC)

Intuitive 3D robot control for human-machine collaboration.

Able Innovations
(Toronto, ON)

Robotic devices for safe, dignified patient transfer.

smartARM
(Toronto, ON)

Affordable, 3D-printed prosthetic arms, powered by vision.

Promise Robotics
(Toronto, ON)

Home builder robots to help increase the housing supply.

Life savers

Coloursmith
(Halifax, NS)

Contact lenses that protect and enhance your vision.

Rho by 16bit
(Toronto, ON)

Detecting low bone density and reducing fragile breaks with AI that reads X-rays.

Toothpod
(Toronto, ON)

A smart chewable, because oral health shouldn’t be a hassle.

Wave View Imaging
(Calgary, AB)

Safe, portable, and pain-free breast imaging.

Tech loved by tech

Trulioo
(Vancouver, BC)

Identify verification platform used around the world.

1Password
(Toronto, ON)

The market-leading password manager.

Hootsuite
(Vancouver, BC)

One of the oldest and most popular social media management tools.

Daybreak Studios
(Toronto, ON)

The design+tech team behind Dropbox’s new brand.

Fun and games

Lux Bio
(Vancouver, BC)

Long-lasting, compostable glow sticks, bulk purchased by NASA.

Ideogram
(Toronto, ON)

Turning ideas into reality with AI photos.

Simply Sweet Games
(Osoyoos, BC)

Ad-free word puzzles from former Electronic Arts developers.

PixMob
(Montréal, QC)

The glowing wristbands lighting up global stadiums.

The product of your ambitions

Core Devices (Palo Alto, CA)

Most founders are taught that startups are designed to grow fast, and growing fast requires making something for a big market.

A decade ago, Eric Migicovsky followed that path to pursue his ambition: defining the smartwatch category. He launched his company, Pebble, to incredible heights. It came crashing down just as fast.

Years later, his ambition hasn’t changed. Migicovsky has started a new company to make smartwatches again. This is the story of why Pebble died and how this time will be different.

Born in Vancouver, Migicovsky moved to Southern Ontario in the mid-2000s to study Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. He was attracted by the university’s approach to intellectual property–policies that leave the IP generated by its students to its students, making it an outlier in Canada.

At school, Migicovsky started a company and joined the university’s nascent Velocity accelerator. Its first product, a smartwatch, had a local bent: it connected with BlackBerry smartphones, made by hometown tech hero Research In Motion. Called the inPulse, the watch displayed messages and alerts so Migicovsky could read a text while riding his bike without breaking his neck. Most of the initial batch of devices broke in shipping.

“Looking back, it was not the most beautiful product in the world,” he said. “But we shipped it.”

Migicovsky was undeterred. He was driven to build the smartwatch he’d been dreaming of: one that showed the time, basic message notifications, and not much else. Its battery would last forever, because it wasn’t trying to be a smartphone on your wrist.

“At the end of the day, I really wanted a Pebble,” he said. “It didn’t exist. No one was building anything remotely like it. So I, without really knowing what I was doing, decided to go and make it.”

Migicovsky’s ambition took him from Waterloo to Silicon Valley, after Pebble was accepted into world-renowned startup accelerator Y Combinator in 2011. There, he was taught that startups are designed to grow fast.

Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham gave him an offhanded piece of advice that stuck: don’t fundraise, crowdfund. From then on, Pebble would raise money directly from its customers for its products, using a new platform called Kickstarter.

The result? Almost 70,000 backers collectively pledged over $10 million USD for the first Pebble smartwatch in 2012. Powered by three of the 15 most-funded Kickstarter projects of all time, the company sold more than 2 million smartwatches in a five-year period. Pebble was growing fast.

But by 2015, smartwatches were no longer a novelty, and Pebble was facing tough competition from Samsung and Apple, which had begun offering watches focused on productivity and fitness. Pebble was originally a product built for an audience of one; to compete, Migicovsky felt he now had to build Pebbles for everyone. The company started rolling out a range of watches with comparable features.

Migicovsky now thinks Pebble lost its North Star trying to chase a bigger market. “I got pulled in a direction towards something that I didn’t even really care about,” he said. “We were like, ‘Okay, this seems to be working for Fitbit. This seems to be working for Apple. Maybe we could do that, but make it a bit more affordable, make it a bit more Pebble-y.’”

The decision had disastrous results. Pebble missed sales targets by $20 million in 2015 after the productivity and fitness pitch failed to connect with its core user base, leaving the company with a warehouse full of costly unsold inventory. By the end of 2016, Pebble was effectively insolvent, and the team and IP were sold to Fitbit for less than $40 million USD. Migicovksy ended up joining Y Combinator.

“I had built the thing that I wanted, and there wasn’t like a grand master plan in my mind of where this was going,” Migicovsky said. “We should have just stuck to what we knew best and continued to build quirky, fun smartwatches for hackers.”

Migicovsky is clear-eyed about Pebble’s past failures, which is a mark of a good entrepreneur. But so is persistence. Eight years later, with some incredible luck, Migicovsky has found a way to bring Pebble back.

In 2021, Fitbit was sold to Google. Last year, Migicovsky began working back channels within the company to get access to the old Pebble IP. The charm offensive worked, and earlier this year, Google open-sourced the PebbleOS—a very rare decision. Without access to his old work, Migicovsky would have lost the chance to rebuild his dream device.

It will be through a new company, Core Devices, and the smartwatches won’t be called Pebble, but they’ll use PebbleOS. Amazingly, they’ll also contain leftover parts for the original devices after Migicovsky found a supplier selling a warehouse full of them on AliExpress.

The feature set should sound familiar: the smartwatches will show the time, basic message notifications, and not much else—with batteries that last forever, because they aren’t trying to be a smartphone on your wrist.

Why launch a new company just to remake a device that’s more than a decade old? “I tried every other smartwatch,” he said. “But at the end of the day, I can’t stop using it. I love my Pebble.”

This time, Migicovsky will apply the lessons he learned with Pebble: the Core Devices team will be kept small and won’t crowdfund or fundraise or do anything else to chase scale. He’s confident there’s still a modest market of nerdy hackers who love their Pebble, too, but the goal is to break even.

Migicovsky doesn’t dream of selling millions of smartwatches anymore—he’s back to building for himself.

“I am more of an inventor, I think, than a startup founder. A company, to me, is a means to an end,” he added. “At the end of the day, I build things that I want and I tend to not let anything get in my way.”

Feature image courtesy WhaleSeeker.