#TechTO

One number determines if your startup makes it. Your growth rate.‼️ We just launched the TechTO Startup Growth Calculator, a free tool inspired by Trevor Blackwell's original calculator and Paul Graham's essay on Default Alive. Plug in your revenue, expenses, and monthly growth rate. It shows you exactly when you'll be profitable, when you'll hit your first million, and how your curve stacks up against Shopify, Stripe, and Apple. Because at the end of the day? A startup is just a growth rate with a dream attached. Try it free → 🔗 growth.techto.org 💬 Drop your monthly growth rate below. Let's see who's on the rocket ship. 🚀 #TechTO #CanadianTech #TorontoTech #StartupGrowth #GrowthRate #DefaultAlive #FounderTools #StartupFounder #FounderMindset #BuildInCanada #StartupLife #TechStartup #CanadianFounder #StartupToronto #GrowthHacking

You may have noticed something new.... 👀 We have revamped our branding at TechTO and are very excited to share it with you! 👏 Take a look and let us know what you think - more to come in 2025, we’re just getting started 🎉 / and Link in BIO

In 2008, Jack Newton was pitching Clio at airports while The Economist ran a cover of every major US bank circling the drain. The feedback he kept getting: "Best pitch we've seen. Not writing cheques right now." He maxed out his credit cards. Remortgaged his house. Found a million dollars from a guy in Germany whose email sat in his spam folder for two weeks. And kept building. This week, Clio crossed $500M ARR. Profitable. Accelerating. A $5B valuation. A $1B acquisition of vLex - the largest M&A deal in legal tech history. Built from a basement in Burnaby into a global legal AI platform serving hundreds of thousands of lawyers across 130+ countries. That's what 18 years of not waiting for permission looks like. We're bringing Jack to our Boast Funding Stage during Toronto Tech Week on May 26. The conversation: how you fund a company at every stage - first cheque to growth capital - and the decisions that separate the companies that scale from the ones that don't. Built here. Scaled globally. That's the bar. Join us: lu.ma/boast-funding-stage-may-2026 📅 Tuesday, May 26 · 8:30-11:00 AM 📍 U of T: Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus, Toronto 🎟️ Approval required, spots are limited #TorontoTechWeek #TTW2026 #CanadianFounders #VentureCapital #Founders #LegalTech

This one’s for you if you’re: → Building in fintech and not sure if embedded finance is a moat or noise → Trying to read where Canadian consumer payments are actually going → Raising and want to know what investors are writing cheques for right now vs. passing on Three hours on consumer payments, embedded finance, personal finance, and vertical fintech. Market-setting opening, founder perspectives from emerging companies, and a featured fireside deep dive co-hosted with Affirm. Joining us: Wayne Pommen - Chief Revenue Officer at Affirm. Built PayBright from 5 people to 250 and into one of Canada’s leading fintechs before Affirm acquired it. Alex Norman - General Partner at N49P. Sitting across from Wayne in the fireside, asking the questions you’d want asked. Jane Podbelskaya - Founder of Charge Forward. Ten+ years in venture at Georgian and Information Venture Partners before going operator. Now supports vertical SaaS and AI platforms on how to actually embed payments, lending, card issuing, and banking. Ricky Lai - General Partner at Portage Ventures. Invests in early-stage fintech globally and sits closest to the Canadian portfolio - KOHO, Wealthsimple, Nesto, Clark…to name a few. Will share the honest investor read on what’s fundable in this category right now. 📅 Thursday, May 28 🎟️ Link in bio. #TorontoTech #Fintech #TTW2026 #TorontoTechWeek #CanadianFintech FintechFounders EmbeddedFinance

Most fintech events tell you what a company does. Very few show senior builders what the work actually looks like. That is the point of Beyond the Trade on May 26 at Questrade Downtown office. Request an invite here: luma.com/beyond-the-trade-may-26 [link in bio] Salim Naran is one of the reasons this conversation matters. Before Questrade Financial Group, he co-founded Borrowell and SAVVYY (Acquired by Questrade), working on the infrastructure behind digital lending and the systems most people never see but every customer depends on. Now he leads Questrade’s Growth Portfolio, scaling new businesses across digital lending, real estate, and emerging verticals inside one of Canada’s most established fintechs. If you are a senior engineer, PM, or technical leader who wants a clearer view of how product, platform, and scale come together inside a regulated Canadian fintech, this is the room. 📆 May 26 | 4:30PM - 9:00PM 📍Questrade Downtown Toronto office | Approval-required. #TorontoTechWeek #CanadianFintech #TechTO #SoftwareEngineering #ProductManagement

While others raised $400M and never launched, Nipun Sharma (Appetronix) built a fully autonomous restaurant in 14 months for $1.2M. He came from restaurants, not robotics. Watched the industry hit a labor wall nobody was solving. Met every robotic company out there and couldn't understand how any of them had a business plan. So he built his own from scratch. No Canadian VC would give him the time of day. His manufacturing partner stole from him. He ran out of money and paused the company more than once. The founders didn't take a salary for years. The breakthrough wasn't technology. It was the business model - stop selling machines, sell food. Stop emulating human hands, design the kitchen without a human in it. Today Donatos, one of the biggest pizza brands in the US, is their largest investor. They've raised $12M USD, and are building toward 100 countries with a team of 30. Hear him share the real cost of building hardware in Canada and what it actually takes to get it to global scale at the TiEQuest Summit. 📅 May 25, 8:30AM - 12:30PM 📍 U of T Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus 🎟️ luma.com/tiequest-2026[link in bio] #TiEQuest2026 #TorontoTechWeek #TechTO #CanadianFounders #GlobalScale #FoodTech

Two Grade 10 students who had never built together met in a library 3 days before the TechTO x Althra Hackathon in Vancouver. What started as a last-minute decision to participate turned into an unforgettable experience and a winning project. Their build: 🏆Smii, a video journaling app where AI surfaces your own progress back to you when you need it most. Followed by 🥈Vibe Modify - Strips overwhelming websites down to what matters. And 🥉 Socials Engineer - Rebuilds trending reels in your brand voice using AI. Thanks to Backboard.io and Klue for making it happen. Next Hackathon: Toronto. May 24, AI to Organize Your Life. Link in first comment. #VancouverTech #CanadianFounders #AIHackathon #TorontoTechWeek

The first companies on this year’s Canadian Rocketships List just took the stage in #Vancouver. Congrats to all six, here’s what they’re building and how you can support them. 🚀 Blossom Social (Brandon Beavis) - The investing social network. 700K+ investors, 150K+ MAUs, $4M ARR and on track to hit 1.1M members by end of 2026. Apple Top 25 App of 2025. Raising $10M. Nominated by Weave VC. 🚀 Soma Energy (Athanasios Caramanolis) - AI that unlocks existing grid capacity for the AI economy. 300% YoY growth, 13 active sites across North America, optimizing 2GW of power. Hiring software, front-end, ML engineers, and designers. Nominated by Chris Neumann. 🚀 GroundedAI (Shelby Yee) - Making sense of the underground. AI that defends $100M+ in cost overruns for tunnels and mining. 3x revenue growth from January to April. Hiring a Mobile Engineer, Account Manager, and Tunnel Engineer. Nominated by StandUp Ventures. 🚀 VitaminLab (Anton Solonnikov) - The world’s only truly personalized supplement, formulated from blood, DNA, and health data. Taking more than 3 supplements? Try it at getvitaminlab.com with code HELLO30. Nominated by Relentless Venture Fund. 🚀 Slate (Scott Elliot) - Embedded lending for vertical SaaS, fintech, and marketplace platforms. 60% loan offer acceptance rate vs. 0-1% industry average. Run a platform? They want to talk: tryslatehq.com. Hiring ML/AI and Full-Stack Engineers. Nominated by N49P. 🚀 Asset (Cameron Frayne) - Embedded accounting for the software platforms small businesses already trust. Books that run in real time, not at month-end. Hiring engineers, designers, and operators. getasset.com. Nominated by Ripple Ventures. Thanks to our friends at @lwconnect for the support. #CanadianTech #Rocketships #CanadianStartups #VancouverTech

Web Summit Vancouver kicks off today and so does our Rocketships Tour. 🚀Six founders take the stage tonight: Cameron Frayne(Asset), Shelby Yee (GroundedAI), Brandon Beavis (Blossom Social), Athanasios Caramanolis (Soma Energy), Scott Elliot (Slate), Anton Solonnikov (VitaminLab). 🎤VCs who nominated them: Relentless Ventures, N49P, Chris Neumann, StandUp Ventures, Weave VC, Ripple Ventures. 🎉 Food, drinks, and the best networking in Vancouver tonight - founders, investors, builders, and operators all in one spot. D/6 Bar & Lounge, Vancouver. Doors open at 4pm. Join us: https://lnkd.in/gVSKEHfZ #WebSummitVancouver #WebSummit #VancouverTech #vancouverstartup

Speaker Reveal #1 for TiEQuest Summit is live. → Janet Bannister closed Staircase Ventures Fund II at $50M. Oversubscribed. In one of the hardest VC markets in a decade. She also launched the successful online classified business Kijiji.  → Mike McCauley has backed 200+ companies through Garage Capital with collective portfolio valuation north of $30B including Substack, Census, DarwinAI. Previously, he was co-founder of BufferBox, Y Combinator S12 batch which was later acquired by Google.  → Nipun Sharma acquired Cibotica two weeks ago. Appetronix operates robotic kitchens in partnership with US pizza chain Donatos, including a fully autonomous location at the Columbus International Airport. → Willson Cross is building Borderless AI which emerged from stealth with $27 million in seed funding in March 2024 for its AI HR assistant and backed by SusquArnault(SIG.com) & world’s richest man, Bernard Arnault (LVMH) More reveals coming soon!  May 25 8:30am to 12:30pm. Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus, U of T.  Link in bio.‼️ #TechTO #TechWeek2026 #TorontoTech #CanadianStartups

One of the companies in the room raised $7M and emerged from stealth last month. Another has 500,000+ users. Third is post-Series A, Victoria-based, 40 on the team and shipping products to consumers directly. The TechTO Rocketships Tour format is brutal by design. VCs get 60 seconds to pitch a portfolio company. Not to describe potential. To state the company, the metric, and put their name behind the nomination. Founders get three minutes. Real traction. Real asks. Every company that survives lands on the shortlist for the annual Canadian Rocketships List - TechTO’s yearly roundup of the high-velocity Canadian startups that top talent and investors watch most closely. The tour launches this Monday, May 11. Vancouver is stop one of eight cities. Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Waterloo, Atlantic Canada, Calgary - then the finale at Toronto City Hall on December 1. Sunday May 10: TechTO x Althra Hackathon, Klue, Vancouver. Theme: ‘Build AI that remembers.’ Three YC founder judges. Cash prize $1,000 CAD. LINKS IN BIO ‼️ Nominations for upcoming cities: [email protected] #VancouverStartups #VancouverTech #CanadianTech #Startups #Entrepreneurship

Vancouver, we’re less than 48 hours out! Sunday at Klue HQ: 10 hours to build AI that remembers. On the day we celebrate mothers who remember everything for us, can you build a working AI that does the same? What’s in the room: → Full access to Backboard.io - one API to 17,000+ LLMs, long-term memory, RAG, web search → $1,000 cash to first place. Apple Watch to second. → Judges are YC-backed founders shipping right now: Paul Chuang Li (OpenBuilder, YC F25), Aaron Cullen (Mendelia, YC P26), Raj Lad (Infinite, YC W25) → A high-density crowd of founders and technical builders First-time shippers welcome. Sign up before Sunday. 🔗 luma.com/techto-hackaton-web-summit-may-10-2026 #Vancouver #VancouverTech #VancouverStartups #YVR #BCTech