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Canadian Tech in 100 Words

Elevate Rebrands as Nrth

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Elevate has rebranded as Nrth, expanding beyond its annual Toronto festival into a year-round platform for Canadian founders and business leaders. CEO Lisa Zarzeczny unveiled the new name during opening night of the 2026 festival, which immediately became Nrth Festival. Since launching in 2017, the organization has welcomed more than 89,000 attendees.

Beginning in 2027, Nrth plans more frequent events, programs connecting startups with customers and investors, technology-adoption initiatives, and research on Canada’s innovation economy. The nonprofit says the shift reflects a new challenge: helping Canadian companies turn innovation into stronger businesses, productivity, competitiveness, and economic growth at greater scale.

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Shopify Brings Shop Pay to Meta’s Muse

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Shopify is partnering with Meta to bring Shop Pay checkout to Muse, Meta’s new personal AI agent. The integration will let Muse users browse products from Shopify merchants and complete purchases using Shop Pay, extending Shopify’s commerce infrastructure into agent-driven shopping.

CEO Tobias Lütke described the partnership as an easier way to shop and check out through AI, while Meta says the deal expands the range of products available inside Muse. The move strengthens Shopify’s position as infrastructure for AI commerce, as assistants increasingly move beyond recommendations toward completing purchases directly on behalf of consumers across digital storefronts worldwide.

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TD Deepens Cohere AI Partnership

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TD Bank Group is committing up to $25 million over three years to expand AI development and adoption through a collaboration between Cohere and its Layer 6 research team. Cohere specialists will work alongside Layer 6 at Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District, combining enterprise AI models with TD’s applied research capabilities.

Initial work will focus on knowledge management, productivity, decision-making, and client experiences, with an emphasis on security and responsible adoption. The partnership builds on TD’s 2018 acquisition of Layer 6 and recent deployment of agentic AI for mortgage underwriting, as Canadian banks increasingly integrate external AI partners into everyday operations.

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Wander Adds Polarity’s AI Agents

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Travel platform Wander has acquired the team behind Polarity, an applied AI research lab focused on agents and model post-training. Founded by Shane Barakat, Alex Ungureanu, and Mihai Posea, Polarity studied how AI agents navigate large codebases, learn recurring tasks, and improve after deployment. The team will bring that expertise into Wander’s engineering stack, helping accelerate development of Wander.com and WanderOS, its operating system for vacation-rental operators.

Wander also plans to introduce specialized agents for routine portfolio management and custom-trained models tuned to its data and workflows, aiming to automate more operational work while helping operators focus on guests and growth.

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TextNow Crosses $1B Without VC

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Waterloo-founded TextNow has surpassed $1 billion in cumulative revenue after 16 years of largely bootstrapped growth. The app-based phone service reached the milestone without venture capital or institutional backing beyond an initial $1.5 million seed round, while remaining profitable.

Founded in 2009, TextNow serves millions of consumers across North America with free nationwide talk and text over 5G, plus flexible paid data options. CEO and co-founder Derek Ting says the milestone demonstrates technology companies can scale without following the traditional fundraising playbook. TextNow is marking the achievement during Waterloo Tech Week with a permanent public sculpture celebrating entrepreneurship and independence.

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Snap Pushes AR Beyond Screens

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Snap has expanded its SPECS augmented reality glasses with new AI, entertainment, shopping, navigation, translation, fitness, and workplace features. The company also introduced SPECS Intelligence, an anticipatory AI service designed to understand a user’s goals, routines, relationships, and priorities across iPhone, Mac, and SPECS, surfacing help without waiting for prompts.

SPECS can stream content, translate 60 languages, provide walking directions, create virtual workspaces, and place Shopify products in 3D. Snap is also working with Salesforce, AWS, NVIDIA, and others on enterprise deployments. The glasses cost US$2,195, with shipments expected later this fall in select markets across the United States, Britain.

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ACDSee Puts Privacy First

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Victoria-based ACD Systems has launched ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2027 with a privacy-first approach to artificial intelligence. The release adds generative AI tools for image generation, fill, editing, and object removal, while keeping features such as face detection and image similarity processing on-device.

For cloud-based generative tools, ACD Systems says prompts and images are encrypted, routed through its own servers, and deleted after seven days. The company is positioning the software as an alternative for photographers who want AI-assisted editing without surrendering control of their images and data, combining local processing, cloud tools, and traditional photo management in one platform.

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AI Spending Surges at Canadian Businesses

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Canadian businesses are rapidly increasing AI spending, according to new Float transaction data from more than 10,000 companies. Among 2,644 businesses active on Float in both August 2024 and August 2026, monthly AI spending increased more than twelvefold, while adoption rose from 27 percent to 47 percent.

Float says the data captures actual purchases rather than survey intentions, offering a clearer view of how AI is entering company budgets. The surge also brings new challenges around cost control, predictability, and governance as finance teams manage a growing mix of AI subscriptions and tools across their organizations and technology spending strategies.

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AI Leaders Clash Over Speed

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Dreamforce became a stage for competing views on how quickly frontier AI should advance. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for stronger safety practices, independent evaluations, common standards, and ultimately international coordination. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman backed the need to pace frontier development and argued companies must act responsibly regardless of competitive pressure.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang rejected an industry-wide slowdown, calling safety an engineering problem and arguing innovation and safety are not mutually exclusive. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff focused on enterprise adoption, saying businesses still need trusted data, permissions, workflows, and governance to safely turn increasingly powerful models into useful workplace systems.

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Salesforce Opens CRM to Any Interface

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Salesforce has unveiled AIforce, a new interface layer that brings Salesforce data, workflows, business logic, permissions, and governance into any AI experience. Announced at Dreamforce, AIforce is designed to let agents reason and take action across enterprise systems without forcing users into a traditional Salesforce interface.

The company says developers can build composable, live interfaces wherever work happens, while preserving Salesforce context and security. The launch reflects Salesforce’s broader push to make CRM intelligence available across agentic productivity tools, helping companies connect AI assistants directly to the systems, rules, and operational knowledge already running their businesses across teams and channels.

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