Decoder.ca

Canadian Tech in 100 Words

AI Spending Surges at Canadian Businesses

by

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.

Want to know more? Check out the source code on Fintech.ca.

AI Leaders Clash Over Speed

by

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.

Want to know more? Check out the source code on Techcouver.com.

Salesforce Opens CRM to Any Interface

by

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.

Want to know more? Check out the source code here.

Radical Ventures Raises $1B AI Fund

by

Toronto-based Radical Ventures has announced the first close of its Radical Breakouts Fund, with more than US$1 billion in commitments, making it Canada’s largest venture capital fund to date.

The fund will target artificial intelligence scale-ups in Canada and abroad, with a focus on companies capable of becoming global leaders. Backers include TD Bank and BMO, which are supporting the effort to deepen domestic growth capital for Canadian AI companies. Radical Ventures co-founder Jordan Jacobs argues Canada has no shortage of world-class AI companies, but has lacked the scale of capital needed to keep them growing and headquartered at home.

Want to know more? Check out the source code on Fintech.ca.

Salesforce Builds CRM Reasoning Model

by

Salesforce and NVIDIA have launched Koa, Salesforce’s first CRM reasoning model for Agentforce, built on NVIDIA Nemotron. Koa was post-trained on synthetic enterprise scenarios reflecting nearly three decades of Salesforce CRM knowledge, without using customer data.

Salesforce says the model matches or exceeds leading models on CRM tasks while producing three times fewer errors. It is designed for multi-step workflows such as updating opportunities, routing cases, and scheduling follow-ups. Salesforce controls Koa’s weights and runs inference within its own infrastructure. The companies are also bringing Nemotron models and accelerated computing into Missionforce for government and regulated organizations securely.

Want to know more? Check out the source code here.

Bell Quadruples Saskatchewan AI Bet

by

Bell is quadrupling its Saskatchewan AI data centre project from 300 to 1,200 megawatts, after Prime Minister Mark Carney, Premier Scott Moe, and CEO Mirko Bibic announced a new 900-megawatt expansion at the Canada Investment Summit. The Regina-area campus is part of Bell AI Fabric, a national platform combining data centres, fibre connectivity, cloud services, and high-performance compute for sovereign AI workloads.

Earlier plans called for a 300-megawatt build with phased service beginning in 2027. The larger project strengthens Saskatchewan’s bid to become a Canadian-controlled compute hub while raising bigger questions about power supply, grid planning, jobs, and domestic data.

Want to know more? Check out the source code on DataCentre.ca.

Photonic Proposes $500M Semiconductor Facility

by

Vancouver-based Photonic has unveiled Project VANGUARD, a proposal for a $500 million Canadian semiconductor manufacturing facility serving quantum computing, AI, aerospace, defence, advanced sensing, and chip packaging. The multi-tenant facility would be anchored by Photonic and provide domestic manufacturing capacity for companies moving from prototypes to commercial-scale production.

Project VANGUARD has been selected for the Canada Investment Summit Prospectus, highlighting nationally significant investment opportunities. Photonic says the facility could create skilled jobs, strengthen Canadian technology sovereignty, protect intellectual property and supply chains, and build domestic expertise across semiconductor design, fabrication, packaging, and commercialization while supporting allied advanced-technology supply chains globally.

Want to know more? Check out the source code on Techcouver.com.

Intrepid Closes AI Growth Fund

by

Intrepid Growth Partners has formally launched with the final close of its inaugural US$525 million fund, positioning the Toronto- and London-based firm as a specialist growth investor for AI companies. Founded by former CPPIB CEO Mark Machin, former OMERS growth equity head Mark Shulgan, and University of Toronto AI economist Ajay Agrawal, Intrepid will back commercially proven businesses using AI to redesign industries.

Fund I is supported by more than 80 global limited partners, including Temasek, Abu Dhabi Investment Council, British Business Bank, Export Development Canada, and BDC. The firm will focus on Canada, the U.K., U.S., and Europe.

Want to know more? Check out the source code here.

Quantum Machines Links Qubits and GPUs

by

Quantum Machines has demonstrated an end-to-end NVIDIA CUDA-Q program running across live qubits, GPUs, CPUs, and its classical PPU processor using NVIDIA NVQLink. The milestone lets developers write hybrid quantum-classical applications in familiar languages such as Python, C++, and QUA without manually coding low-level quantum control sequences.

Quantum Machines says the full exchange between processors completed in roughly one microsecond, enabling the real-time coordination needed for future workloads such as quantum error correction. The company is demonstrating the system at IEEE Quantum Week in Toronto, showcasing how quantum processors could eventually operate as another computing resource alongside CPUs and GPUs.

Fullscript Changes Hands

by

Ottawa healthtech company Fullscript is changing hands, with Altas Partners and L Catterton acquiring a majority stake from HGGC and Snapdragon Capital Partners. Financial terms were not disclosed. Founded in 2011, Fullscript provides supplement fulfillment, laboratory management and clinical tools used by more than 135,000 healthcare practitioners serving 10 million patients annually.

HGGC and Snapdragon invested US$240 million in Fullscript in 2021. The company has since acquired Emerson Ecologics and Rupa Health while adding integrations with Oura and Epic. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter, subject to regulatory approval.

Want to know more? Check out the source code here.