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Canadian Tech in 100 Words

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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Radical Ventures Raises $1B AI Fund

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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.

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Salesforce Builds CRM Reasoning Model

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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.

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Bell Quadruples Saskatchewan AI Bet

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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.

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Photonic Proposes $500M Semiconductor Facility

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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.

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