Tech Thursday Live!

GeologicAI builds robots that scan drill core and tell mining companies where to dig. They spent their first eight years doing research projects for oil companies in Calgary, pivoted to mining in 2019 against nearly everyone's advice, and raised a Series A thirteen years in from Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy, BHP and Rio Tinto. They're now capital break even, 330 people, and building a new scanning unit every three weeks.CEO Grant Sanden and CTO John Mortimer on the long road to product market fit, buying their own copper mine in Arizona to prove out the product, what a 17 year mine development timeline means for the copper crunch, and why hard science has to come before the LLMs when a billion dollar decision is on the line.Recorded at GeologicAI's assembly facility in Calgary.

Five banks own 96% of the Canadian market. The relative cost of banking has barely moved in a century.Rob Khazzam co-founded Float and just raised a $60 million Series B. Jeff Adamson co-founded Skip the Dishes, then Neo Financial, and scaled it to 600 people. Both are building independent technology companies inside one of the most protected industries in the country.In this conversation: how homebuilt fintech platforms are pressuring the incumbents, how early fintech advocacy on NSF fees shifted consumer costs nationally, why Rob runs Float on a day-to-day survival mindset, the "misfit" advantage in hiring against rigid institutional experience, the accountability frameworks from the early days of Skip and Float, why a Schedule I banking license isn't the answer most founders think it is, and what a decade of open banking consultations actually means for who owns your data.Moderated by Philippe Burns, Co-Founder of Tech Thursday.Fireside chat from our first annual Tech Founder's Stampede Summit in Calgary, co-hosted by House831, with help from the C100 and Fintechs Canada, welcoming 50 founders from across Canada. Sponsored by Float, BLG, Boast, RBCx, PNC Bank, and Fortinet.

Mastercard's data shows the biggest retail day of Stampede happens before it starts, and that's just the opening insight. Benjamin Jacob (SVP, Mastercard) hosts Anne Butler (Bank of Canada), Ruhee Ismail-Teja (Calgary Chamber), and Philippe Burns (Tech Thursday) on agentic commerce and the $1.7T shift coming by 2030, how the Bank of Canada builds trust into the plumbing of the economy, the small business AI adoption gap, and why the deals at Stampede still get done in cowboy boots. Recorded live at the Sam Centre in Calgary.

Claude Guay went from CEO of IBM Canada to Member of Parliament, and he's now one of the people shaping how Canada regulates and adopts AI. Live from Stampede, he joins Mastercard's Jennifer Sloan to talk about the AI for All strategy: protecting kids and elections, why the government is "not Team Pitchfork and not Team Pompom," the $1B bet on AI in healthcare, why a $1M Canadian round is a $10M round in Silicon Valley, and the one test every AI tool should pass before you trust it. Recorded live at Tech Thursday x Mastercard at the Sam Centre in Calgary.

"I told the team we had six months to live."Nic Beique founded Helcim in 2008 as a 23-year-old self-taught coder. For ten years, he ran it as a reseller in the shadow of a bank. In 2020, he and his team made the call to pivot, build their own independent payments stack, and take on Stripe, Square, and Moneris head-on.Three years later, in the middle of the Series B fundraise, the company was running out of cash. He told the team they had six months to live.A month after that, they closed $27 million.In this conversation, Nic walks through the full 15-year arc of Helcim. The Texas-born Montreal-raised origin, the years in the shadow, the pivot, the crunch, and where the company is heading next: a publicly traded Calgary-based anchor for Canadian tech.This is the audio version of the Tech Thursday Calgary fireside originally recorded May 2026.Read the recap on the Calgary Tech Newsletter at calgarytech.substack.com.Tech Thursday is Canada's largest tech community event series, hosted weekly across Calgary, Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Ottawa.

Over $125 billion in assets. 4 million clients. From an investment app nobody would download to one of the most prolific product companies in Canadian tech.A few hours before this panel, Wealthsimple announced a suite of new banking products. By the time we sat down, it was already public. So instead of talking about what they shipped, we got inside the room where it got built.Three product and engineering leaders from Wealthsimple walk through how the company actually operates: how nine engineers ship four products in parallel, why they cancelled their Cursor subscription and went all in on Claude, and what an AI-native company expects from everyone on the team.Featuring Sam Newman-Bremang (Sr. Director of Product), Jocelyn Jeffrey (Director of Engineering), and Channing Allen (Sr. Engineering Manager and former Co-Founder of Plenty), hosted by Philippe Burns.Along the way: how Wealthsimple went from a campus app nobody would download to a million-client banking product, the "naive ambition" behind shipping a feature before they were legally allowed to send an e-transfer, and why the engineer's role changes when code generation cost goes to zero.Recorded in Calgary, May 2026, co-hosted with Wealthsimple.Read the recap on the Calgary Tech Newsletter at calgarytech.substack.com.Tech Thursday is Canada's largest tech community event series, hosted weekly across Calgary, Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Ottawa.

"The whole thing is f*cked. It's really messed up because we haven't spent the time and the attention to build the critical infrastructure across the entire thing."Jesse Wiebe said that on stage in Ottawa last week. He runs the Canadian Startup Capital Association, has invested in over 40 startups, and spent five years scaling Startup TNT into one of the most active early-stage capital programs in the country. He's also one of the few voices arguing publicly that Canada's startup ecosystem isn't broken because there isn't enough capital. It's broken because the capital that exists isn't being activated.In this episode, Jesse joins Caroline von Hirschberg (Spring Activator) and Suzanne Grant (Capital Angel Network) for a candid panel on what's actually broken in Canadian early-stage funding, moderated by Darryl Bandoro of Tech Thursday Ottawa.Along the way: the 5% for Canada framework Jesse is pushing every accredited investor to adopt, why most Canadian fund managers are operating as "first to be second," how government LP money creates perverse incentives for consensus picks, and why a Regina parking company can't get the University of Saskatchewan as a customer but can land UCLA, Stanford, and MIT.This is the audio version of the Tech Thursday Ottawa panel originally recorded May 2026, co-hosted with Deloitte's Technology Fast 50.Read the recap on the Ottawa Tech Newsletter at ottawatechnewsletter.substack.com.Tech Thursday is Canada's largest tech community event series, hosted weekly across Calgary, Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Ottawa.

"Our goal is to build Canada's first trillion dollar company."Graeme Harrison and Dan Chapman co-founded Augur VC, then incubated Simply Silicon out of their first fund. Their first data centre site, Foundation, is being built in downtown Calgary right now. Their plan is to build many more, across North America, all powering the AI native economy.This is the inaugural episode of Tech Thursday: House Calls. Our new on-site interview series, where we go inside the companies and have conversations in the rooms where the work is happening.Along the way: why they called an Alberta data centre bubble in 2024 and started building one anyway, the conduit network moat that even Elon Musk couldn't replicate, the just sovereign versus also sovereign framework for evaluating AI infrastructure, and the plan to build something Canada has never produced before.Recorded on-site at Foundation in Calgary, May 2026.Read the recap on the Calgary Tech Newsletter at calgarytech.substack.com.Tech Thursday is Canada's largest tech community event series, hosted weekly across Calgary, Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Ottawa. Sponsored by Boast, Neo Financial, Skip, Motiv, Alberta Innovates, Crestview Strategy, and BLG.

Energy and mining are two of the largest industries by Canadian GDP. They've been generating high-quality data for decades. The infrastructure is there. The problems are real.So why is almost nobody talking about how much AI adoption is actually happening inside them, or how much further it could go?Three founders building AI for Canadian heavy industry sit down to walk through what's actually working, what isn't, and what an AI-native energy or mining company would even look like.Featuring Keri Lee (Blue Marvel AI), John Mortimer (Geologic AI), and Josh Malate (Ultimarii), with Philippe Burns moderating.Along the way: why "AI goes to die in IT," what the rise of Chief AI Ethics Officers means for innovators, why one Canadian oil major recently burned through $10 million in cloud credits in a single week, and why human judgment becomes more scarce, not less, as inference costs fall toward zero.This is the audio version of the Tech Thursday panel originally recorded in Calgary, April 30th, 2026.Read the recap on the Calgary Tech Newsletter at calgarytech.substack.com.Tech Thursday is Canada's largest tech community event series, hosted weekly across Calgary, Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Ottawa. Sponsored by Boast, Neo Financial, Skip, Motiv, Alberta Innovates, Crestview Strategy, and BLG.

Is the Canadian tech ecosystem over-watered?Four people who've operated inside the system sit down to ask whether government funding has become so pervasive in Canadian tech that it's distorting how companies actually get built.Featuring Derrick Hunter (Bluesky Equities, Alberta Enterprise Corporation), Graeme Harrison (Augur VC), Michelle Scarborough (formerly BDC Capital), and Cam Linke (Amii), with Philippe Burns moderating.The conversation works through three zones where government money shapes the ecosystem: grants, venture capital, and the non-profit support organizations that surround them. Along the way: why Canadian VC funds take 12 weeks to make decisions US funds make in 30 minutes; why less than 10% of Canadian VC managers ever reach their carry; and what each panelist would do tomorrow with a magic wand to fix it.This is the audio version of the Tech Thursday panel originally recorded in Calgary, April 23rd, 2026.Read the recap on the Calgary Tech Newsletter at calgarytech.substack.com.Tech Thursday is Canada's largest tech community event series, hosted weekly across Calgary, Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Ottawa. Sponsored by Boast, Neo Financial, Skip, Motiv, Alberta Innovates, Crestview Strategy, and BLG.

Most founders think about patents too late, or too early. In this live panel recorded in Calgary, Moderator Louise Lee sits down with IP lawyer and patent agent Jason Hogg (BLG), space tech co-founder Kurtis Broda (Wyvern), and medical device founder Danny Zahynacz (RAD Medical Technologies) to cut through the myths around intellectual property and give founders practical, honest advice.They cover the real questions early-stage founders should be asking about trademarks, patents, and trade secrets, and the costly mistakes that happen when they don't. From why chasing patent counts impresses no one, to why your trade secrets might matter more than your patents, to how to think about freedom-to-operate searches without breaking the bank, this conversation is packed with hard-won wisdom from people who've been on both sides of the table.Whether you're pre-revenue or scaling fast, this episode will help you protect what matters, without losing focus on building your business.Sponsored by Elevate IP, a federally funded program helping Canadian entrepreneurs navigate and protect their intellectual property.

This podcast is a live recording from a Tech Thursday that took place in Calgary called 'The Tech Behind Data Centres'. Our speakers were:Thomas Farran, VP at Longbow Capital. Longbow is an investor in VoltaGrid, a company that just signed a 2.3GW deal with Oracle.Benjamin Sutton, Product Marketing Manager at CoolIT. CoolIT was acquired last week for $4.75B, the city’s largest tech deal ever. Joe Gentile, Account Executive at eStruxtures Data Centre. eStruxtures is Canada’s largest data center provider.Moderated by: Vlad Oujegov, Founder of Western Canada Data Centre Alliance. We discussed:Massive Scale: The scale of data centers is changing significantly; for example, a proposed 2.3-gigawatt facility would be the largest capital expenditure project in Canadian history.Bring Your Own Power (BYOP): Because local grids often cannot support gigawatt-level demands without 5–7 years of upgrades, developers are increasingly building on-site natural gas generation to meet immediate power needs.Grid Benefits: While some projects are "behind the meter," experts suggest grid-connected facilities can benefit the community by providing flexible loads that can be managed during peak demand or storms.The End of Air Cooling: Modern AI chips from Nvidia have reached a thermal limit where they can no longer be cooled by air alone.Liquid Cooling: New data centers are adopting 100% liquid cooling, which is far more efficient than air. This technology reduces Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) from a historical 1.6 down toward 1.1.Free Cooling: In regions like Alberta, operators can utilize "free air" cooling for hundreds of days a year when the ambient temperature is below 10°C, significantly reducing water and power consumption.Sovereign Compute: There is a growing focus on "sovereign compute" to ensure Canadian data remains under Canadian jurisdiction and brand, free from the reach of the U.S. Patriot Act.Market Growth: Alberta is currently viewed as a "frontier market" with over 1.2 gigawatts of approved grid-connected projects, surpassing the status of global hubs like Northern Virginia in 2018.Follow Ben Sutton on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminsutton95/Follow Thomas Farran on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasfarran/Follow Joe Gentile on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-gentile-20082429/Follow Vlad Oujegov on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladoujegov/Follow Western Canada Data Centre Alliance on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wcdca/Follow Tech Thursday on LinkedIn:www.linkedin.com/company/tech-thursday/

Adam Froese has had one of the more unusual journeys in Canadian tech. He was a former Olympic field hockey player, ex-Deloitte investment banker, Venture Capitalist at Harvest Ventures, and co-founder of SecondShop, a company that provides the strategic operating layer for retailers like Costco and HomeDepot. In 24 months, the company has sold over $100M worth of retail goods, through it's integrated logistics and recommerce marketplace. The business started with a Wayfair couch that came in the wrong colour. What followed that thread revealed an $800B gap in the global retail supply chain that nobody was seriously solving.In this conversation we get into why the real moat isn't the marketplace, it's the truck. Why Canadian VC is broken and what the incentive misalignment actually looks like from the inside. Why government R&D grants are distorting the companies that receive them. And why Adam says he is not building this company to make money.One of the more honest conversations we've had on the show.

On this Episode, we take you live to our panel CTO vs. CTO. We had Saba El-Hilo, the CTO at Certn, and Cullen Jennings, the CTO for Audio Visual and AI at Cisco. These two went head to head on AI in the Workforce, how cybersecurity is changing, and new requires for data sovereignty around the globe.

Get ready to dive deep into the world of insurance innovation with the latest InsurTech trends and solutions! We were thrilled to co-host this event with Flora Fertility to explore what the future of insurance actually look like. We break down the biggest innovations in InsurTech and what they mean for the industry moving forward.The panel featured:Christy Lane, Co-Founder & President at Flora FertilityFinn Magee, CEO at Insurtech CanadaDiane Horsfield, VP Client Success at TruflaModerated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder at Tech Thursday

On January 29th, Tech Thursday partnered with the DMZ and TDIP to bring together some of the most exciting early stage Tech companies in Calgary. The conversation focused on taking a service, and bringing it to scale through productized solutions.Our speakers were:Amanda Julian, Chief Science Officer & Co-founder at MonarkAddy Graves, CEO and Co-Founder at CashewLourdes Juan, CEO and Co-Founder at Knead TechModerated by: Justine Clark, Strategic Partnerships Lead at DMZ

 Welcome to Tech Thursday Live. A live recording from the first Tech Thursday event in Calgary in 2026. The topic of this conversation was 'Hot Takes for 2026'. This is a panel featuring: Kelly Schmidt, the CEO at HeadversityMark Le dain, CRO at Fueled Graeme Harrison, the CEO at Augur VCWe talked about everything from whether or not there's gonna be Robot Olympics, if there's an AI bubble or not, and what the future of the human is gonna be in the workforce. We had this event in front of a sold out audience in Calgary, and it was a ton of fun.We hope you enjoyed this live recording. Every week we're gonna be releasing live recordings from our events, whether they take place in Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, or Ottawa. So be sure to follow us wherever you get your podcast. Enjoy Tech Thursday Live.