Organization: University of Toronto

Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab receives $25 million through the Strategic Innovation Fund

The Government of Canada is investing $25 million in the University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab (CDL), a non-profit project to pair science-based startups with business expertise. The investment comes through the Strategic Innovation Fund, a $1.26 billion federal program to spur innovation in Canada’s industrial and technological sectors, with a focus on large projects…

Federal government must improve innovation funding practices: study

The federal government needs to improve assessment of “innovation intermediaries” it funds and better target future funding for business accelerators and incubators, says a study done for the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

LG Electronics launches new AI Lab in Toronto

Korean tech giant, LG Electronics Inc. (LG) is launching the “LG Electronics AI Research Lab”, an extension of LG’s existing AI Research Lab in Silicon Valley, at the Univ of Toronto. The new facility is the latest LG AI lab, joining existing labs in South Korea, India, and Russia, as a part of LG’s growing…

Canadian VC investment strategy hurting VCs and Canadian innovation: Report

Innovation in Canada will be seriously compromised unless domestic venture capitalists start throwing  big bucks into Canadian firms, suggests a new report. Big funding is one of the secrets of success of US firms, whether in Silicon Valley, or in other technology hubs in the rest of the US. In contrast, it is a challenge to get large funding tranches from Canadian VCs.

Report calls for data-driven approach to government investing to grow world-class Canadian firms

A report from the University of Toronto’s Impact Centre is calling for a data-driven approach to maximizing the government’s investments in Canadian firms and growing them to be world-class. The report — Government Venture Capital: Can the Public Sector Pick and Nurture World Class Companies? — says that the strategy for venture capital investments of the Canadian government is not to simply copy what venture capitalists in Silicon Valley are doing.

Toronto AI firm gets fund boost from Fidelity Investments

A Toronto-based company developing artificial intelligence (AI) systems for enterprises has recently received a fresh round of funding from Fidelity Investments Canada. DeepLearni.ng will use the $9 million in Series A funding to help the company scale the development of its machine learning platform, called Frontiers, which is used for rapid deployment of AI enterprises.…

Vector Institute aims to play key role in Canada’s bid to maintain AI leadership

Geoff Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Richard Sutton may not be household names but in the world of artificial intelligence (AI) these Canadian researchers are superstars at the forefront of a field that is attracting a host of marquee tech titans angling to gain competitive advantage in the rapidly evolving field. Yet many highly accomplished AI researchers have left Canada to seek opportunity elsewhere prompting a remarkable alignment of government, academia and industry to make Canada the go-to destination for AI advancements in an ever-expanding range of industry sectors.