From the MaRS Discovery District, to ventureLAB, to the Durham College AI/HUB, the support you need to grow your AI business is here.
Canada's AI industry is growing fast, and Toronto is quickly becoming a hub for the most promising AI ventures. The Toronto Region is bursting with like-minded technological businesses and startups thanks to our diverse and inclusive culture and the most educated workforce in the OECD. The Toronto Region is the largest technology hub in Canada and 3rd largest in North America, and it's no surprise that 8 percent of Canada's head offices and the Canadian locations for nearly half of Fortune 500 companies are located in the Greater Toronto Area.
In the past year, more new tech jobs were added in the Toronto Region than in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area combined. In terms of job numbers, the Toronto Region has surpassed Boston, Chicago and Seattle. Our tech scene is booming – just ask Amazon, Etsy, GM and Samsung.
Home to dozens of AI startups, the AI industry in the Toronto Region has transformed the area into a prosperous AI hub where both startups and established tech companies thrive and compete. Fueled by talent and innovation, the rapidly developing AI space has found its home in the Toronto Region. Our AI industry is supported by our strong operating environment, generous R&D incentives, and an innovative ecosystem.
Meta/Facebook (2021): Meta/Facebook chose the Toronto Region to grow its Canadian Reality Labs and AI Research teams utilizing the skilled tech talent across the region, planning to hire up to 2,500 people in its new engineering centre.
AUTOCRYPT (2021): The South Korean e-mobility company chose Whitby in the Toronto Region for its regional headquarters in North America to be situated within the Great Lakes AI 'supercluster' which accounts for 100% of Canada's light vehicle production.
IBM (2021): Technology giant IBM announced a new office in Toronto to support 500 new hires in the Toronto Region that will include an AI and hybrid cloud client showcase centre.
Groq (2021): Groq was attracted to the Toronto Region's world-renowned AI researchers and emerging progressive thinkers produced by our academic institutions. Groq's new Toronto office will be near the University of Toronto and AI research hub, The Vector Institute.
Google (2020): Google announced a new 400,000 square foot office in Toronto. With the addition of this massive Toronto office, Google employs over 2,500 people across Canada.
Uber (2018): Uber announced plans to invest more than $200-million in Toronto over five years as it opens an engineering office and expands its self-driving car centre. In 2017, the company also announced a new research hub to focus on developing AI for driverless vehicles, representing Uber’s first R&D operation outside of the United States.
Etsy (2018): Etsy chose Toronto as the location for its newest Machine Learning Center of Excellence, the first in Canada.
Samsung (2018): Opened a new R&D office which focuses on strengthening collaborative research with world-leading scholars in the AI field.
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The new Vector Institute is an independent, non-profit research institution dedicated to the transformative field of artificial intelligence, excelling in deep learning and machine learning. Notable corporate partners are Google, Shopify, Loblaws, Accenture, Thomson Reuters, Magna International, NVIDIA, Uber, Air Canada, and all fi ve major Canadian banks.
Under the guidance of Chief Scientific Advisor, Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI” – “the Vector Institute will build on Canada’s outstanding pool of globally recognized AI expertise by training, attracting and retaining more top researchers who want to lead the world in machine learning and deep learning research, while having the flexibility to work on commercial applications with companies or in their own startups.
One of the world's biggest tech conferences will be returning to North America's fastest-growing tech region when Collision heads to Toronto from June 26-29, 2023. Toronto has been home to Collision – North America's fastest-growing tech conference – since 2019, a testament to both the Toronto Region’s momentum as a hub for tech and innovation and Canada’s reputation as a diverse and inclusive place to live and work.
Cohere: Founded in 2019 in Toronto, Cohere provides an NLP-based platform to classify and build language generation models in such a way that humans can understand them. Each of the cofounders also attended the University of Toronto.
Untether: Founded in 2017 in Toronto, the team at Untether developed an artificial intelligence neural net processor for enabling power-constrained devices like AR headsets and wearables to carry out inference operations such as machine vision and speech recognition. The chip combines near-memory design with digital processing to reduce the physical distance between memory and processing tasks, which speeds up data transfer and lowers power consumption.
Ada: Founded in 2016 in Toronto and named after Ada Lovelace, the team at Ada developed a no-code AI chatbot platform that automates the customer engagement process, featuring analytics, API & authentication, and conditional logic capabilities. It has use cases in travel, e-commerce, fintech, telecom, retail, banking, and insurance.
Xanadu: Founded in 2016 in Toronto, the team at Xanadu developed open-source software that includes a new quantum computing language, a dedicated machine learning platform for quantum computers. It also consists of a quantum photonic processor which uses squeezed light (fluctuation in light behaviour at the quantum level) for better calculations and computing speeds.
Deep Genomics: Founded in 2015 in Toronto, Deep Genomics is working on a new generation of computational technologies that can tell what will happen within a cell when DNA is altered by genetic variation, whether naturally or artificially. They also produce SPIDEX, a comprehensive set of mutations and their predicted effects on RNA splicing across the entire human genome.
BenchSci: Founded in 2015 in Toronto, Benchsci allows scientists to search millions of papers to find antibody usage data for drug data management and experiment designing, allowing them to focus on more important aspects of their work. The platform includes features for reagent selection, antibody selection, and more.
AlayaCare: Founded in 2014 in Toronto, AlayaCare is a cloud-based software platform for home healthcare practitioners featuring clinical documentation, back-office functionality, patient and family portals, remote patient monitoring, telehealth, and mobile care worker apps. It also helps analyze wearable devices to gather patient data and give real-time insights to care professionals.
CorVista: Founded in 2012 in Toronto, CorVista provides an AI-based cardiac health diagnosis tool for healthcare professionals that can detect cardiovascular disease by analyzing patient data. It uses the data to detect diseases such as pulmonary hypertension, heart failure, and coronary artery diseases so that patients can get treatment earlier.