Zain Adil

🇨🇦 I believe in building in Canada. After Toronto Tech Week, I wrote about our decision to start OpsLevel in Canada. The response reminded me how many of us care deeply about this ecosystem. Since then, I’ve been thinking more about what it takes to make Canada a place where builders thrive. One thing we need? Capital that backs ambition early. There’s been a lot of chatter lately about the Canadian venture gap. Some of it’s fair. Some of it’s outdated. But we won’t change the narrative by complaining.  We change it by showing up. So I’ve been trying to do my small part. I don’t write a ton of angel cheques. But when I do, I try to back founders who are building world-class companies *and* choosing to build here. Here are three I’m proud to have recently supported: 🔌 Clockwork — CEO Andrea Curry Automating EV charger operations and support. Think Sentry + PagerDuty for EV infrastructure. “Clockwork makes EV chargers work all the time.” Incorporated in Canada. 50% of the shares are female-held. Founders from Shopify, Axonify, D2L, Flo, and more. 🧪 Kiln — CEO Steve Cosman Infra for building great AI products. Fine-tuning, evals, and synthetic data all in one place. Think Vercel or GitHub, but for AI. Founded by two ex-Apple engineers who moved back to build here. Fully CCPC 🇨🇦. 🛰️ Stealth Startup - CEO Ben Vinegar So stealth, I'm not sure I can even name them publicly yet. But they're working on a pretty important problem in a giant market and using AI to make it 1000x times better. Incorporated in Canada.  Half the team’s in Toronto (incl. Ben, who returned from the US). These aren’t “Canadian” companies in name only. They’re hiring here.  Building here.  Betting on here. Creating value here. That’s why I’m proud to back them. That’s why I’m biasing my angel investments toward founders who believe in this place too. Want to help fix Canadian tech? Start by writing cheques. Or writing code. Or writing job offers. Or just... doing the thing. Who else is betting on Canada right now? Tag a founder, team, or startup we should know about 👇

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We often hear the question: 𝐰𝐡𝐲 𝐝𝐨 80% 𝐨𝐟 𝐀𝐈 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐚𝐢𝐥 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐛𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐞? But the more important question is: 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐰𝐞 𝐝𝐨 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐢𝐭? At TELUS, we’ve spent the past decade answering that — growing from a handful of ML engineers to 100+ and generating $100𝐌+ 𝐢𝐧 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲 𝐛𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐭𝐬. Along the way, we’ve learned what makes AI succeed (and fail). I had the opportunity to present key lessons at Ai4 - Artificial Intelligence Conferences in Las Vegas last month — thank you Sanjay Puri and RegulatingAI for the invitation. In my talk, I shared: ✅ How to balance fear of missing out vs. risk aversion when financing AI ✅ How to select and manage AI projects to maximize impact ✅ Why “proof of value” beats “proof of concept” ✅ Practical steps to monetize AI early and reduce failure risk ✅ Why the most important part of AI transformation is rarely the technology itself Watch the full talk for practical lessons you can apply today and let me know what you think! https://lnkd.in/e8RVkMv3

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At a Canadian startup I worked for (RIP), we chased big growth with fancy algorithms. But 80% of our purchasing challenges were solved by one thing , simple seasonal trends from past purchases. Often, the simplest data holds the real answers.

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The CRA just posted an RFP asking for a local solution to generate Java code. Canada is finally waking up to what we should have been building all along. We spend $50B+ annually on R&D. Less than 2% of that IP gets commercialized. Over half gets assigned to foreign companies. The gap isn't invention. It's translation. Vision to execution. Idea to Production-Ready code that stays here. When a federal agency asks for local AI tooling to build software, it's a signal. Not just procurement. Recognition that exportable IP and sovereign capability matter. This is the bottleneck I've been watching for years. Brilliant innovators who can't build alone. Risk-averse capital that won't fund pre-revenue deep tech. A translation layer that costs $400k or doesn't exist at all. The RFP is small. The shift it represents is not.

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It’s frustrating to see that the productivity gap between Canada and other advanced economies has widened in recent years. Meanwhile it’s inspirational seeing how advanced technology is being applied in other countries. While most Canadians are busy debating affordability, lowering taxes or increasing minimum wages, more attention can be paid on using technology to truly improve standard of living by increasing productivity. I don’t think there’s a shortage of talents or inventions coming from Canadians, but actual productization and commercialization of technology does not seem to occur frequently enough in Canada. What can individuals like myself do? Aside from working on products to help businesses identify and close productivity gaps, one thing I can think of is to bring back and share experience I have in the industry back to the university. Hopefully this could align students’ expectations and inspire better collaboration between academics and commercial application of technology. Do you agree? What would you suggest?

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What happens when you apply Engineering principles to go-to-market strategy? I'm about to find out firsthand as the new Cloud Solutions Architect at DEDICATTED. The mission: systematically engineer how we connect world-class DevOps capabilities and proven Cloud & AI expertise with the Canadian and international businesses and public sector organizations that need them most. Working directly with AWS Canada, we're building the blueprint for how technical excellence translates into transformational business outcomes. The hardest engineering problem isn't always technical. Sometimes it's engineering the bridge from capability to customer value. Let's build something remarkable. 🚀 #Dedicatted #AWSCanada #CloudCommunity #GenerativeAI #DevOps

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83 Builders signed up early so far for AI Agents Waterloo's first Hackathon of the year Feb 13th-15th. Last year we did the world's first Agent to Agent payments hackaton, before MCP, before Google's protocol, before x402. Now we're a doing an Agentic VOICE modality Hackathon. Multimodal human computer interaction design is how we will communicate symbioticly with machines. Join us if you love being early and if building to learn is in your blood. Talk to our voice agent here before the event caps out: https://lnkd.in/eMvwnWbi

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There is an opportunity right now in the Canadian tech/founder support ecosystem to rapidly update the approach for an AI world A lot of good people, both building and supporting, simply want to see the Canadian tech ecosystem succeed and this is the time to recalibrate to achieve that Without IMMEDIATE action several legacy structures in the ecosystem risk delaying Canadian tech growth vs global peers Example 1. A lot of programs, grants and incubators are milestone based. This no longer applies. In just the last week many public exec teams pulled guidance or said they are recalibrating everything, because of how quickly AI has changed their business, and these are established businesses. By comparison there are still programs in Canada that require multi year milestones to be met by founders. Iteration is the source of innovation and milestones can constrain. 2. A lot of grants, incubators etc review applications over weeks and months (some grants are several months). I can think of several well known Canadian tech founders that have been changing their agentic architecture or approach weekly. If you run a business using any type of agentic tools (which should be every competitive tech business right now) you would submit a grant that is outdated in a week and completely disconnected by the time you review it with the provider. 3. A lot of Canadian awards and credits recognize headcount. This model (SRED etc.) is very good for multi-year, human driven, R&D initiatives. It is not good at recognizing the cost of compute and the rapid iteration on top of it. We don't want to incentivize the wrong thing in the ecosystem. Founders have advisors walking them through traditional org design, to then build things manually, and then apply for SRED, when they need to iterate using AI tools. 4. A lot of incubators provide pitch coaching, intros to legacy advisors, and PMF workshops, but founder needs have changed entirely in the past few months. i.e. people now need an incubator that walks them through cost optimization on interference. They don't even need PMF advice in the same way anymore cause what if their market is just agents. AI is presenting an opportunity to rapidly improve on some of the above for the benefit of all in the ecosystem

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🇨🇦 Canada's AI Adoption is Accelerating—But Will It Translate to Broad Prosperity? Canada's AI opportunity is time-sensitive. The foundation is strong and now we need coordinated action to ensure this momentum benefits our entire economy: ✓ Strengthen AI and digital skills training ✓ Convert research strength into commercialization ✓ Create predictable, pro-innovation policy frameworks ✓ Lead through public sector adoption (64% say government leadership accelerates their adoption) https://lnkd.in/g-yyz4VM

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