Canada has spent two decades producing world-class AI research and then watching most of the commercial value of it move south. Private and public capital together offer the country’s best chance to break that pattern, and turn its research strengths into globally competitive businesses. Mia Morisset, who evaluates Canadian technology companies from a growth equity seat and sits on boards, frames the test bluntly: a global champion is not the best Canadian company in its category; it is the company that sets the terms of its category worldwide. By that standard, Canada has companies with global reach and significant room to develop more champions. The next five years could determine how far the country goes.
What Separates A Breakout From A Ceiling
For Morisset, the foundations of global success are laid early. Canadian customers, enterprise relationships, and local partnerships can provide a strong starting point. The opportunity is to build on that foundation by designing products for demanding customers around the world and bringing international experience onto boards and into investor networks. “The choices that help a company reach $5 million in revenue need to leave room for it to grow beyond $30 million,” she says. Those decisions shape a company’s trajectory long before their impact appears in the numbers.
Breakout companies put that ambition into practice early, often before the timing feels comfortable. They secure an international reference customer, hire a senior sales leader with experience scaling globally, and set prices that reflect the value their products deliver to customers, rather than anchoring them to Canadian market norms. Underlying them is a shared mindset. “The founders who win don’t think of Canada as the market,” Morisset says. “They think of Canada as the place they build from.” Cohere, BenchSci, Spellbook, and Waabi illustrate that ambition: Canadian companies tackling global problems. The opportunity is to make that approach the norm, building a generation of companies that scale from Canada and compete on the world stage.
The Evidence Growth Investors Want
At the growth stage, ambition stops being a credential. Morisset looks for signs that a company’s success can travel beyond home: international customers who see lasting value in the product, a team equipped to scale across markets, and a clear reason customers choose it over global competitors. If the non-Canadian cohort looks as good or better, that is a strong signal. If a company only works at home, the numbers surface it fast. This is a useful corrective for founders who assume a compelling story about the total addressable market will carry a Series C conversation. It will not.
AI introduces a second set of questions, and they are the ones most likely to separate durable businesses from well-funded experiments:
- Is AI becoming embedded in workflows, clearing procurement, and turning pilots into recurring revenue?
- Do margins hold once inference and compute costs are carried at scale?
- How defensible is the product as foundation model providers keep pushing up into the application layer?
Morisset looks for proprietary data, workflow depth, and distribution advantages that a better base model cannot erase. That last filter is severe, and it should be. A great deal of what currently presents as AI product strategy is a thin layer sitting on someone else’s roadmap. For Canadian companies, building these durable advantages is an opportunity to turn strong technical foundations into businesses that can lead globally.
Capital and Conditions for Global Success
Public capital can help Canadian companies pursue global ambitions, while preserving their flexibility to grow. Its impact depends on how it is designed as much as how much is available. Morisset sees a valuable role for the state as a disciplined co-investor alongside private investors, investing on market terms and providing patient capital at the stage when companies need larger rounds to scale. The strongest programs also preserve access to future international investors, partnerships, and exit opportunities. “Founders need to be able to raise from the best capital in the world,” she says. “Keeping companies in Canada should be the result of Canada being the best place to build, not a condition attached to the check.” The goal is to attract more private investment while strengthening the reasons to build in Canada.
That means pairing capital with the talent, customers, and infrastructure companies need to scale. Morisset highlights three priorities:
- Attract and retain the talent to build global leaders. Deepen the pool of executives who have taken businesses from $50 million to $500 million in revenue, recruit specialized AI talent, and develop the next generation of Canadian leaders. Give them compelling reasons to build here through streamlined immigration pathways, competitive taxation, and employee equity rules that reward long-term growth.
- Make Canada a stronger home market. Encourage Canadian enterprises and governments to become early customers of domestic technology, with procurement processes that give promising companies a path from pilot to commercial contract. Reducing interprovincial trade barriers would also make it easier for companies to sell, operate, and scale across the country.
- Turn Canada’s energy advantage into an AI advantage. Expand access to affordable compute by translating Canada’s abundant clean energy, cold climate, and jurisdictional stability into competitive AI infrastructure. Faster approvals and grid connections would help turn those strengths into capacity that companies can use.
Canada has substantial strengths to support that ambition. The broader opportunity is to bring these pieces together: research that becomes commercial leadership, energy that supports new industries, and capital that connects Canadian companies to global markets. With that foundation, Morisset is confident Canada can become an increasingly compelling place for ambitious founders to build – and for international investors to help them scale.
Follow Mia Morisset on LinkedIn for more insights on growth equity and Canadian technology scale-ups.
