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Investor Showcase

Bringing together global and local investors for an exclusive pre–Web Summit Vancouver event spotlighting British Columbia’s most investment-ready startups.

 

British Columbia’s most promising startups across key sectors like life sciences, artificial intelligence, and creative technology will be featured in our curated investor showcase on May 11, 2026.

These high-growth companies represent the depth of B.C.’s innovation ecosystem and the next wave of globally scalable ventures emerging from the province.

Learn more about the 25 companies selected to be featured as part of the Investor Showcase—some of the most exciting and high-potential ventures currently building in British Columbia.

Monday, May 11 @ Microsoft Vancouver (Invite-Only)

4AG Robotics Inc.

Salmon Arm | Agritech

4AG Robotics automates mushroom harvesting with AI-powered robotics, increasing yield, lowering labor costs, and delivering consistent, high-quality mushrooms.

What They’re Solving & How: Mushroom farms face chronic labor shortages, rising wages, and inconsistent manual harvesting that reduces yield and profitability. Growers struggle to scale production reliably while maintaining quality and controlling costs. 4AG Robotics delivers AI-powered robotic harvesting systems that autonomously pick mushrooms with precision and consistency, increasing yield, reducing labor dependence, and enabling scalable, data-driven farm operations.

Leadership:

• Sean O’Connor, Founder & CEO
• Chris Payne, COO & CFO
• Steven DeBoer, VP Finance & Business Operations

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7Gen

Montreal | Cleantech

We help accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles for commercial fleets by solving for financing, charging, software and incentives.

What They’re Solving & How: EV adoption is hard. It involves many different issues: charging, behaviour change, managing operational risks. We provide the one stop shop solution that integrates vehicles & EV charging financing, carbon credit generation and a unifying software platform.

Leadership:

• Frans Tjallingii, CEO
• Ken Richardson, CFO

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AquaEye

Vancouver | AI

AquaEye is revolutionizing water rescue with AquaEye Pro - an AI power sonar system that allows rescues to locate drowning victims in minutes and communicate seamlessly with mutual aid.

What They’re Solving & How: 315,000 people drown every year. The World Health Organization believes that global drowning fatalities are underestimated by as much as 50%. For every person who drowns, five more are injured in a near drowning—placing even greater strain on already overwhelmed public safety & healthcare systems. Drownings are rising, driven by climate change, floods, and urbanization near water and flood plains. AquaEye Pro is a complete hand-held sonar system that is deployed in seconds and uses AI to locate drowning victims in under a minute. Rescuers can act the moment they arrive and start capturing actionable data within seconds of entering the water. Customers are seeing a 90% reduction in search times saving them time, money and vastly reducing risk.

Leadership:

• Carlyn, Founder & CEO
• Patrick, VP Engineering
• Erik, VP Sales

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Arca

Vancouver | Cleantech

Arca turns industrial waste into massive carbon sinks to permanently remove CO2 from the atmosphere and enable corporations to meet their net-zero targets, while delivering significant process efficiencies to industrial partners.

What They’re Solving & How: We are in the midst of a climate emergency due to the rapidly increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Governments and corporations are increasingly investing in addressing it, however durable, measurable, scalable methods remains elusive. Arca leverages historical industrial waste and existing infrastructure to permanently sequester CO2 from the atmosphere. We turn liabilities into assets, while delivering significant co-benefits to our industrial partners, and local communities.

Leadership:

• Paul Needham, CEO
• Greg Dipple, Head of Science

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ChopValue

Vancouver | Cleantech

ChopValue redefines waste as a resource by engineering chopsticks into high-performance commercial furniture solutions, produced locally on a global scale.

What They’re Solving & How: Mass-produced furniture relies on virgin materials, centralized supply chains, and quality leading to short lifespans, undermining sustainability goals. Sustainable furniture solutions often sacrifice durability, price, or can’t offer the scale large brands require to meet globally, limiting adoption across commercial projects. ChopValue combines value-added material engineering with decentralized production to deliver durable, scalable furniture that strengthens local economies, builds supply chain resilience, and reduces pressure on traditional virgin resource extraction.

Leadership:

• Felix Böck, CEO & Founder
• Katrina Shum, Chief Strategy & Impact Officer
• Andy Burt, President, Business Development

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Defang Software Labs Inc.

Vancouver | AI

We help developers, startups, and enterprises deploy agentic applications, written in any language / using any framework, to the cloud of their choice (AWS / GCP / DigitalOcean / others) with a single command in a secure, scalable, and cost-efficient way.

What They’re Solving & How: After Cleint-Server and SaaS, we are now in the early stages of the Agentic Era. Many startups around the world are building agentic applications - for fraud-detection, meeting note-taking, marketing, etc. However, their customers don't want to send their sensitive business data to these agents running in an unknown external environment. They want these agents deployed into their (the customer's) cloud environment - on AWS / GCP / Azure etc. - where they have consolidated their data and set up compliance and security rules. So, startups need to deploy their agentic solutions into each customer's environment. Defang provides a deployment tool and platform that enables startups and enterprises to easily deploy any agentic application to any cloud account. Developers can develop their solution once, using any language and agentic framework, and use Defang to easily deploy to the cloud of their choice in a secure, scalable, and cost-effective way. Defang integrates with all the leading IDEs such as Claude, Cursor, VS Code, etc. so that developers can deploy their agentic solutions directly from their development workflow. Defang also integrates CI-CD workflows in source repositories such as GitHub and GitLab.

Leadership:

• Prakash Sundaresan, Co-founder & CEO
• Lio Lunesu, Co-founder & CTO

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Effie

Kelowna | Life Sciences

Smart automation. Real medical insight. Effie powers care that feels personal.

What They’re Solving & How: Clinics lose time and trust as receptionists juggle calls, nurses chase labs, doctors chart late, and patients wait on hold. Effie Agentic AI automates clinic workflows with instant, personalized audio support—using RAG and accurate function calling on medical data for precise responses, ensuring data sovereignty, IP protection, seamless human escalation, and compliant care.

Leadership:

• Bülent Uyaniker, Managing Director
• Jim de Vries, VP Business Development
• Charl Coetzee, Head of Technology

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Glüxkind Technologies Inc.

Vancouver | AI

Glüxkind builds an AI-powered smart stroller that makes daily walks safer and easier for modern parents—hands-free assistance, smarter safety, and smoother rides.

What They’re Solving & How: Parents juggle distractions, safety risks, and fatigue on every outing—while also trying to calm a fussy baby. Traditional strollers are passive gear, offering no assist with pushing, soothing, or sleep support. Glüxkind is an AI-powered smart stroller that actively assists on hills and uneven terrain, boosts safety with intelligent sensing, and helps soothe baby with built-in white noise, stories, and gentle rocking—giving parents more ease and peace of mind.

Leadership:

• Kevin Huang, Co-Founder & CEO
• Anne Hunger, Co-Founder

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GuideStar Medical Devices

Victoria | Life Sciences

Our product, EpiZact, provides an easier epidural procedure for the clinician, a safer outcome for the patient, and saves money for the health care provider.

What They’re Solving & How: Despite the skill of clinicians who perform epidurals, hundreds of thousands of patients are injured every year from epidural needle placement. Injured patients suffer debilitating headaches that can last weeks or months, and in some cases suffer permanent nerve damage or paralysis. EpiZact makes the epidural procedure easy to perform and safer for the patient. EpiZact is the only device that prevents these injuries by automatically stopping the needle, and has been shown to be over 10x safer than the current standard of care.

Leadership:

• Mike Dolphin, CEO
• Ryan Ruedebusch, VP Business Development

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Hydra Energy

Delta | Cleantech

Hydra Energy connects low carbon hydrogen supply with demand through our hydrogen-diesel co-combustion technology.

What They’re Solving & How: Heavy-duty truck fleets face mounting pressure to decarbonize but lack viable options: battery-electric suffers from range and charging limitations, while waiting for new hydrogen fuel cell trucks is costly and slow. Meanwhile, low-carbon hydrogen producers struggle to secure the consistent, large-scale demand needed to reach final investment decisions. Hydra converts diesel trucks to hydrogen-diesel co-combustion, reducing emissions by up to 40%. Through our Hydrogen-as-a-Service™ model and strategic partnerships with producers, we connect fleets with reliable hydrogen supply, creating the guaranteed demand needed to scale low-carbon production.

Leadership:

• Badr Abduljawad, Interim CEO / CIO / Co-Founder
• Jo Borck, CTO

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Hyper Hippo Entertainment

Kelowna | Digital Media

One of Canada's leading mobile video game studios, creating original IP in Canada that we self-publish around the world.

What They’re Solving & How: A new paradigm of player connection is needed to profitably reach new players and build experiences that players choose to engage with for extended periods of time. Personalization of the player experience, building experiences that players can enjoy wherever they want.

Leadership:

• Sam Fisher, CEO
• Lance Priebe, CIO
• Jennifer Kilback, CBO

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Ikomed Technologies Inc.

Vancouver | Life Sciences

Ikomed develops innovative medical devices that improve the health of patients and staff.

What They’re Solving & How: Emphysema is an incurable, progressive lung disease that affects millions worldwide. Along with other pulmonary conditions collectively known as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), it is the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. Ikomed has developed a proprietary extracorporeal RF technology to treat emphysema. By selectively heating diseased lung tissue, it induces controlled inflammation and volume reduction, helping restore lung function.

Leadership:

• Eran Elizur, CEO
• Amos Michelson, Chairman
• Lindsay Machan, Board Member

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instaHOP

Vancouver | Travel Technology / AI Commerce Infrastructure

instaHOP is an AI monetization platform that helps airlines, hotels, and travel platforms upsell personalized in-journey experiences.

What They’re Solving & How: Travel brands struggle to monetize in-journey traveler intent, relying on static offers and fragmented tools that fail to convert real-time demand. instaHOP embeds an AI travel companion directly into partner platforms to personalize, recommend, and monetize experiences in real time.

Leadership:

• Ali Basij, Founder & CEO
• Sharyn, CRO
• Roozbeh, CPO

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Intelligent Project Solutions Inc.

Richmond | AI

iEng AI turns engineering drawings and documents into actionable data to unleash engineering data intelligence for process manufacturing industry.

What They’re Solving & How: More than 95% of critical engineering data – is locked in CAD drawings, scans, word, Excel sheets, unstructured and unusable: a bottleneck of digital transformation and AI development iEng AI is a vertical industry AI platform for the process industry, developed for engineering data extraction, structuring and automated design in drawings, documents and workflows. The platform consists of three core modules iDrawings, iDocuments, iWorkflow and future development of generative AI module, building a complete "engineering data intelligence" system.

Leadership:

• Daniel Bin Zhang, Founder & CEO
• Saurabh Raina, Co-Founder & CTO

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M2M TECH INC

Surrey | AI

Our M2M Edge AI (MEA) is a dual-use Physical AI platform that helps enterprises deploy real-time Edge AI, Digital twins, and Autonomous workflows in mission-critical operations.

What They’re Solving & How: Enterprises struggle to deploy AI in real-world, mission-critical environments due to fragmented Edge data, unreliable connectivity, and slow pilot-to-production cycles. As a result, downtime, waste, and safety risks persist. M2M’s MEA platform (Edge devices plus ARC agents and AURA digital twins) turn real-time sensor data into fast decisions and automated workflows - running reliably at the edge and scaling through an AI factory with enterprise-grade security.

Leadership:

• Ashok Kasilingam, Founder & CEO
• Edouard Romeus, Chief Product & Revenue Officer

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MATT3R Technologies Inc.

Vancouver | AI

MATT3R converts real-world driving signals into simulation-ready, action-grade datasets that power safer autonomous and embodied AI systems.

What They’re Solving & How: Autonomous and embodied AI systems lack access to structured, high-fidelity real-world edge cases, making training, validation, and safety assessment slow, expensive, and incomplete. MATT3R captures and converts real-world driving edge cases into structured, simulation-ready action data that accelerates AI training, validation, and safety assurance.

Leadership:

• Hamid Abdollahi, Founder & CEO

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Molecular You Corporation

Vancouver | Life Sciences

Molecular You is a clinical informatics SaaS platform that enables predictive health by leveraging proprietary multi-omic blood assays and AI to provide early disease identification and actionable risk assessments.

What They’re Solving & How: Current diagnostics are reactive, detecting diseases only after symptoms appear, missing the critical early-intervention window and costing healthcare over $1 trillion annually. Molecular You's AI-powered SaaS platform uses multi-omic blood assays to predict disease risk for 26+ conditions, delivering actionable, personalized intervention plans before symptoms develop.

Leadership:

• Jim Kean, CEO
• Rob Fraser, President, Chief Scientific Officer & Co-Founder

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Redwood AI

Vancouver | AI, Life Sciences

Redwood AI empowers pharmaceutical teams with chemistry-specific AI, improving decision quality and accelerating medicine development.

What They’re Solving & How: Pharmaceutical discovery and manufacturing remain largely manual and inefficient, limiting scalability and speed. As a result, global medicine shortages persist, directly impacting patient access and health outcomes. Redwood AI has developed a proprietary suite of models to support chemists. With an interface designed with industrial chemists in mind, we are able to support synthesis decisions including safety, cost and efficiency in a matter of minutes.

Leadership:

• Louis Dron, CEO
• Kristian Thorlund, President
• Glenn Sammis, Head of Chemistry

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Robson Communications Inc

West Vancouver | AI

Emily OS is a sovereign Canadian AI operating system that delivers secure, validated memory and scalable intelligence for enterprises and governments.

What They’re Solving & How: Organizations using AI face data sovereignty risks, vendor lock-in, and unreliable memory systems that store hallucinations and false information. Existing platforms keep data on foreign servers and offer no validated, portable memory control. Emily OS is a sovereign Canadian AI operating system with validated memory, LLM-agnostic flexibility, and scalable multi-agent intelligence—keeping data in Canada while eliminating vendor lock-in and hallucinated memory.

Leadership:

• Martin Robson, CEO
• Bill McGraw, President
• Tamara Robson, VP Business Development

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SimplyAsk

Vancouver | AI

SimplyAsk.ai builds Symphona, a practical AI operations platform that reduces manual work by turning recurring requests and documents into trackable workflows and tasks, improving service quality while lowering cost and cycle time.

What They’re Solving & How: Enterprises still run critical work through email, PDFs, and follow-ups across teams and tools, creating delays, rework, and inconsistent service quality. Manual coordination hides cost and risk. Symphona turns recurring requests and documents into trackable workflows and tasks, automating routing, reminders, and approvals so work closes faster with better visibility and service quality.

Leadership:

• Shuli Gortler, CEO
• Zane Frantzen, VP Platform & Operations
• Sanjay Gupta, VP Delivery & Principal Architect

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Total Flow Medical

Vancouver | Life Sciences

Saving costs and improving outcomes for heart surgery and life support patients.

What They’re Solving & How: Current femoral cannula can block blood flow in patients’ legs- leading to ischemic limb conditions, amputation and even death. There is currently no single-device solution in the US to this problem. Our first product for the US market, a specialized cannula, will decrease the risk of ischemic limb conditions (lack of oxygen to the leg) for 90,000 US adult patients undergoing heart surgery and ECMO annually;decreasing the risk of extended hospital stay, amputation and death- saving the hospital ~$3k per patient vs. current practice.

Leadership:

• Hillary Pierce, CEO
• Martina Wan Lockwood, VP Engineering

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Variational AI

Vancouver | AI, Life Sciences

Using generative AI to help biopharma companies discover novel small molecule drugs 100x more efficiently.

What They’re Solving & How: Biopharma companies spend years and $B’s trying to discover novel small molecule drugs. Most of these efforts fail. Drug discovery requires the exploration of drug-like chemical space and the exploitation of hit/lead molecules. Sadly, exploration is often limited and the exploitation of sub-optimal molecules is prioritized resulting in poor success rates. We believe great drugs start with great molecules. We have invented a generative AI-based foundation model called Enki to generate novel small molecules to vastly augment exploration of novel chemical space to reduce the slow and expensive exploitation of hits/leads resulting in 100x efficiency gain versus the status quo of drug discovery.

Leadership:

• Handol Kim, Co-Founder & CEO
• Jason Rolfe, Co-Founder & CTO
• Peter Guzzo, EVP, Head of Drug Discovery

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Vesalius Cardiovascular Inc.

Vancouver | Life Sciences

Non-invasive, percutaneous (transfemoral) solution able to repair degenerative mitral regurgitation (DMR), a fatal and prevalent heart valve disease.

What They’re Solving & How: Current gold standard treatment for DMR is open-heart surgery. However, ~50% of patients are unable to undergo surgery due to risk, representing a substantial unmet clinical need. Additionally, Open-heart is associated with a heavy burden carried by patients (long recovery), hospitals (10 days post-op), and payers (extremely high cost)." Based on proven surgical techniques and delivered with a catheter, our unique solution provides surgery effects, without the need for open-heart. This allows treating all patients suffering from DMR, filling the unmet need and eliminating the burden associated with current treatment.

Leadership:

• Vincent Ledoux, Co-founder & CEO
• Peter Skarsgard, Co-founder & CMO

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VoxCell

Victoria | Life Sciences

VoxCell's vascularized human tissue models give drugs their first real human test in blood vessels, closing the gap between preclinical data and clinical success.

What They’re Solving & How: ~90% of drugs that pass animal testing fail in humans. Existing preclinical models lack true human vasculature, a critical determinant of drug penetration, toxicity, and efficacy before costly clinical trials. VoxCell's 3D vascularized human tissue platform replicates functional microvasculature for drug testing, delivering more predictive preclinical data prior to expensive clinical trials.

Leadership:

• Dr. Karolina Papera Valente, Founder, CEO & CSO
• Graham Craig, Chief Commercial Officer

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Workforce Wellness Inc.

Vancouver | Healthcare

We provide home care  and healthcare organizations advanced AI agents which handle dozens of administrative workflows

What They’re Solving & How: Healthcare organizations are struggling to deliver necessary care due to a shortage of staff. This is staffing crisis is intensified by a crippling administrative burden, where clinicians spend up to 28 hours weekly and over 50% of their time on non-patient care. Constant recruitment & retention is causing massive budget over runs and highlighted the need for more efficient ways of delivering care. Workforce Wellness has developed AIOS, an AI Agent orchestration, deployment and management platform for healthcare. This platform enables hospitals, home care and specialty care clinics to deploy a wide range of voice and workflow agents, that autonomously manage 80% of routine administrative tasks (e.g., pre-op calls, patient intake, scheduling, medication adherence etc.).

Leadership:

• Ashish Anand, Founder & CEO
• Leon Salvail, COO
• Jennifer MacGregor, Chief Growth Officer

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