Canada’s AI industry came out of university labs, not garages
- Mila traces back to a 1993 Bengio lab
- Vector Institute — $135m, March 2017
- Toronto: 3rd in North America for tech talent
- Ubisoft Montreal — the world’s largest game studio
Three editorial pieces on the Canada digital market. Editorial register, no product pitch. Companion series: Australia, New Zealand.
How Canada’s tech scene grew
Yoshua Bengio founds the lab that becomes Mila
The Montreal research group grew into Mila, the Quebec AI Institute, which describes itself as the world’s largest academic research centre for deep learning — a community of more than 1,400 people by 2022–23.
The digital economy here
Canada is best read as three separate technology economies that happen to share a country, and the differences between them are larger than the national picture suggests. Toronto is finance and artificial intelligence; Montreal is academic research and video games; Vancouver is games, film and visual effects. A supplier who treats them as one market will be wrong about at least two of them.
The unusual thing about Canadian tech is how much of it traces back to publicly funded university research rather than to startups. Yoshua Bengio founded the Montreal lab that became Mila in 1993 — decades before deep learning was commercially interesting — and the Vector Institute launched in Toronto in March 2017 with $135 million behind it and Geoffrey Hinton as Chief Scientific Advisor. When Bengio, Hinton and Yann LeCun shared the 2018 Turing Award, two of the three were running Canadian institutes. That research base is the country’s real competitive asset.
One correction worth making, because it is the most repeated inaccuracy about Canadian tech: Shopify is not a Toronto company. Its official headquarters is Ottawa. It keeps a large Toronto office, but it was founded elsewhere and is headquartered elsewhere. Toronto’s actual case does not need it — CBRE’s 2025 Scoring Tech Talent report ranks the city third in North America behind only the Bay Area and New York, with an AI talent pool of 23,936 workers.
Where the work happens
Research institutes and corporate anchors matter more here than coworking space does — the clusters formed around labs and studios rather than around accelerators.
Vector Institute, Toronto
Launched March 2017 with $135 million committed over five years and Geoffrey Hinton as Chief Scientific Advisor. Toronto has also led Canada in seed-stage venture investment every year since 2021.
Mila, Montreal
The Quebec AI Institute, tracing back to Yoshua Bengio’s 1993 lab and describing itself as the world’s largest academic deep-learning research centre — over 1,400 people as of 2022–23.
Ubisoft Montreal
The company’s largest studio and the largest single video-game development studio in the world, employing more than 4,000 people. It sits in the same city as Mila, giving Montreal two unrelated digital economies at once.
Amazon Tech Hub, Vancouver
More than 4,500 employees, one of only two Amazon Tech Hubs in Canada — the other is in Toronto. British Columbia also holds roughly 11,000 of Canada’s ~34,000 video-game workers across about 150 studios.
Events worth knowing
Canada’s biggest technology event changed both its city and its name recently, which is worth knowing before you go looking for it.
Web Summit Vancouver
Formerly Collision, which ran in Toronto from 2019 until a final edition in July 2024. It moved west and rebranded for May 2025, drawing over 40,000 attendees from more than 130 countries — North America’s fastest-growing tech conference.
How Canadian businesses buy websites
Two facts shape this market: the country is enormous, and Quebec runs in French. Montreal is officially bilingual and French is the primary working language for most local business — the AI research layer is English-dominant, but the wider city is not. It is the one market in this series where offering English only is a visible gap rather than a preference.
Trades and home services
Service areas matter across Canadian distances the way they do in Australia. Name the municipalities you actually cover, and in Quebec, name them in French.
Clinics, salons and studios
Online booking is standard. Time zones span more than four hours nationally, so phone-only booking is genuinely awkward for anyone serving beyond their own city.
Shops, cafés and hospitality
Hours, location and menu readable on a phone. Winter changes trading patterns in most of the country — if your hours are seasonal, say so.
Professional and B2B services
Toronto buyers in particular comparison-shop hard and have seen more suppliers than anywhere else in Canada. Compete on demonstrable capability, not on proximity.
How well do you know Canada’s digital economy?
5 quick questions. Get all 5 right and you win a 10% off discount code. Every answer is somewhere on this page.
Canada quiz · 1 of 5
Where is Shopify actually headquartered?
Why FastSites works here
A market this comparison-literate rewards a published price. Toronto buyers especially have seen every pitch already, and a clear number on the page does more than a sales conversation would.
Live in days, built mobile-first, and light enough to load properly outside the big three cities. If you trade in Quebec, tell us — French matters there in a way it does not elsewhere in Canada, and it belongs on the page rather than in a footnote.
The Canada series
One piece per city, written in an editorial register for people assessing the market rather than shopping for a supplier.
Toronto: Canada’s deepest AI talent pool, backed by a $135 million research institute
Toronto has topped Canada in seed-stage funding every year since 2021.
2 min readMontreal: the world’s largest academic deep-learning lab, next door to its biggest game studio
Mila traces back to a lab Yoshua Bengio founded in 1993.
1 min read