The Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, today announced an investment of $49 million (opens in a new window) into the Industry Consortium for Image-Guided Therapy (ICIGT), a pan-Canadian network led by Sunnybrook.

“Canadians have long been at the forefront of exciting innovations in health and biosciences, and through the Strategic Innovation Fund we have brought together the best in the public and private sectors to find real health care solutions. Our investment in the ICIGT project is helping to leverage Canada’s strengths in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and image-guided therapies to ultimately deliver better health care for Canadians across the country,” says Bains.

The University of Toronto is making significant contributions to the thriving Toronto tech industry and the region’s innovation economy, U of T President Meric Gertler told the Collision tech conference Thursday during a panel discussion on how start-ups can prepare for success.

“The university is both a really pivotal player in generating talent, [while] attracting and retaining talent,” said President Gertler.

“That makes a big difference in a city like this.”

He added the university’s goal is to create well-rounded graduates and entrepreneurs who understand customers’ needs and deliver advanced solutions.  “We have focused on core competencies we want to develop in our students – things like being able to work well in teams, being able to communicate and collaborate effectively across cultural boundaries,” President Gertler said.

It’s known as the Venture Cup: the holy grail for student entrepreneurs with a gleam in their eye, those searching not just for funds to help their budding business bloom, but for networks, advice, and a venue to test their world-class ideas against world-class competition. 

And this past April, at the annual event at Lundquist College of Business at the University of Oregon, the first place $20,000 USD Cup was handed to the University of Toronto based-start up, Cohesys. 

LG is expanding its artificial intelligence research investment in the University of Toronto (U of T) to focus on business-to-business applications.

Some of these applications including solutions in supply chain optimization and manufacturing, according to LG.

“The extensive joint research with LG will secure research capacity, nurture top artificial intelligence experts and add practical values to the research done on campus,” said Christopher Yip, U of T of associate vice-president of international partnerships, at the Collision tech conference in Toronto.

The partnership will help LG become more competitive in the ever-growing AI space. Meanwhile, U of T will benefit by providing research opportunities for students at the master’s, PhD and post-doctoral levels.

LG Electronics Inc. has added artificial intelligence specialists of the University of Toronto to its pool of brain power responsible for future competitiveness. 

The Korean electronics maker said it has entered into a memorandum of understanding with the University of Toronto to collaborate on developing AI technology for enterprises. The agreement was signed during the Collision 2019, North America’s fastest-growing tech conference that is running for four days until Thursday in Toronto, Canada, this year. 

Kitchener-based, female founded tech company Bridgit Inc. is the latest local tech company to benefit from federal government investment in the lead-up to the federal election.

The company, which develops mobile applications for the construction industry, is set to receive a repayable $750,000 contribution that will create a dozen new jobs, FedDev Ontario announced Wednesday.

“It’s really exciting for us to be at the cusp of two of these industries that are really growing here in Canada, construction and technology … and bring them closer together,” said Bridgit Inc. co-founder Lauren Lake, 27.

Team Paramount AI from the University of Toronto won the KPMG Ideation Challenge 2019, which invited university teams from nine countries to crack complex business issues with artificial intelligence.

The second annual iteration of the Ideation Challenge welcomed over 600 applicants, with nine teams ultimately invited to a final round of judging at KPMG’s offices in Amsterdam, held between May 10-12. Participating teams were composed of STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) university students with at least one year left in their studies, representing the countries of Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Luxembourg, Italy, Netherlands, UK and US.

Nanoleaf is a true Canadian success story, and its CEO Gimmy Chu couldn’t be more proud.

The company‘s origins date from when Mr. Chu and two co-founders first worked together on a University of Toronto solar-powered car challenge. With some Kickstarter funding, they reunited in 2012, to start a business making a highly efficient light bulb. From those humble beginnings, they’ve now built the company into one of the world’s largest manufacturers of smart lighting products.

This week, MedStack is at Collision, the fastest-growing tech conference in the world. For the very first time, Collision is coming to Toronto, and we celebrate our home town’s important and growing presence on the world stage as an innovation capital, picking up on the news that Toronto’s ecosystem is growing in tech jobs faster than anywhere else in the world.

Collision features seventeen tracks (sub-conferences) , focused on industry vertical and business topics on vehicles, the environment, financial services, advertising, growth, software development and more. The track for healthcare is HealthConf, gathering leading medtech innovators, industry giants, and startups each leveraging innovation and tech to help humanity live better lives.

Collision is expected to draw in more than 25,000 attendees over the next three days at Toronto’s Enercare Centre. We are at Booth E234, directly in front of the healthcare stage for all three days. Our booth is co-located with an island featuring eight of our digital health innovator clients, coming from across Canada and the US and representing a wide spectrum of healthcare topics. We are extremely excited to showcase what they do and the breadth of healthcare opportunity they cover between them.

In this four minute video, Balaji Gopalan, CEO and Co-Founder, MedStack talks about the importance of a collaborative ecosystem where start ups can take on the world’s biggest problems. MedStack, a platform for App-Enabled Healthcare is an example of how it is done,

MedStack received the TELUS outstanding Product Achievement Award for Mobility Health (M-Health) Innovation Excellence in Canada’s Health Care Sector at the CATA Gala.

Toronto based, MedStack was launched in 2015 as a cloud automation tech company that builds and manages healthcare privacy compliance into cloud hosting tools. This greatly de-risks application commercialization, and the standardized platform can help bring apps to market 60% faster.
MedStack now provides enhanced app hosting and actively managed compliance policies in several countries.

The company has raised a $2.4 million oversubscribed seed round led by TELUS Ventures, with participation from ScaleUP Ventures and Panache Ventures. Existing investor Ontario Centres of Excellence and several existing angel investors have also participated in this round.

MedStack’s mission is to enable more digital innovation to be adopted in healthcare so that cloud technologies may deliver care anywhere with smarter, more timely decisions and better experiences.

MedStack founders, CEO Balaji Gopalan and CTO Simon Woodside, have evolved their solution with the input of hundreds of digital health startups through programs including Dreamit Health, the Creative Destruction Lab and 500 Startups. Over 50 companies now run their apps integrated with MedStack’s healthcare compliance platform.