Canada’s top tech founders to showcase talent the day before Carney’s global investment summit

Waabi Innovation Inc. chief executive Raquel Urtasun, left to right, Aidan Gomez, chief executive of Cohere Inc., and Mike Katchen, chief executive of Wealthsimple Inc., will be among the speakers at the Canadian Global Growth Forum on Sept. 14. Photo by Waabi, Getty Images, Bloomberg

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The founders of some of Canada’s most valuable private technology startups will showcase their companies to global investors at an event next month in a bid to attract more international investment to the sector.

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The Canadian Global Growth Forum will take place on Sept. 14 and aims to take advantage of the global financial heavyweights expected to attend the federal government’s Canada Investment Summit the next day.

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“They will make the case for building a global company from Canada, their experience of doing it … (and) why the world should put capital behind a company headquartered in Canada,” said Benjamin Bergen, chief executive of the Canadian Venture Capital & Private Equity Association, which is hosting the invitation-only event.

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Aidan Gomez, co-founder and chief executive of Cohere Inc., Canada’s only frontier artificial intelligence model developer, Michael Katchen, co-founder and chief executive of fintech platform Wealthsimple Financial Corp., and Raquel Urtasun, founder and chief executive of self-driving truck company Waabi Innovation Inc., are among the announced speakers.

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Gomez has often called on founders in Canada to keep their companies in the country and resist the pull to move stateside.

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“Canada has the talent, ambition and ecosystem to build companies that compete and lead globally,” he said in a statement on Thursday.

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The forum’s goal is to build ties between global investors and Canadian fund managers and their companies and drive international investment into this country’s mid-market funds, Bergen said.
Some global capital flows into Canadian companies directly, such as international investor participation in Waabi’s January fundraise and Wealthsimple’s October 2025 fundraise, which both raised $750 million each, but Bergen said a commitment to a Canadian fund can stretch further.  

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Mid-market funds, which target established, mid-sized companies, are the part of the Canadian economy that an international institution may not have visibility into without a Canadian manager, he said.

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“A Canadian manager can deploy (the capital) across companies that a sovereign fund might not see on a shortlist of their own and can hold positions through the later financings while the company scales,” he said.

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Active Canadian pension and institutional investors, including OMERS Ventures Management Inc., Brookfield Corp. and Radical Ventures Investments Inc., will join investment teams from the United States, Australia and other countries at the forum.

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Prime Minister Mark Carney’s national investment summit occurs the following day as Canada tries to get $1 trillion in public and private investments over five years.

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“Across those two days, an investor sees the full range of opportunities in this country, from venture and growth financings, through private equity, to ports, transmissions and mines,” Bergen said.