Yukon founder joins national Indigenous AI program as Fireweed gains traction

Yukon founder joins national Indigenous AI program as Fireweed gains traction

Published 6:00 am Friday, May 29, 2026

Cole Robulack, founder and CEO of Fireweed AI, has been selected for Mila’s Indigenous Pathfinders program, marking a national milestone for the four‑month‑old Yukon startup building AI systems for First Nations.

The seven‑week program brings Indigenous participants to Montréal for hands‑on AI training and community‑centred project development, according to a news release issued May 28.

Robulack, a Vuntut Gwitchin citizen and electrical engineering student at UBC Okanagan, said the cohort includes engineers, artists, healthcare workers, journalists, and entrepreneurs from across Canada, all trying to answer the same question about what AI should do for Indigenous communities rather than what corporations decide.

In an interview, he said the experience is rooted in reciprocal learning, not top‑down instruction.

“All that knowledge is flowing in every direction,” he said, adding that being in the room with Indigenous people working toward similar goals is the program’s biggest value.

Robulack said the Yukon’s presence in the national AI landscape is limited, with most compute power, capital and research institutions concentrated in southern provinces. He said northern innovation rarely appears on national AI maps.

Fireweed’s work, he said, is part of a push for northern control in the AI space. The company is building infrastructure that keeps First Nations data in Canada and under First Nations’ own authority, instead of sending it to large U.S.-based AI platforms.

“There’s a real gold‑rush feeling to the AI race,” Robulack said.

“Yukoners know what it’s like when there’s a rush on something valuable, and that’s the kind of momentum we’re feeling as we try to build something here.”

Fireweed AI launched in late January and has five employees, including senior machine‑learning engineers and a governance lead. The company is also bringing on several co‑op students in the coming weeks.

Robulack said the startup already has 30‑plus First Nations in its pipeline, along with Indigenous development corporations in the Yukon and B.C. He said the company is also working with researchers at UBC, York University and UBC Okanagan on language and cultural components of the platform.

He declined to name specific First Nations without their consent, citing the same community‑ownership principles the product is built on.

Fireweed’s core product is a private, Canadian‑hosted AI system built so each client’s information stays separate. Robulack said the model keeps every organization’s data in its own space, with nothing shared or pooled between users.

He said most mainstream AI tools run on large U.S. platforms, meaning governance documents, cultural materials, and language records are processed on servers outside Canadian jurisdiction. Fireweed’s model, he said, is built from the ground up on Indigenous data‑governance principles rather than added as an afterthought.

The company is raising three‑quarters of a million dollars in early investment to grow its team and speed up deployments. Robulack said the next year will be focused on scaling the business, hitting key technical milestones and expanding into the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and several southern provinces.

One of the technical features Fireweed is developing is a verification layer that uses blockchain to show exactly how a community’s data is stored and protected. Robulack said the goal is to give First Nations a clear, tamper‑proof record of what happens inside the system.

Robulack said interest from outside the North has grown quickly, helped by Fireweed being named one of the country’s Top 20 “moonshot” startups this year. He said many in the AI sector are surprised to see a Yukon company emerging in a field usually dominated by Ontario, B.C. and Quebec.

“People are starting to look elsewhere in Canada to see who can innovate,” he said.

“We’re opening the door for northern companies as a whole.”

Robulack said he plans to bring what he learns through the Pathfinders program back into Fireweed’s development work and to Yukon First Nations. He said the cohort is united by a shared goal of creating space in an AI sector where Indigenous people have largely been left out.

Contact Jake Howarth at jake.howarth@yukon-news.com.