{"id":424506,"date":"2026-01-21T22:20:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T22:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/424506\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T22:20:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T22:20:09","slug":"quebecs-mila-institute-raising-100-million-fund-for-ai-startups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/424506\/","title":{"rendered":"Quebec\u2019s Mila institute raising $100-million fund for AI startups"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

The Mila building in Montreal. The AI institute is partnering with Inovia Capital to raise a US$100-million venture capital fund with plans to invest in more than 55 early-stage AI firms.ROGER LEMOYNE\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

The Mila artificial intelligence<\/a> institute in Quebec is raising a US$100-million venture capital fund with plans to invest in more than 55 early-stage AI companies, in partnership with Inovia Capital in Montreal, as the federally backed research hub puts a greater focus on helping scientists spin out businesses.<\/p>\n

The Venture Scientist Fund, as it will be called, has not closed yet. But Mila Ventures director-general St\u00e9phane Marceau said there is strong interest from potential investors. \u201cWe\u2019ve had so much inbound from Canada and the U.S.,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The fund will target pre-seed AI companies based on emerging research not just from Mila, but Canada\u2019s wider ecosystem, including universities. <\/p>\n

Dominion Dynamics, vying to become Canadian defence \u2018neoprime,\u2019 raises $21-million led by Georgian<\/a><\/p>\n

Competition for top AI talent is fierce, and the goal of the Venture Scientist Fund is to help keep talent and intellectual property in Canada. \u201cResearchers have essentially told us, \u2018We need support from our institutions. We need access to capital,\u2019\u201d Mr. Marceau said. <\/p>\n

A serial entrepreneur and angel investor, Mr. Marceau joined Mila last year to lead its ventures arm, which has programs to help commercialize research. He has seen firsthand the pull that the United States can exert on Canadian AI experts. <\/p>\n

\u201cThey publish a paper, they go to the U.S., and they come back with a big cheque,\u201d he said. \u201cWe need to get very active at the ground level and be in the conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Canadian researchers have played an outsized role in foundational AI breakthroughs (rare is the Canadian AI conference that doesn\u2019t laud Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Richard Sutton), the economic benefits have largely accrued to U.S companies such as Google and OpenAI. The country is home to roughly 10 per cent of the world\u2019s top AI research talent, but the capital deployed by Canadian funds in 2024 amounted to less than 2 per cent of global venture capital investment into AI, according to Mila.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Yoshua Bengio, Mila’s founder and scientific adviser, in Montreal in 2023.Christinne Muschi\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

A study last year by venture capital firm Leaders Fund found that just 32.4 per cent of Canadian-led \u201chigh potential\u201d startups<\/a> launched in 2024 were headquartered in the country. <\/p>\n

The federal government is preparing a new national AI strategy to be released later this year. More effectively commercializing homegrown AI research is one priority of the plan.<\/p>\n

Mila, along with the Vector Institute in Toronto and the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, have the advantage of being close to the kind of fundamental AI research that can be used for new commercial products and services. A recent survey of the wider Mila community also found that nearly 95 per cent of respondents were interested in entrepreneurship. \u201cIt\u2019s such a myth that researchers want to just do research,\u201d Mr. Marceau said.<\/p>\n

Inovia, which has backed Canadian AI companies Cohere Inc., Signal 1 and Spellbook, will invest in the fund, but did not disclose the amount. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis fund is really meant to build that bridge between research and commercialization,\u201d said Inovia co-founder and partner Chris Arsenault. <\/p>\n

Jagged edges and bottlenecks: The confusing uneven capabilities of AI<\/a><\/p>\n

While Canada is home to a number of funds that invest in AI companies, the country does not have one focused exclusively on pre-seed, AI-native startups. \u201cThis is not bolting AI onto an existing product,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Inovia will not be managing the fund, but it is helping Mila assemble a small leadership team.<\/p>\n

Mila has spawned companies in the past. Dr. Bengio, Mila\u2019s former scientific director, co-founded Element AI, which was bought by California-based ServiceNow Inc. NOW-N<\/a> in 2020. Drug discovery startup Valence was purchased by Recursion Pharmaceuticals Inc., based in Utah, in 2023.<\/p>\n

More recently, AI-powered citizen engagement platform Polaire and automation company Rise Robotics have been hatched from Mila.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: The Mila building in Montreal. The AI institute is partnering with Inovia Capital…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":424507,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,901,276,277,888,902,879,877,903,49,48,876,895,896,891,878,875,46,549,295,894,887,914,880,881,893,889,890,884,904,885,909,910,912,907,911,905,908,882,898,899,714,897,906,865,61,900,892,886,883,913],"class_list":["post-424506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-alberta","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-arts-news","tag-bc","tag-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news-video","tag-british-columbia","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-canada-news","tag-canada-sports","tag-canada-sports-news","tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","tag-canadian-breaking-news","tag-canadian-news","tag-economy","tag-education","tag-environment","tag-federal-government","tag-foreign-news","tag-globe-and-mail","tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","tag-government","tag-life-news","tag-lifestyle","tag-local-news","tag-manitoba","tag-national-news","tag-new-brunswick","tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","tag-northwest-territories","tag-nova-scotia","tag-nunavut","tag-ontario","tag-pei","tag-photos","tag-political-news","tag-political-opinion","tag-politics","tag-politics-news","tag-quebec","tag-sports-news","tag-technology","tag-travel","tag-trudeau","tag-us-news","tag-world-news","tag-yukon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424506\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/424507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}