Jonah Midanik, managing partner at Forum Ventures, joins BNN Bloomberg to discuss the company’s investment in Canada and their bet on Toronto’s AI scene. <\/p>\n
A U.S.-based venture capital firm with a studio in Toronto says it will tap into Canada\u2019s \u201cmassive pool of artificial intelligence talent\u201d to help build it\u2019s next generation of AI companies. <\/p>\n
Forum Ventures launched the Toronto studio in 2023 and plans to hire Canadian talent to help launch 18 companies in the next two years, Managing Partner Jonah Midnaik told BNN Bloomberg in an interview. He said they\u2019ve launched 17 companies so far.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo for this one, we\u2019ve raised about US$25 million and you know, we\u2019ll be back out on the street hoping to add to that tally,\u201d said Midnaik<\/p>\n
\u201cThe goal is to build more international champions right here out of Toronto.\u201d<\/p>\n
Midnaik said some of the best AI advances came out of Toronto.<\/p>\n
\u201cOpen AI\u2019s CTO was out of Toronto,\u201d said Midnaik. \u201cGeoffrey Hinton famously invented neural nets here in Toronto. So that massive pool of artificial intelligence talent is what we\u2019re betting on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite Canada\u2019s past success in producing AI talent, he said there are challenges as many founders move to the U.S. due to lack of capital and support. He said the trend has been accelerating. <\/p>\n
\u201cOnly $2.1 billion was raised for venture funds last year in Canada, the lowest number we\u2019ve had in years\u201d said Midnaik. \u201cAnd there\u2019s 25 times more venture backed businesses in the U.S., up from 11 times in 2015.\u201d<\/p>\n
Midnaik said he is working to convince founders that they can build a winning company, such as Shopify, in Canada by surrounding them with best-in-class talent. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re hoping we can show them they can stay here, build global winners here and add more Canadian jobs here,\u201d said Midnaik.<\/p>\n
He said the response has been great and downstream investors are investing in Canadian businesses.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve had some of the biggest venture capital firms in the world invest in some of these businesses and back some of our Canadian founders, and some of our builds, and we\u2019re hoping to see that trend continue,\u201d said Midnaik.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jonah Midanik, managing partner at Forum Ventures, joins BNN Bloomberg to discuss the company’s investment in Canada and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":428738,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-428737","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428737","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=428737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428737\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/428738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}