Ottawa’s private sector bets on rise of AI
Serial entrepreneur Eli Fathi has definite opinions about how Ottawa was shortchanged along the way when it came to investments for artificial intelligence. But rather than sitting back and waiting, the CEO of MindBridge Ai (Analytics Inc.) — along with members of the startup community — took matters into his own hands. Established in 2015, MindBridge Ai creates products that reduce financial risk for corporations by leveraging AI to detect anomalous transactions.
“When we saw what was happening with Element AI (in Montreal) and the support they received from Quebec, Ontario — including Ottawa — wanted to follow suit. The Ontario government put money into Toronto and Waterloo. Ottawa got zero.”
It may seem surprising, given the region had a strong tech history. But the fall of the telecom industry in 1999 and 2000 saw some spectacular failures, he says. “A number of fibre optic companies got up to $500 million but not one succeeded. So the VC world went sour.”
Fast forward 10 years; Shopify has played a key role in reviving the software industry in Ottawa. Interest has returned for establishing innovation hubs and accelerators, as has program support from Carleton and Ottawa universities and government.
The fall of such juggernauts as Nortel left a lot of incredible tech expertise on the table, says Jenna Sudds, president and executive director of the Kanata North Business Association.
The AI startup ecosystem in particular has been getting more active recently, says Victoria Lennox, co-founder and CEO of Startup Canada. So much so, the organization now regularly hosts meetups and other special events to bring together AI developers. “Everyone is talking about AI and the thriving tech hub. It’s all emerging quite rapidly.”
Lennox says MindBridge Ai is one of the key companies pushing the AI agenda, in creating a product to train the next generation of AI developers. “There’s a big vision in the community about a private-sectordriven AI accelerator. Eli Sathi has been a great startup presence in the community and in ensuring jobs have stayed here. In fact, he managed to convince a leading industry analytics expert to help them build Ottawa into an AI centre.”
That expert is Robin Grosset, MindBridge Ai’s CTO. A U.K. entrepreneur, he left a senior leadership role with IBM’s analytics group to return to his entrepreneurial roots. “With MindBridge, I saw some really interesting things happening, including a big movement to open source AI,” he says. “When that happens, the value is not the platform or the algorithms. Rather it becomes what you do and what you can create.
“Ottawa is now doing a really good job of creating the right environment to create new organizations that are delivering new value. A lot of people are now looking here for the talent, the academic programs and the support of institutions like Invest Ottawa.”
As the community shifts its focus, key areas of concentration include cybersecurity, communications and transportation, Sudds says.
“In terms of where growth is happening, next generation 5G R&D is by far the biggest sector. An incredible success has been the CENGN (Centre of Excellence for Next Generation Networks), which has received $63 million in provincial funding, and we are now working on building an accelerator.”
Stephan Jou, CTO at Interset, an AI cybersecurity startup, believes Ottawa is a perfect locale for cybersecurity analytics because such major companies as IBM, Shopify and Nokia have big data expertise.
The AI landscape in Ottawa doesn’t have enormous pockets as yet, Fathi admits.
“We don’t yet have the same critical mass we had in telecom. But it’s not as if we lost the talent (when the telecom industry fell). We can recreate that mass — so we have to find the next Shopify in order to do it.”