100 startups. One map of where Canadian AI is heading.

Building one of these startups and spot something Palconf got wrong? Tell us and we'll fix it the same day: info@palconf.com.

Canada's AI wave points at the hospital first

21 of the 100 selected startups are built for healthcare and life sciences. No other sector comes close — general workplace productivity, in second place, trails by six.

The public conversation about AI is mostly chatbots and office work, but Canada's most celebrated startup cohort is quietly pointed at wait times, clinical paperwork and disease. Those 21 span a range: AI scribes that write the clinical note while the doctor talks (Plume IA, Sylvia santé), Raman spectroscopy that helps surgeons find cancer during the operation (REVEAL Life Science), generative chemistry designing new drug molecules (Variational AI), literature reviews for drug approvals done by agents (Loon), and virtual twins that flag health issues before symptoms show up (BioTwin).

One more detail we love: at least four of these companies were founded by practicing physicians — Plume IA, Sylvia santé, Rocket Doctor and Verismo AI.

Nine out of ten build for organizations, not consumers

Only 10 of the 100 sell mainly to individual consumers. Everyone else serves other businesses and governments.

While consumer AI apps dominate headlines elsewhere, this cohort works in the back office: invoices (Aviron), email queues (Snoooz), RFP responses (SeevAI), anti-money-laundering casework (Chronhr), municipal paperwork (Carange Solutions).

Palconf counted 15 companies whose core offer is agentic — the AI finishes the task and reports back. The marketing now leads with "it's done" — the product delivers finished work rather than answering whatever you ask it. On the ground, that shift matters more than any single model release.

Sovereignty became a product

At least 10 companies on this list make the same promise: your data, and the AI that touches it, stays in Canada.

Two years ago, "where does the model run" was an engineering detail. In this cohort it's a headline feature. Nebula Block positions itself as Canada's first sovereign AI cloud. RaccoonGPT markets a made-in-Canada alternative to the big chat assistants. Piwwop sells a confidential multi-model workspace. QSnxt builds Quebec-hosted AI platforms for industry. Carange Solutions hosts its municipal assistant under Quebec's Law 25, Plume IA keeps clinical data 100% Quebec-hosted, Atolio ships self-hosted enterprise search, and Onix stores personal health data on-device.

Ottawa's $2B Sovereign AI Compute Strategy is now writing cheques — the first $66M went to 44 companies in May — and the federal AI strategy released in June made sovereign AI one of its pillars. Founders turned the moment into product. Buyers, especially in health and the public sector, are rewarding them for it.

The most interesting AI in Canada is leaving the office

19 companies build for the physical economy: mines, farms, factories, kitchens, construction sites and roads. GDP-shaped AI.

Rigid Robotics puts autonomy on mining shovels. Soralink's sensors listen to production lines for Saputo, Olymel, Agropur and Lassonde and call the failure before it happens. SpectrAI measures soil carbon on more than two million acres of farmland from satellites. Waysights drives at night photographing road signs so cities know which ones have gone dim. LiORA sinks sensors into contaminated soil for clients like Shell and Stantec. Maket generates build-ready floor plans in minutes, Bucky AI runs pre-development for home builds, Trax makes building codes searchable, and DeepSight captures a veteran machinist's know-how into AR guidance for whoever's on shift — with clients like Airbus and Volvo.

Even the restaurant back-of-house made the list twice, with Octogone and Pivot.

A Quebec engine, pulling a genuinely pan-Canadian list

Of the 76 startups with a publicly identifiable home base, 43 are in Quebec — 28 in Montreal alone. Ontario follows with 19, BC with 11.

A Montreal event, co-organized by Montreal institutions, was always going to lean Québécois — and the depth here is real: Mila is the world's largest concentration of academic deep-learning researchers, and this summer's cohort shows what grows around it. But look past the two big hubs and the list gets more interesting. Parados analyzes movement for NHL, NFL and F1 clients from Fredericton, New Brunswick. LiORA monitors soil for the energy industry from Saskatoon. GeoMate maps roads from Waterloo, OpenJustice builds legal AI at Queen's in Kingston, and IMOnline runs agentic web management out of Alberta.

The list spans six provinces and fourteen cities. For a country that worries about its regions being left out of the AI boom, that spread reaches exactly the places at risk.

The caring streak

Four startups on this list exist, in one way or another, so that somebody's grandmother is safer.

Amical builds a simple AI companion phone for seniors with cognitive disorders. Josephine Care watches over seniors at home with camera-free sensors that detect falls. OnGuardAI listens for phone scams targeting seniors and alerts the family. Konpanion builds emotion-aware companionship tech. Around them sits a wider circle with the same instinct: NURIXA helps internationally educated nurses get licensed and hired, BorderPass guides newcomers through immigration, OpenJustice widens access to legal help, Polaire turns citizens' voices into signals decision-makers can act on, and Workforce Wellness automates hospital admin so staff burn out less.

On the evidence of this list, Canadian AI has a soft spot for the people software usually forgets. We're proud of that.

Small numbers we couldn't resist

Canada's lane: applied, trusted, and close to the real economy

Together the seven insights describe one strategy. The 2026 cohort applies AI in the places Canada already runs on — hospitals, mines and factories — rather than trying to out-scale San Francisco on foundation models. What Canadian buyers now demand is trust, sovereignty and proof.

The money is going the same way. In 2025, 54 cents of every Canadian venture dollar went to AI companies, more than double the year before. Waabi's US$750M Series C in January was called the largest fundraise in Canadian history, and Cohere passed a US$7B valuation around ALL IN 2025. Those are the towers. This Top 100 is the town being built around them — a hundred mostly early-stage companies turning research strength into products that ship.

ALL IN itself tells the growth story in one line: 2,300 participants in 2023, 4,000 in 2024, 6,500 in 2025, and 7,500 expected this September.

All 100, in one place

Every company on the ALL IN 2026 Top 100, grouped the way we read them. One line each, from their own public materials. Go meet them in Montréal.