Founders warn peers to stay in Canada as brain drain continues to threaten local innovation
Rejecting a nine-figure US acquisition offer, Cohere Inc. co-founder Aidan Gomez said any exit that removes a company from Canada amounts to failure—a position he says his team stood firmly behind despite board-level discussions.
Speaking at Toronto Tech Week, Gomez said the choice to stay was intentional: “Any sort of exit that would take us out of Canada is only if we fail. And we haven’t failed.”
According to The Globe and Mail, Gomez called on Canadian founders to reject foreign pressure, especially from US buyers and funders.
“Refuse. Don’t do it. You’re here to build a Canadian company. We need this,” he told a room of entrepreneurs, warning that Canada’s sovereignty “has been opened and it can’t be closed.”
Shopify president Harley Finkelstein and Wealthsimple CEO Michael Katchen joined Gomez in urging founders to keep their companies—and ambitions—based in Canada.
As per BNN Bloomberg, Katchen said, “We have a desperate need to build Canada and to really reshape our economy and the only way to do that is through entrepreneurship.”
Gomez added that many entrepreneurs reach out asking how to incorporate in Delaware, but he advises them to “fight to appease venture capitalists” while keeping their Canadian headquarters.
“We’re still growing super quickly, so I think acquisition is failure,” he said.
Shopify’s early resistance to US pressure mirrored that of Cohere.
Finkelstein said the company ignored phone calls related to mergers and acquisitions to avoid initiating conversations that could lead to a sale.
During its Series A round, US investors insisted Shopify move south in exchange for funding.
The company declined and eventually found funders who were “content to let them build in Canada,” according to The Globe and Mail.
As per BNN Bloomberg, Finkelstein recalled that when he and CEO Tobi Lütke left Ottawa, the assumption was they were heading to the US.
Lütke moved to Toronto, and Finkelstein returned to Montreal. “The great decision I think I ever made was staying here,” he said.
Cohere, one of the world’s top AI companies, received up to $240m from the federal government in 2023 under Ottawa’s sovereign artificial intelligence compute program.
According to The Globe and Mail, the company’s data centre is being built by CoreWeave Inc., a US-based firm and indirect recipient of the funds.
Gomez stressed that Canada’s brand has helped Cohere on the global stage, especially amid geopolitical shifts. But he added that Canadian investors must “step up” if domestic innovation is to thrive.
He pointed to the broader threat of brain drain, saying the issue is not ambition, but retention.
While interning at Google, he said he noticed many Canadians working in AI roles. “It’s that Valley-or-bust mentality which breaks the ecosystem and really hurts Canada,” he said.
The concern is reflected in earlier data.
According to BNN Bloomberg, a 2018 LinkedIn study showed 66 percent of software engineering and 30 percent of computer science grads from the Universities of Toronto, British Columbia and Waterloo in 2015–2016 left Canada for work.
Katchen said he returned to Canada from the US because he was “deeply worried about the trajectory here.”
He added, “We do two things here: we pull things out of the ground and we finance pulling things out of the ground,” and said he did not want that to be Canada’s legacy for his children.
Still, competition for Canadian startups is intensifying.
Ajay Agrawal, founder of the Creative Destruction Lab and professor at the Rotman School of Management, said at a Toronto Tech Week panel that more US venture capitalists are investing in early-stage Canadian companies.
“There’s a lot more capital flow, and competition. That means our local venture capital community now has to compete with US investors,” he said, as reported by The Globe and Mail.
Toronto Tech Week replaced the Collision Conference with more than 300 events hosted by companies, universities and organisations across the city.
According to The Globe and Mail, over 15,000 attendees registered.
Ameet Shah, partner at Golden Ventures and board member for the event, said it grew out of locally organised offsite events during the prior Collision. “We wanted something that would be authentic to the community, and city, and country,” he said.
