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Most clinical AI companies are racing toward the patient. Compiled Health is running the other way. Christian Chartier is a physician by training, admitted to McGill's fast-track medical program at 19, stepped away halfway through to study math and computer science, came back to finish, and graduated residency about a year ago. Along the way he spun a research project into a real product: image generation for plastic surgeons, letting patients see a plausible post-operative result before consenting to surgery. That thread, informed consent, and the time it takes to actually get it, runs through everything he's building now. With his co-founder Antoine, Christian started Compiled Health after noticing a specific failure in primary care. In a twelve-minute visit, a physician is expected to recall an effectively infinite rule set from memory, fact-find, and then counsel the patient on trade-offs. The counselling is what gets crowded out. Compiled's answer is a pipeline that ingests guidelines and consensus documents and compiles them into machine-readable artifacts — think decision trees, or a game of twenty questions that reliably terminates at the right next step.

Sam Witherspoon is the CEO and co-founder of Anvil, a Canadian company building the information layer behind military intelligence, pulling data out of siloed networks and repositories, normalizing it into a single open standard, and serving it up through mission applications that turn work that used to take hours or days into seconds or minutes. Roughly a decade in, Anvil sells across NATO, has just crossed 100 people, and has never taken venture capital. We get into why Sam deliberately refuses commercial business, how a 30-minute training burden became his sharpest differentiator against the giants in the category, and the moral conversation Canada isn't having about lethal autonomous weapons systems. Sam is candid about the risks of the current defense funding boom, what he tells founders who show up looking for a government contract, and why he can't honestly promise a VC that a dollar in becomes a dollar thirteen out. In this episode: What Anvil actually does, and why everything lives in silos "Victory through information advantage" — the mission, and selling across NATO How Anvil differs from Palantir: 30 minutes of training, open APIs, no ambition to be everything to everyone Why target development and weapons interfacing shouldn't exist in the private sector Sensor fusion in practice: distinguishing a T-90 from a farmer's tractor AI, Jevons paradox, and the danger of abstracting the human out of a targeting decision Canada's bright red line on lethal autonomous weapons — and the debate we're avoiding The origin story: banker's boxes, Steelcase as first paying customer, then RCMP and USSOCOM Cracking Canadian procurement: an active clearance, a reference customer, and an engineer-lawyer Warnings for defense tech founders: entitlement, "move fast and break things," and who's swimming naked when the tide goes out Air-gapped networks, hot-swappable models, and gold-standard human-annotated evals The magic wand: what is Canada's actual role in the world? Why defense doesn't fit the traditional venture model — 32 potential customers on Earth Hiring, growing in "gulps," and why Sam is optimistic about this moment in Canadian history

Sam Witherspoon is the CEO and co-founder of Anvil, a Canadian company building the information layer behind military intelligence, pulling data out of siloed networks and repositories, normalizing it into a single open standard, and serving it up through mission applications that turn work that used to take hours or days into seconds or minutes. Roughly a decade in, Anvil sells across NATO, has just crossed 100 people, and has never taken venture capital. We get into why Sam deliberately refuses commercial business, how a 30-minute training burden became his sharpest differentiator against the giants in the category, and the moral conversation Canada isn't having about lethal autonomous weapons systems. Sam is candid about the risks of the current defense funding boom, what he tells founders who show up looking for a government contract, and why he can't honestly promise a VC that a dollar in becomes a dollar thirteen out. In this episode: What Anvil actually does, and why everything lives in silos "Victory through information advantage" — the mission, and selling across NATO How Anvil differs from Palantir: 30 minutes of training, open APIs, no ambition to be everything to everyone Why target development and weapons interfacing shouldn't exist in the private sector Sensor fusion in practice: distinguishing a T-90 from a farmer's tractor AI, Jevons paradox, and the danger of abstracting the human out of a targeting decision Canada's bright red line on lethal autonomous weapons — and the debate we're avoiding The origin story: banker's boxes, Steelcase as first paying customer, then RCMP and USSOCOM Cracking Canadian procurement: an active clearance, a reference customer, and an engineer-lawyer Warnings for defense tech founders: entitlement, "move fast and break things," and who's swimming naked when the tide goes out Air-gapped networks, hot-swappable models, and gold-standard human-annotated evals The magic wand: what is Canada's actual role in the world? Why defense doesn't fit the traditional venture model — 32 potential customers on Earth Hiring, growing in "gulps," and why Sam is optimistic about this moment in Canadian history

Zaid Al Hamami built Immunio in the early 2010s, sold it to Trend Micro, and is now back at it with Boost Security. He joins Nectar to talk about what changes when you build a cybersecurity company twice, fifteen years apart. The conversation traces Zaid's path from coding as a kid in Jordan to running product at Canonical, founding Immunio and navigating the RASP category consolidation, and the market insight behind Boost: securing software at the speed that AI now writes it. What gets covered: Why "if you build it, they will come" nearly cost Immunio its shot What Mythos actually changes for cybersecurity, and where it's overhyped The economics of running frontier models on every pull request (hint: tens of millions) Developer endpoints as the new CISO blindspot CI/CD pipelines as the next supply chain attack surface Why agile is dead and the best engineering teams are now three people How one major airline restructured 600 developers into 200 three-person pods Founder scar tissue from a first exit, and what ports over to the second company Plus the story of Zaid and Nectar being WeWork neighbors years before Amiral ended up investing in Boost.

Zaid Al Hamami built Immunio in the early 2010s, sold it to Trend Micro, and is now back at it with Boost Security. He joins Nectar to talk about what changes when you build a cybersecurity company twice, fifteen years apart. The conversation traces Zaid's path from coding as a kid in Jordan to running product at Canonical, founding Immunio and navigating the RASP category consolidation, and the market insight behind Boost: securing software at the speed that AI now writes it. What gets covered: Why "if you build it, they will come" nearly cost Immunio its shot What Mythos actually changes for cybersecurity, and where it's overhyped The economics of running frontier models on every pull request (hint: tens of millions) Developer endpoints as the new CISO blindspot CI/CD pipelines as the next supply chain attack surface Why agile is dead and the best engineering teams are now three people How one major airline restructured 600 developers into 200 three-person pods Founder scar tissue from a first exit, and what ports over to the second company Plus the story of Zaid and Nectar being WeWork neighbors years before Amiral ended up investing in Boost.

Bachar Elzein knew at 13 he wanted to build rockets. Twenty-five years later, he's the founder & CEO of Reaction Dynamics — the Montreal-based company building Canada's first orbital launch capability. In this episode, Bachar breaks down the hybrid propulsion breakthrough that makes RDX's rockets cheaper, safer, and deployable from virtually anywhere — including the back of a truck. We talk about what it takes to survive nine years building deep tech, skipping payroll, and betting everything on a technology the market wasn't ready for. We also get into the geopolitics: why Canada is the only G7 country without sovereign launch capability, what the recent federal backing means, and why allied nations are now paying attention. A rare conversation at the intersection of frontier engineering, national strategy, and founder resilience.

Two years after first appearing on the Flagship Podcast, Nectar, Fred, and Dom reunite for a long-overdue conversation: Amiral Ventures has officially closed Fund 1. In this candid episode, the three partners trace the origins of the fund: how Fred's entrepreneurial journey (including co-developing LTE at Nortel and a successful Series A & B raise at Mnubo) first brought him together with Dom, a veteran M&A banker who went on to launch Xpnd Capital and deliver two IPOs. Nectar rounds out the team, coming off years of post-investment value creation work at PNR and crossing paths with Fred through this very podcast. The conversation gets real about what it actually takes to raise a fund from scratch: nearly three years in the trenches, no product to show, just a slide deck and conviction. They share what they've learned, the primacy of trust-building, the importance of giving candid feedback to founders (even on a "no"), and the gap they're filling in the Canadian ecosystem at the seed-to-Series A inflection point. The team also lifts the curtain on their Prosperity Decoded thesis, backing AI-native companies driving enterprise productivity, sustainability, and resilience; and spotlights their first two portfolio companies: Maxa (AI for CFOs and FP&A) and Maket (AI for residential architecture and design). They close on what excites them most: the caliber of Quebec founders, the community of successful exits now back as LPs and mentors, and the long game of building Canada's next generation of flagship technology companies.

Today I'm joined by Anthony, co-founder of General Magic and one of the most exciting young builders coming out of the Canadian AI ecosystem. We talk about his journey from building robots as a kid to launching startups while still in university, what he learned from failing his first company, and how General Magic is rethinking the way humans interact with software using natural language. We also dive into their recent $7M seed round, going through a16z Speedrun, and why the future of computing might move beyond the traditional graphical interface. I really enjoyed this conversation, Anthony is thoughtful, ambitious, and building something genuinely interesting. Let's get into it.

In this episode of the Flagship Podcast, we sit down with Tyler Reid, co-founder and CEO of Xona Space, to explore the future of satellite navigation and why GPS as we know it is no longer enough. Tyler shares his journey from space-obsessed kid to Stanford researcher to venture-backed space founder, and explains how Zona is building a next-generation positioning system designed for centimeter-level accuracy, stronger signals, and built-in security. We unpack how modern infrastructure depends on timing and location, why GPS is vulnerable to jamming and spoofing, and what new satellite constellations unlock for autonomous systems, defense, data centers, and everyday devices. We also go deep on building a hard-tech startup: raising capital for space infrastructure, launching satellites, assembling the right team, and navigating the long road from research to orbit. If you're interested in space tech, deep tech startups, autonomous systems, or the new space economy, this episode is for you. Topics covered: Why GPS needs an upgrade How next-gen satellite navigation works Centimeter-level positioning and resilient timing Space infrastructure and low-Earth orbit constellations From PhD research to space startup Lessons from building a hardware + space company The coming wave of space innovation and lunar missions

What does it really take to build a unicorn-scale company from Canada? At North Star, the Unicorn Panel brings together founders behind global tech leaders to talk candidly about ambition, scaling, capital, leadership, near-death moments, and the realities behind the highlight reel. Moderated by Sophie Boulanger, this conversation goes beyond success stories and digs into the hard decisions: when not to sell, how to think about control and cap tables, scaling teams, surviving crises, and building companies with long-term impact. You'll hear firsthand lessons from founders who have built and scaled category-defining businesses across gaming, mobility, and healthcare technology Topics covered include: Early exit offers vs long-term ambition Scaling from startup to global platform Fundraising strategy and cap table discipline Hiring executives and leadership evolution Crisis moments and near failures Building and keeping tech champions in Canada AI, moats, and the future of company building Recorded live at North Star — Inspiring Entrepreneurs in Montréal.

Two of Montreal's most iconic tech founders — Dax Dasilva (Lightspeed) and Fred Lalonde (Hopper & Deep Sky) — sit down for a rare and candid fireside conversation on building global companies from Canada, surviving the founder rollercoaster, and using technology and capitalism to tackle world-scale problems. From bootstrapping and product-market fit, to IPOs, hypergrowth, culture, leadership, and climate action — this keynote goes deep into what it really takes to build enduring companies. This is not a highlight reel. It's an unfiltered operator conversation. In this keynote, they discuss: Bootstrapping vs venture capital journeys The hardest leadership transitions founders face How company culture is actually built (not what's written on the wall) Product-market fit stories from Lightspeed and Hopper Scaling teams from 10 → 1,000+ people Founder psychology, resilience, and decision-making under pressure Why trust is the ultimate currency with teams and boards Capitalism as a lever for large-scale positive change Climate, carbon removal, and building Deep Sk Conservation, Age of Union, and purpose beyond exits Speakers: Dax Dasilva — Founder & CEO, Lightspeed Fred Lalonde — Co-founder, Hopper; Founder, Deep Sky Recorded live in front of founders and students at North Star in Montreal. If you're a founder, operator, investor, or student thinking about building — this conversation is a masterclass in real-world company building.

At North Star, we brought together top founders and emerging entrepreneurs for a candid panel on what it really takes to build in today's tech ecosystem — from first traction to scale, hard lessons, and unfair advantages. In this session, the panel shares practical insights on: How to get your first real customers Mistakes founders make early (and how to avoid them) Fundraising vs. bootstrapping decisions Building momentum with limited resources What great investors actually look for Tactical growth and execution tips If you're a founder, operator, investor, or student exploring startups, this conversation is packed with field-tested perspective and actionable advice. About North Star North Star is a founder-first gathering that brings together startup builders, investors, and students to share real stories, practical lessons, and ecosystem insights.

This is the North Star Pre-Show — recorded live as a Tech Poutine podcast session — where founders, investors, and ecosystem builders warm up the room before the main event with unscripted startup talk, real operator stories, and behind-the-scenes insights. This pre-show segment sets the stage for an exciting day filled with inspiration and insight from a dynamic lineup of entrepreneurs. Reflecting on last year's success, the hosts discuss the unique value of gathering experienced founders and ambitious young entrepreneurs, all while growing the event to new heights. Hear about keynote speakers Dax and Fred, as well as engaging panels with industry leaders like Adrian and LP. This episode captures the essence of Montreal's tech scene and the vibrant community driving it forward. About North Star North Star brings together hundreds of founders, students, and investors for high-signal conversations and practical startup insight. About Tech Poutine Tech Poutine is a live startup podcast focused on founders, venture, and the Canadian tech ecosystem.

We closed out the year with a special live recording of the Flagship Podcast in collaboration with AI Salon at Mila, a packed evening featuring a Montréal VC panel, an AI founder roundtable, and a fireside keynote with Sam Ramadori (BrainBox AI, now co-president of Law Zero). Across all three segments, one theme dominated: AI is moving faster than any tech cycle before it, and Canada has a once-in-a-generation chance to lead. VC Panel,  Navigating the AI Wave Investors from Inovia, White Star, and Amiral Ventures explored the chaos and opportunity of today's market. The AI cycle is "psychotic" in speed and scope, but the fundamentals still matter: strong teams, sticky products, real customer value. The best startups will use AI as an enabler, not the product, and differentiate through privileged data, deep domain expertise, and the ability to deliver ROI, not hype. Founder Panel,  Building Real AI Companies in Montréal Budpress, Maxa, and Wrk shared candid takes from the front lines: why traditional SaaS is being rewritten, how open-source models and reasoning engines are changing the game, and why Montréal remains one of the best bases in the world for AI talent and cost-efficient scaling. The founders stressed that Canada must shed its "small market" mindset, big outcomes are possible here. Keynote with Sam Ramadori,  AI, Climate, and Responsibility Sam recounted his unlikely journey from private equity to leading BrainBox AI through an acquisition, and why he's now dedicating himself to Law Zero, a nonprofit effort led by Yoshua Bengio to build safer, more reliable AI systems. His message was clear: Canada has extraordinary AI talent, but must rally around sovereignty, responsible innovation, and deeper collaboration to avoid being squeezed between global superpowers. The night ended with a message to the community: this is our moment. We have world-class research, world-class founders, and a fast-maturing ecosystem. If we choose ambition, and support one another, Montréal can be one of the defining AI hubs of this decade.

In this insightful episode, we turn the tables on Josh Scott from BetaKit, delving into his journey in journalism and passion for Canadian tech. Josh shares his early writing experiences, challenges in the industry, and the invigorating process of reporting on tech startups. We dive into engaging discussions on the evolution of journalism, the state of Canadian tech, the intricacies of venture capital, and the policy landscape shaping the tech industry. With candid reflections on past stories and predictions for future trends, Josh offers a compelling look at the importance of transparent reporting and the dynamic world of Canadian tech.