Elevate Festival brings Canadian tech closer to customers and capital

A year ago, Lisa Zarzeczny described a Canadian innovation ecosystem at a crossroads.

“We are at a really pivotal moment here in Canada, and the stakes are high for all Canadians,” said the cofounder and CEO of non-profit innovation organization Elevate when we spoke in 2025, alluding to the country’s relationship with the U.S. that had already started to buckle, the rise of AI, and the digital sovereignty questions at the heart of both. 

Twelve months later, many of the same pressures are still on the minds of Canadian innovators.

Access to capital, finding customers, and the challenge of helping Canadian companies grow here while competing globally are all still on the table. 

“The stakes only continue to get higher,” Zarzeczny says in a statement. “Which is why conversations around AI and sovereignty are at the forefront of this year’s programming. Canada already has the talent and the ambition. Our job is to turn that potential into momentum.” 

The festival returns to Toronto Sept. 22-24 for its ninth year, with roughly 10,000 attendees expected at Meridian Hall and the St. Lawrence Centre. 

This year brings a new sovereign growth content track, exploring how Canada can create a stronger innovation economy while competing on a global scale. It also includes more opportunities for founder-investor meetings, new hands-on crash courses about essential tools, and a new AI-powered networking app designed to help people find the right person in a very large room.

The speaker lineup spans the homegrown and global ecosystems, including: 

• Michael Pelosi, Canadian country manager of Cohere
• Jack Newton, CEO and founder of Clio
• Eva Wong, co-founder and COO of Borrowell
• Adam Collins, chief communications officer of Reddit
• Beah Burger-Lenehan, chief product officer at DuckDuckGo

Kyle Lowry, former Toronto Raptor and now an owner of Canada’s first WNBA team, the Toronto Tempo, will headline opening night in a fireside chat. 

There is plenty happening on the mainstage, but some of the more interesting changes this year are in how Elevate is helping people find the right conversations.

Customers are part of the scale-up problem

Ahead of this year’s event, Zarzeczny and I sat down again to look at how things have changed, and what needs to happen so homegrown companies can stay here while competing on a global scale.

She admits it’s not an easy answer, and kept coming back to two things Canadian startups need.

Capital and customers.

“Canadian companies have had to go abroad to find their first customers,” she says. “So from both corporate Canada and the public service, becoming adopters of Canadian solutions is such a huge piece of that. We’ve noticed the rhetoric change there, so now I’d like to see activity and action change there as well.”

An August study from the Council of Canadian Innovators identified access to customers as one of four structural barriers companies hit as they scale. 

Founders told researchers that early domestic customers can be difficult to secure, with buyers wanting evidence of global customers first.

Zarzeczny hears the same frustration from founders.

When they approach customers outside Canada, she says, one of the first questions is which Canadian companies are they working with?

“We need to be that proof-point for startups and become their first customers, and then have them scale globally,” she says.

CIOs choosing a cybersecurity provider or AI solution still have to choose the provider that can solve the problem while meeting the organization’s requirements. 

When they ‘buy Canadian,’ these purchases build both revenue for the provider, and are a valuable first customer that can be shown to another market, a sign of domestic credibility.  

When we spoke earlier this year about Canadian procurement, Keith Jansa, executive director of the Digital Governance Council (DGC) said that members also flagged early customer engagement as one of the best ways to strengthen Canadian companies.

“Having that first customer, for a CIO, it’s about creating value back to the customer,” he said.

Elevate’s goal is to put more of those potential buyers, founders, and investors within reach of each other.

“Your customers are everything,” Zarzeczny says, adding that capital and customers “are the two most important ingredients for a startup.”

When Canadian founders do secure capital and customers, the results can be globally competitive. But, according to Zarzeczny, Canadians are often too quiet about their own wins. 

“I feel as Canadians we can be very negative at times and very down on ourselves,” she said, pointing to recent story Kepler Communications, which has actively competed against global giants Amazon and Starlink, as the first company to offer commercial space data relay services.

Sovereignty gets practical

The same buying decisions also raise another question Elevate is spending more time on this year. 

How much of Canada’s technology infrastructure should remain under Canadian control?

​​To illustrate the stakes, Zarzeczny points to a thought experiment published by the Canadian Shield Institute, titled “A Day in the Life Without American Tech.” 

It’s exactly as it sounds, wherein the reader is asked to imagine an apocalyptic event taking out U.S. tech overnight. We’d lose access to the obvious (no more Instagram doomscrolling or all-hands-on Teams meetings), but what about all those digital products and services that rely on U.S.-based cloud services? 

It’s a chilling thought, and not just because the article flags Google Nest smart thermometres.

“It’s fascinating when you see how reliant we are when it comes to getting our news, communication — all of these things that we would lose access to,” she says.

In the festival’s new half-day track dedicated to sovereign growth, developed with DMZ and BDC, programming covers areas including dual-use technology, cloud sovereignty, and cybersecurity.

She points to the growing interest in Canadian alternatives as businesses reconsider their dependence on foreign technology providers. 

At the same time, she says she sees a chance to connect that conversation with another persistent problem in the ecosystem, by giving Canadian companies more opportunities to sell at home.

Turning a crowd into useful connections

Event networking can quickly become wandering around with a coffee and hoping the person you need happens to walk by.

Elevate is trying to make it less random.

Its new AI-powered festival app will recommend people to meet based on an attendee’s profile, interests, and objectives. Zarzeczny describes it as a target list that can point someone toward relevant founders, customers, investors, or peers.

The festival has also doubled the capacity of its meeting exchange program, where capital-ready early and growth-stage startups can get advice and build relationships with investors. Elevate says it will facilitate more than 750 curated one-on-one meetings, while Zarzeczny says 120 investors will be on site meeting founders looking for funding, advice, or mentorship. 

Canadian founders need capital, companies need customers, and tech leaders are weighing sovereignty alongside cost, capability, and risk. Organizations using AI have to work through governance and implementation.

Zarzeczny says she wants Elevate to create the conditions for some of those conversations to move into the next step.

“I would love for people to walk away from Elevate having learned a new skill, met a co-founder, found an investor, received mentorship, and have really learned or done something that has allowed their business to grow and scale,” she says.

As for the hand-wringing that often dominates discussions about Canada’s economic future, Zarzeczny has no patience for it.

At the end of our last conversation in 2025, I threw in a just-for-fun question, asking what’s one thing in Canada’s innovation story that drives her nuts.

“The constant narrative around Canadians being risk averse,” she said at the time, citing the “huge aspirations and global visions” of founders she’s connected with.

This year, I revisited the question, where she offered what is essentially the other side of that narrative.

“I would love Canadians, and the Canadian tech and innovation ecosystem, [to] be really proud of success, and the successful companies and the successful moments, and call greater attention to them,” she says.

Headlines often “go negative,” she tells me, focusing on challenges and what we don’t have in Canada. While there’s truth there, the “incredible stories” can sometimes be buried.

“I call bullshit on a lot of these things,” Zarzeczny says, about Canada’s risk-averse reputation. “I think we have incredible ambition. We have incredible talent, and we have founders across Canada who aren’t listening to the noise. They are so heads-down in building category-defining companies here that I’m super proud of.”

Final shots

• Canadian technology buyers can play a direct role in whether homegrown companies get the customers they need to scale.
• Sovereignty is increasingly showing up inside ordinary technology decisions about vendors, data, infrastructure, and ownership.
• Elevate’s 2026 additions focus on what happens after people meet, from investor conversations to policies they can put to work.