Calgary’s startups want a spot on your supplier list

More than 60 conversations with ranchers helped change what Agrivanna was building. 

The producers wanted fewer gadgets and a system that worked with equipment they already owned, says co-founder Amirhossein Foroughi. The Calgary startup, founded by three University of Calgary students, moved away from developing its own hardware and focused on software that could work with producers’ existing equipment.

At Made It Legal, founder Greg Ramsay says legal teams wanted standardized rules for reviewing contracts, but creating those rulebooks was a job in itself. The company added a way for its software to draft them from existing contracts, with lawyers checking the rules before the software uses them.

The two startups are among this year’s Launch Party Top 10, featured during Calgary Innovation Week from Nov. 2 to 5. Their work spans ranching, crop inputs, electrical infrastructure, classrooms, contracts, and household budgets. 

This year’s theme, “Built Here. Backed Here,” asks established Calgary businesses to consider becoming startup customers. Platform Calgary CEO Jennifer Lussier says access to those buyers is what founders keep asking her for.

“Last year was about celebrating growth and momentum,” says Lussier. “This year, founders are telling us that customer access is their number-one focus. They want Canadian enterprise buyers to open their doors, shorten procurement timelines, and actively back local innovation.”

She says established businesses are also looking for local technology partners to help solve operational problems and adopt AI, and want a structured way to meet them.

An interested buyer can still mean a long wait for a contract. Lussier says startups move in weeks, while large companies can spend quarters or years working through purchasing processes, vendor lists, and compliance requirements.

She says partnerships work when established companies make room for a smaller first step. That could mean explaining their needs through a reverse pitch, testing technology in a controlled pilot, or offering an initial contract that gives a startup a chance to demonstrate what it can do.

Innovation Week’s program is organized around different audiences. Monday focuses on founders and startups, Tuesday on technology talent and careers, Wednesday on industry and investors, and Thursday on the YYC Tech Crawl and Launch Party.

“A founder looking for capital needs a different environment than a corporate executive looking for software, or a student entering the tech workforce,” says Lussier.

Innovation Week includes more than 70 events across the city. The Top 10 pitch at their showcase on Nov. 2, when awards are announced, and are celebrated at the 16th annual Launch Party on Nov. 5 at the Platform Innovation Centre, where Platform Calgary expects more than 1,000 people.

Platform Calgary says a committee of Calgary technology and corporate leaders selected the companies for their traction, technical innovation, and potential to scale globally.

Some of these founders are preparing field trials or commercial launches. Others are selling to large companies, expanding through school networks, or finding customers across the Prairies. 

Below, they explain what they’re building, what they’ve had to change, and what comes next.

Agrivanna

Software built for a ranch has to work where there is often no cell service. Agrivanna built around that problem. 

Ranchers can record information about their cattle by speaking into a phone, even without cell service. Once they reconnect to Wi-Fi, the app turns the audio into records they can check and confirm with a tap.

CEO Amirhossein Foroughi says existing software leaves ranchers entering tag numbers and pasture moves at a desktop after a 12-hour day. He says that is why producers abandon it and records end up incomplete.

The company also maps pastures against satellite imagery to show which ones have rested enough. Two more tools are weeks away, Foroughi says. One recommends where to move the herd, showing its reasoning. The other files the annual paperwork the province requires on leased grazing land, which he says currently eats weeks in paper logs and guesswork.

Black Owl Systems

Companies have to account for the office space, vehicles, and equipment they lease. Greg Kautz says most still track those leases in spreadsheets and enter the monthly journal entries into their accounting systems by hand.

Black Owl’s software runs those calculations and generates the entries automatically. 

It covers all three sides of a lease (the company leasing something, the one leasing it out, and the one leasing something), then passing it on to someone else, under Canadian, U.S., and international rules. Kautz says most software on the market only handles the renter’s side properly. 

Kautz says the company has 11 people in Calgary, with customers ranging from mid-market companies to the Fortune 100 and 500.

Kautz is chief executive officer and his son Derek is chief operating officer. Both are CPAs, a generation apart in the profession.

“We each spent years working with accounting systems that did not quite fit what the people using them actually needed, so you build a workaround, and then another one, and eventually the workarounds become the job. Black Owl came out of deciding to stop doing that,” says Kautz. “Not many people get to build a company with their kid.”

Candidly AI

Candidly AI helps organizations ask the people affected by their decisions what they think. 

Employees, residents and others talk to an AI interviewer when it suits them, which lets the company run hundreds of conversations in a week. Those get turned into a report leaders can act on.

Founder and CEO Noah McDonough came out of management consulting at KPMG and holds a master’s in artificial intelligence. He built the company with his siblings Kennedy and Jackson.

McDonough says potential customers are familiar with surveys and town halls, so he shows them what an AI interview produces. They listen to a real conversation and read a report based on the interviews.

McDonough describes two versions. Candidly AI Studio is a self-service option for organizations that want to run interviews themselves. With Sovereign, its flagship service, Candidly helps prepare the questions, manages the interviews, and has staff review every conversation before writing the report. The company says Sovereign keeps recordings, transcripts, and AI processing in Canada.

Fledge

Fledge sends instructors into classrooms and gyms to take kids through breathing and movement exercises, the kind meant to help a child settle themselves and put words to what they’re feeling. 

It also runs workshops so teachers and parents can do the same thing without Fledge in the room. 

The platform gives both a daily activity to do with a child aged three to 12, on or off screen.

Founder and CEO Jenna Galloway has been an educator for more than 12 years, and previously founded Wymbin, an early learning studio that’s now a sister company. She says Fledge turns research on how children’s brains and bodies work, into activities a parent or teacher can do with a child right away.

Scaling meant dealing with schools that all have different needs, schedules, and resources, which Galloway says the company handled by running pilots with educators and reshaping the tools to fit a typical classroom day. Growth has come through school associations rather than one school at a time. 

A spring pilot with the Association of Independent Schools and Colleges in Alberta reached 116 educators across 33 schools, and turned into an ongoing partnership with subsidized access for member schools.

National expansion through a similar kind of partnership is next.

Leeg

Companies are spending lots of money restructuring around AI, and Leeg’s chief executive Bri Falls says they are doing it on resumes, interviews, and gut instinct.

Orgvue’s 2025 survey of 1,000 senior decision-makers found 39% had made people redundant because of an AI deployment, and 55% of those leaders said they got those calls wrong.

Leeg starts with the employee. Someone sets a goal, and the app gives them a short exercise to practise at work each day, and a prompt to reflect on the day before. Doing the work builds a record of what they can do, which stays theirs for life and gives them something to point at come review time. 

Add those records up and the employer gets a read on where employee skills can be found throughout the company, and a heads-up on where they’re likely to lose people.

Falls founded the company with Shannon Burch, Celene Campbell, and Emma Brown, and says the biggest breakthrough was the four of them learning to trust each other, with everything else following from that.

“As a fully female founded team that bootstrapped Leeg to this point, it means even more,” says Falls. “It’s recognition of the blood, sweat, and literal tears it took to get here.”

The goal now is scaling with Canadian partners before expanding into the U.S. market.

Made It Legal

Reviewing a contract means reading every clause against what your company will and won’t accept, then marking up the parts that need to change. 

Greg Ramsay has nearly 20 years of corporate legal experience, including work as an outsourced general counsel for growing technology companies.

Made It Legal created Nelle, which stores the terms a company has already decided it will accept, then suggests  edits to bring an incoming contract in line with those terms. The suggestions appear in Microsoft Word, where lawyers already work, and a real-life lawyer decides what to keep. 

Nelle also sends the contract around for sign-off, so sales, finance, and operations can approve their part and see where the deal stands.

Ramsay says legal teams wanted those standardized rulebooks and had no appetite for building them by hand. Beta opened to early customers in late September, with commercial launch planned during Innovation Week.

Paradigm Inputs

Every spring a farmer buys the chemicals that keep weeds, bugs, and disease off the crops. In Western Canada, much of it moves through a handful of big distributors. 

Mitch Johnstone, co-founder and CEO of Paradigm Inputs, says it’s the same as our telcos and our banks, and that the cost of every step between the manufacturer and the field gets added to what a farmer pays for crop protection.

Paradigm buys generic crop chemicals straight from the manufacturers and gets them approved for sale itself, then sells through independent brokers. 

Those brokers are farmers, agronomists and rural business owners, and Paradigm gives them the software to run the business, with payments, financing, inventory and delivery in one place. Johnstone says farmers pay 25% to 50% less than they would at retail.

He stopped wondering whether the model worked in the first quarter of 2026, saying the company did nearly as much business in those three months as in all of 2025, and it came from four brokers instead of one. They now have a dozen across Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.

Johnstone says agriculture “almost never” comes up when people talk about what Calgary builds.

“We’re 12 people on 11th Avenue whose revenue comes from grain farms three provinces wide,” says Johnstone.

Splice N Connect

Taban Sabih says more than half of cable-related grid failures happen where two power cables join, and many of those joints sit in underground vaults where nobody looks until the next scheduled inspection.

Sabih spent 15 years as an electrical engineer in oil and gas, including senior roles at Cenovus and Husky, before founding Splice N Connect. Her sensors clamp onto those joints without cutting into anything or taking the power down, and the software tracks whether the insulation is degrading.The company says this gives operators weeks of warning.

The hardest part of building this business was earning trust in industries where a failure has real consequences, says Sabih, and convincing an operator to let an early-stage company attach anything to live equipment. 

The way through was small, low-risk steps, with the results in hand.

A utility signed on for a pilot, and an oil and gas company put $350,000 into developing the technology without taking a stake in the business.

Sabih says those two deals are what let the company finish its pre-seed round, which closed at $1.75 million in April.

Verano.AI

Rules change constantly in energy and pipelines. 

Somebody has to read each update, work out which parts apply, check them against the company’s own policies, and fix whatever doesn’t match.

Clay Swerdelian and Renan Yamaguti watched that job up close at a compliance software company that was acquired in 2022. They built Verano.AI to hand most of this work to AI.

The company says its software reads regulatory updates as they land, works out which rules apply where, and checks them against a company’s own policies clause by clause. Where the two don’t match, it suggests changes. It runs inside systems companies already use, including ServiceNow and SAP.

Swerdelian says enterprise adoption moves slowly in regulated industries, so the company has been testing it with customers and partners already working with large companies.

Waypoint Budget

Florencia Chomski and Ahmad Jamal were both working full-time in software, earning decent salaries, but still living paycheque to paycheque. 

They took a pen and paper to a café, wrote down every goal for the next five and ten years, then listed every expense they had. Credit card balances had been building, and their wedding was further away than they thought.

“People avoid their finances because looking feels worse than not knowing,” says Chomski.

Both are developers, so they built the tool themselves. Waypoint Budget connects Canadian and U.S. bank accounts, sorts the spending, and finds the subscriptions you forgot about.

Chomski says the product launched in January 2026, arrived in app stores in June, and has reached 10,000 users from every province and territory.

Early on, the app could connect to only some of the banks users needed. Chomski says adding another bank-connection service meant committing to an annual contract, a financial stretch for the company.

They offered a discount on their highest subscription tier and saved the proceeds toward the cost. Chomski says early users helped pay for the improvement and told the founders which banks to support. Retention improved once the new connections were in place, she says.

Next up is teaching people how to use the tool, with documentation, in-app guidance, and workshops, along with preparation for open banking in Canada.