Assessing our 2024 technology forecasts as we approach Q4.

It’s already September, which means the year is almost over. The kids are back in school, the long weekends at home are long gone, and Q4 is almost here. It seems like the perfect time to reflect on what’s happened so far in 2024, before we welcome 2025.

Luckily, The BetaKit Podcast has two episodes featuring 2024 predictions and big tech questions, so I can easily look back on the year and — most importantly — gauge my peers’ assessments.

AI dominated both conversations. As podcast co-host Rob Kenedi correctly predicted, companies are devoting significant time and resources to establishing use cases for the hallucinatory technology. Big Tech has spent more than $150 billion in CapEx over the past 12 months, and AI companies continue to secure large rounds in the cold market, with recent examples including Radical Ventures’ $800 million fund, Cohere’s $500 million round, and OpenAI’s reported $6.5 billion in ongoing fundraising.

But what about return on investment? One of BetaKit editor-in-chief Douglas Soltys’s big questions for 2024 was whether AI would become “de facto or verboten.” Apple and Google, which are both incorporating AI into their major consumer smartphone launches, would suggest the former, but Sequoia’s quest for revenue growth has become a $600 billion question. Nvidia can’t remain the only company making money from AI.

The podcast also considered whether 2024 will see a return to tech IPOs. Almost as many public companies have returned to the private sector this year as we saw tech IPOs during the boom in 2021. Investors have told me that founders don’t like dealing with the burden and scrutiny that comes with being listed on a stock exchange, but a recent report from The Globe and Mail points to more structural problems in nurturing Canadian companies to public markets.

Nearly nine months later, everything seems to be reflecting what BDC called “uncertain market conditions” in our story below. How do you predict the year will end? My inbox is open.

Bianca Bharti

Newsletter Editor

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BDC Appoints Geneviève Bouthillier as Head of BDC Capital

The announcement comes a little over three months after BetaKit reported the departure of Jérôme Nycz as EVP and head of BDC Capital after more than a decade in the role. Nycz left the organization in July. Following his sudden and unexpected retirement, BDC CFO Christian Settano took over Nycz’s role. Bouthillier will take the helm from this point forward.

Bouthillier’s leadership of BDC Capital comes at a particularly challenging time for the Canadian VC market, and by extension, the country’s tech startups. BDC’s latest annual report reflects that: The publicly traded corporation cut the value of its VC portfolio by $220 million, noting that its fiscal 2024 results were “below plan,” in part due to “uncertain market conditions.”

Academics, nonprofits locked in data consent fight as AI companies push for access to copyrighted works

While large AI companies like OpenAI, Cohere, and Anthropic are looking for more copyrighted works to use to train their models, it’s academia, nonprofits, and early-stage AI startups that are struggling the most to find materials to use, experts told BetaKit.

Restrictions are being rapidly added or enforced on much of the data that companies use to train their models. OpenAI, Microsoft, Stability AI, Anthropic, Udio, and Suno are facing copyright infringement lawsuits from newspapers, authors, and some of the world’s largest record labels. A growing number of online publishers are trying to prevent AI web crawlers from scraping their content.

“This means that for organizations and AI developers who respect the preferences specified in the robots.txt file, the quality of the models they can produce will be lower,” said Shayne Longpre, lead of the Data Provenance Initiative.

Teachers’ union Paper threatens legal action after mass layoffs

Earlier this year, Ontario’s COPE Local 131 and SEPB-Québec Local 574 were accredited to represent Paper tutors in collective bargaining after a secret ballot. Both unions were still in the process of preparing their first negotiations when Paper laid off all of its tutors, SEPB-Québec told BetaKit in an email.

“SEPB-Québec will take all legal steps it deems necessary to ensure fair treatment of its employees,” the union said in a statement.

OMERS Ventures to be Transferred to New Private Capital Group Led by Michael Block

After OMERS Ventures Managing Partner and Global Head of Venture Damien Steel left for a portfolio company, industry observers speculated to BetaKit that the Canadian pension fund would soon wind down its venture capital arm under Michael Block. Almost a year ago, that prediction came true.

On September 10, OMERS announced the promotion of Block, previously a senior managing director at OMERS Private Equity, to head of its newly formed Private Capital Group. In this new role, Block will oversee Ventures, Growth, Green Tech, Life Sciences, European and Asia-Pacific Private Equity, as well as the firm’s global fund strategy.

Saskatchewan tech employment doubles in four years: report

According to data released Tuesday at a news conference hosted by the government’s innovation agency in Saskatoon, employment in the province’s technology sector grew by nearly 109 per cent to 5,489 workers from 2019 to 2023. Between 2016 and 2023, the technology sector accounted for 10 per cent of all new jobs created in the province, more than mining and manufacturing, even though those sectors are larger.

Saskatchewan’s technology sector has created an average of 715 jobs per year since 2016, allowing the province to exceed its goal of creating 7,893 jobs by 2030.

Artificial intelligence learns quickly, right?

At St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, healthcare workers will soon use AI-powered tools to identify patients most at risk of being admitted to the intensive care unit.

In radiation oncology, scientists are using AI to speed up treatment planning, allowing them to provide faster, more precise care.

You might think that training AI models to solve serious medical problems would be the hardest part of these workplace initiatives. But it turns out that programming humans is even harder.

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Financing, Acquisitions and Layoffs

SFO – Land Base – $12.5 million
VAN – DIGITAL invests CAD 53 million in 11 projects
VAN – Teal acquired by Mercury
VAN – Catalera BioSolutions – CAD 8.8 million
VAN – Spare – $42 million
TOR – Ecomtent – CAD 1.15 million
TOR/PHL – Radiant Biotherapeutics – USD 35 million
MTL – Luge Capital – CAD 96 million
OTT – Kahi – 2.3 million Canadian dollars
HFX – Iris Booth Acquired by Rundle Partners

BetaKit Podcast

Pablo Srugo Wanted to Be “Insanely Rich.” It Killed His Startup.

“It was mine. It was done. I was going to be the next Steve Jobs, I was going to be rich — everything was happening. And now they’ve taken it away from me.”

As the young co-founder of Ottawa-based Gymtrack, Pablo Srugo had one goal: “to get incredibly rich.” Now a partner at Mistral VC, he joins the podcast to share what went wrong and warn founders against becoming their worst hypebeast.

Lead image courtesy of Cohere.