Jennifer Lussier, interim CEO at Platform Calgary, shares the 2025 impact report on Feb. 19, 2026. – Photo by Jennifer Friesen, Digital Journal
On a blisteringly cold Thursday in Calgary, it was standing room only around the stage at Platform Calgary.
Founders, investors, students, corporate leaders, and policymakers packed into the community space yesterday for the 2026 Community Connect Kick-Off, an event examining where Calgary’s innovation economy is headed.
Platform Calgary, a nonprofit organization that supports startups and tech companies across the city, released its 2025 impact report showing $323 million raised last year and more than $1 billion in cumulative capital. The network now includes more than 850 companies. The formation engine is working, but what’s less clear is what happens once those companies outgrow it.
Interim CEO Jennifer Lussier walked through the numbers of capital raised, companies formed, and founders served. The figures showed an ecosystem that has matured. The discussion that followed shifted to what happens once those companies begin raising larger rounds.
By the time Minister of Technology and Innovation Nate Glubish stepped to the podium, the numbers had already outlined a sector that’s expanding.
“We used to lose all of our talent,” he said. “Now we’re losing our ideas and our companies. We need to stop that.”
A 2025 CVCA reports shows that U.S. investors participate heavily in larger Canadian funding rounds, particularly at Series B and later. Influence, as it often does, follows capital.
“The ownership stake of those companies, the cap table, is now controlled in many cases, by Americans,” said Glubish. “The challenge there is then you have investors who don’t care about Alberta. They just care about making money, and they often will exercise their influence and their ownership to compel the founders to move that company to a different jurisdiction.”
Listening to the panel and keynote together, three themes emerged. Who leads large funding rounds, who becomes the first serious customer, and who ultimately owns the upside.
They all address the same vulnerability. When companies reach scale, control can move elsewhere.
Lever one: Anchor capital at scale
The impact report shows Calgary can produce companies and attract capital. But who sets the terms when the funding rounds get bigger?
At that stage, the pool of domestic lead investors narrows. Larger rounds often bring foreign capital into controlling positions, followed by board seats. Strategic decisions start to reflect the priorities of the new majority owners.
Glubish described work underway to create a provincial co-investment framework modeled in part on Quebec. Quebec’s 2022-2027 innovation strategy outlines a formal role for public capital alongside private investors, particularly as companies scale.
Alberta is exploring a similar posture. When a qualified lead investor commits to a major round, Alberta would consider matching that investment on the same terms.
“What we were working to do is create a policy environment that will define what is a qualified lead investor, what are the conditions under which the Alberta government would consider co investing and of course, only in Alberta companies,” he said.
If structured carefully, that model could change the dynamics of later-stage financing. A government match can help close a round more quickly. It can also increase the domestic ownership share in large deals, reducing the likelihood that headquarters or executive teams relocate as valuations rise.
But capital dynamics vary by sector, and momentum does not look the same everywhere.
“I’d say it’s sector dependent,” said Judy Fairburn, co-founder and general partner at The51 and Nia Ventures. “In the realm of clean tech, we’ve got a really strong ecosystem here. Take Ayrton, a Calgary company with two real dynamo women leading it. ATCO out of the gate was supportive of them with an early demonstration pilot that gave a reference customer. They’ve now gone global… There’s other sectors, though, where it’s been really hard.”
The example illustrates the gap Alberta is trying to close. Early validation can lead to global scale. Without it, companies often look elsewhere for traction and capital.
Fairburn also emphasized that scale is not just about technology.
“Invest in a founder, even if they haven’t got everything all figured out, versus a technology,” she said. “Founders will listen, they’ll hustle, they’ll pivot when they need to.”
The ambition behind the co-invest strategy extends beyond closing funding gaps.
“How do we say that, instead of you building with a vision of selling out at $20 million, your goal is to say, I’m not selling out till it’s $20 billion,” Glubish said.
Lever two: Turn government into a customer
For all the talk about capital, the conversation kept coming back to a simpler question.
Can these companies win customers?
“What I know from experience is that finding a customer is so much more rewarding and valuable than finding a grant, because a grant is one time, but a customer is for life,” Glubish said.
Glubish said his department is building AI tools to change how Alberta buys technology.
One tool would help government departments better describe what they are trying to purchase. He said the goal is to move from vague requests to more specific ones and to publish procurement documents “in minutes instead of months.”
The second tool would let companies upload their website, marketing material, or white papers and automatically generate a bid that meets government requirements.
If this approach works the way he described, it could change who gets a shot at becoming a first customer.
Right now, bidding on government contracts can take months and often requires outside help. Larger firms can absorb that cost, but many startups can’t.
Whether this results in more Alberta companies winning contracts is the open question. If more local firms win, they gain a paying customer they can point to when raising capital or selling to the private sector.
Brad Parry, president and CEO of Calgary Economic Development, said the responsibility doesn’t lie with the government alone.
“We need (proof-of-concept) from major corporates,” he said. “We need to unlock some of the corporate venture capital. It comes down to wanting to try stuff.”
Large companies, he suggested, have to be willing to test local technology before it is fully de-risked. Without that first contract or pilot, many firms look elsewhere for validation.
Parry said one of the biggest gaps in the ecosystem is how little time founders spend inside the buying process of large companies. Corporate procurement cycles are slow, involve multiple decision-makers, and carry internal risk. Startups often build based on assumptions about what those buyers want.
“You don’t have a f–king clue what these guys are thinking,” Parry said, referring to corporate buyers. “You need to get out there and start talking to people.”
If companies can’t win business locally, they often look elsewhere for customers. If early revenue comes from outside Alberta, later funding often follows the same geography.
“Invest in a founder, even if they haven’t got everything all figured out, versus a technology,” she said. “Founders will listen, they’ll hustle, they’ll pivot when they need to.”
Lever three: Who owns the upside
Alberta has figured out how to attract talent and capital, Glubish said. The focus is now on what happens to the ideas themselves, and whether they are protected, commercialized, and owned here or absorbed elsewhere.
“We want to make sure that when we have a big success, the wealth created by those successes stays in the hands of Albertans and can be repatriated into the next ideas and the next companies and the next investments,” he said.
Quebec had already come up in the conversation as a province that has spent decades backing its own companies. Deborah Yedlin, president and CEO of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, said the rest of Canada needs that same kind of long-term commitment.
“We need to grow companies in Canada to scale, to become the acquirers, not the acquiries,” she said.
If the buyers are Canadian, the next round of hiring, investing, and product decisions usually happens here too.
Yedlin also pointed out that many founders design their companies with U.S. customers and U.S. investors in mind from the start. The market is larger, the capital pools are deeper, and decisions can move faster. That often means the first meaningful revenue and the first large cheques come from outside Canada.
That early orientation often shapes where later funding and governance settle in.
Parry said risk tolerance plays a role.
“Canadians want to fight to be first to be second,” he said. “We need people willing to take risks.”
He was pointing to a practical gap. Large corporations hesitate to pilot new technology. Startups build without enough direct feedback. Without early customers willing to test and buy, companies look elsewhere.
Investors then reward the traction they see.
“Momentum is what we look at,” said Fairburn. “And Calgary has tremendous momentum.”
As companies raise bigger rounds, the source of that capital can shape board composition, strategic direction and, in some cases, where headquarters remain.
From growth to durability
Platform’s impact report shows more than 400 companies incorporated in the past four years and more than 24,000 jobs tied to businesses in its network. Calgary is producing companies at volume, and those companies are employing people at meaningful scale.
The tricky part comes later. When those firms raise larger rounds, ownership begins to influence where decisions are made and where future investment flows. What happens here shapes whether companies remain rooted here as they grow or gradually align themselves with the markets that finance them.
Alberta’s policy response targets that stage of the lifecycle. The goal is not to replace global investors, but to ensure provincial capital and customers remain present as companies mature.
The issue extends beyond one province. Across Canada, leaders are beginning to recognize that formation metrics alone do not determine resilience. Governance, capital structure, and who leads later rounds influence whether companies become anchor firms or acquisition targets.
For executives and investors, it raises a few questions. Are you participating in scale rounds? Are you acting as a customer early? Are you building organizations designed to endure, or optimized for exit?
Treating scale as infrastructure rather than an endpoint changes how capital is deployed and how companies are built.
Alberta is testing that shift in real time.
Final shots
- The scale stage is where regions either gain leverage or give it away.
- Being willing to buy early may matter more than announcing another fund.
- When companies grow large enough to matter, who is still invested matters more.
