Stop us if you’ve heard this bellyache before: Canada excels at coming up with great ideas but sucks at commercializing them at any scale.
It’s not a new one. Canadian businesses have a long-held tendency to let brilliant inventions and concepts die on the vine, or cede them to foreign interests, before their full economic benefit is captured at home. “We have an incredible educational system in Canada. We have a lot of great talent. We have the most sophisticated AI research hubs in the world, and we’re seeing a growing interest among Canadians in building and growing startups, across the board,” says Abdullah Snobar, executive director of Toronto Metropolitan University’s DMZ and CEO of DMZ Ventures. “But when it comes to translating from idea to minimum viable product to scalable company, a lot of issues tend to get looped in.”
This problem has come to wear a few names—the innovation gap, the commercialization gap, the scale-up gap—and it’s a perennial bugbear for economists, politicians and business leaders alike, many of whom have long advocated for investment, policy and procurement reforms to advance a more commercializable entrepreneurial ecosystem. But the economic headwinds of the Trump 2.0 era have sharpened the urgency of building more big, bold, globally competitive companies at home: “It’s been a big awakening moment for Canadians,” says Patrick Searle, who, as CEO of the Council of Canadian Innovators, represents 175 high-growth businesses from across the country. “We’re figuring out the capabilities the world needs that we can sell, and the companies we can get behind and support.”
Ranking Canada’s Top Growing Companies of 2026
Which brings us to the 375 businesses on the 2026 ranking of Canada’s Top Growing Companies. Among their ranks, you’ll find great ideas aplenty, from mapping drones (Rosor Exploration, No. 19) to medical lasers (LumIR Lasers Inc., No. 34) to more AI applications than you could cram into a data centre. But you’ll also find the entrepreneurial elbow(’s up?) grease that secures customers, capital and talent—and creates scalable ventures capable of sustainably and materially strengthening Canada’s economic sovereignty.
Read on for real-life examples of what it takes to turn great Canadian ideas into great Canadian businesses.
As wildfires burn and rivers dry up, there’s an unassuming form of climate action taking hold in oilfields across North America, as thousands of wells begin to burp a lot cleaner.
This is the work of six-year-old Calgary upstart Kathairos Solutions, which has found a beautifully uncomplicated solution to a big problem and is riding an astonishing growth curve—as in, revenue up 16,379% in three years—on its ability to implement that solution at scale.
Kathairos is in the decarbonization business (its name means “clean air” in Greek), using cryogenics to activate pneumatic devices at oil well sites as a means of methane abatement.
Quick background: A century and a half ago, when the oil and gas industry took hold in North America, drilled wells had a tendency to gush out of control. To manage the situation, engineers began routing oil into separator tanks, with flow dictated by valves. Those valves opened using natural gas, which then vented into the air. That pneumatic system stuck around, resulting in a modern situation in which hundreds of thousands of wells belch methane—an extremely potent anthropogenic greenhouse gas—into an atmosphere that, increasingly, doesn’t need it.
Kathairos co-founder and CEO Dick Brown has known about the problem for some time. An energy veteran with experience in pretty much every corner of the industry, from working on drilling rigs in the 1970s to, more recently, founding and scaling a cryogenics supplier for energy services called Ferus. So when Jason Clarke, an engineer and one-time Ferus employee, came to him with an idea to replace methane in pneumatic venting, his interest was piqued. “We recognized that there was a way to use liquid nitrogen—basically air—to do the work methane had been doing for the past 150 years,” Brown says. The pair joined up with fellow Calgarian Amanda Hehr (Kathairos’s president), an entrepreneurial go-getter with a shrewd eye for strategy, and decided to test whether this technical solution could be a viable company. “The big question, for me, was how to make it work across thousands of locations,” Brown says. “It’s only a business if you can make it work at scale.”
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Six-year-old Calgary upstart Kathairos Solutions has found a beautifully uncomplicated solution to a big problem and is riding an astonishing growth curve.MATT HORSEMAN/The Globe and Mail
After some hands-on R&D in Nisku, Alta., that had Brown brushing off his old pipefitting skills, and a successful pilot at a small oil company whose owner was keen to try it, the team landed on an effective—and scalable—system to take to market. It’s simple by design: Installation usually involves little more than replacing the centralized natural gas repository at a well site with a biogenic tank. Operators generally don’t notice any change at all. But the difference is immediate: What’s emitted from valves is no longer the greenhouse gas responsible for 30% of modern global warming, but rather an inert vapour. “When we first introduced it, the most common comment we’d hear was, ‘Why did no one think of this before?’” Brown says. “That usually tells you you’ve got the start of something that’s going to grow.”
The team wasted no time in building the scaffolding for expansion. They locked in manufacturing capacity via a partnership with Georgia-headquartered Chart Industries. They booked meeting after meeting with executives, industry association leaders and government representatives. They secured a capital stack that would allow them to move quickly (including, in time, equity partnerships with the economic arms of Doig River First Nation and Halfway River First Nation). They applied for, and won, a Clean Resource Innovation Network award, which opened doors with Cenovus and Ovintiv. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency made an introduction to ExxonMobil, whose chief environmental scientist told them, “I think you guys have found what everybody’s been looking for.”
As a result, in less time than it takes for some heavy-industry outfits to land on a minimum viable product, Kathairos has deployed more than 3,000 units for 70-odd oil and gas producers on sites in Canada and the U.S.
There’s nothing flukish about any of it, in Hehr’s view. “Scaling innovation requires more than just proving the technology works,” she says. “It requires building trust in customers that you can deliver a repeatable and trustworthy product, that your operating model works and scales, and that you can also demonstrate a positive return for them. You have to be able to deliver on all those value propositions.” So the team concentrated its energies against those three imperatives. To prove the system worked, they adopted what Hehr describes as an “obsessive focus on delivering excellence at any cost,” stress-testing every element in the product to leave no detail overlooked. To demonstrate operational capacity, they set up bases in every major basin in North America and hired the most experienced technical experts they could find. And to show dollars-and-cents value, they developed a robust data and software arm that gives customers a transparent window into exactly what’s happening at installations and exactly how it’s affecting their businesses.
It all made for an expensive runway, but it supported a sharp takeoff. “I attribute a lot of the success to very good early planning about what exponential or hyperscale growth would look like,” Hehr says. “It was like our hair was on fire for two years, and because we had those success scenarios planned, we were able to not only survive, but I would say thrive.” Brown is quick to credit his business partner for this approach: “It takes a different mind to get the technology up and running than it does to drive it to scale.”
As Hehr and Brown look ahead—Clarke left Kathairos in 2024—they see plenty of upside: There’s interest in adapting the company’s system to other oilfield applications, and there’s huge potential in pairing AI against its dataset to, for instance, predict well behaviour. Kathairos is also exploring licensing opportunities for its system, as well as expansion into both Latin America and Australia.
For Brown, a guy who built a career in oilpatches, it all feels vital. “I see things a little bit differently now,” he reflects. “Climate change is real. We’re seeing it and experiencing it in real time.” Kathairos’s efficacy in addressing a significant contributor to the problem—in June, the company passed one million metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent eliminated as a result of its installations—has him leaning in. “We have been entrusted with a technology that has proven to make a global difference,” he says. “I feel we have an obligation to move this company forward as fast as we can. This is something we can do to make an actual impact. And I believe there is nothing more urgent.”
“Gotta try it.” “Whoa.” “Just got mine! So excited!”
This isn’t the buzz surrounding a viral food trend or a rare sneaker drop. Rather, it’s a sample of the effusive comments on a recent Instagram post by content creator Emmanuel Uddenberg about…laundry detergent. Specifically, a limited-edition collaboration between Brooklyn perfumery D.S. & Durga and Toronto’s Guests on Earth, which Uddenberg lauded as “such a simple way to elevate laundry day.”
If you want to understand what’s behind Guests on Earth’s dizzying growth curve, social media activity like this is a good place to start. As a growing cadre of evangelical customers regularly attest, the company has made chores like washing your gitches not only pleasant but aspirational.
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Guests on Earth began as a pandemic project of founder and veteran marketer Jackie Prince.steph martyniuk/The Globe and Mail
Guests on Earth is in the business of concentrated cleaning products—just-add-water hand soaps, dish soaps, all-purpose home cleansers and detergents—made from plant and mineral ingredients. Its formulations are meant to invoke a more elevated sensorial experience than what you’d normally get from scrubbing the sink: They smell terrific and, when decanted into matte aluminum spray bottles, look chic on a countertop.
The company’s origins trace to a pandemic project of founder Jackie Prince, a veteran marketer with agency and brand-side experience in consumer packaged goods, social impact and tech. Stuck at home with her young children during lockdown, Prince began to notice some things: the indecipherable ingredient list on the disinfectant she was using to scrub down groceries, the blue bins overflowing with single-use plastics, the sheer unpleasant drag of cleaning. Her professional brain began to light up. “I thought, Surely there’s a better way of engaging with this category,” she recalls.
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After much research and testing, Prince and her team landed on the messaging that has resonated with customers: turning routine into ritual.Steph martyniuk/The Globe and Mail
Prince had been observing a few trends: First, surging demand for “clean” and transparent ingredients in several consumer categories, including makeup and skincare. Second, growing interest in the environmental benefits of using highly concentrated and dilutable liquid cleansers, as upstart brands like Blueland captured material market share in the U.S. Third, flourishing brand affinity for products with strong aesthetic and sensory appeal—things that are, in simplest terms, a pleasure to use. It all pointed to an opportunity for a new kind of natural cleaner. “For any brand I’ve worked on, the goal is to come in with a unique, competitive point of differentiation,” she says. “I really felt there was a white space at the intersection of wellness, sustainability and design.”
Prince hunkered down in market research, shipping in dozens of brands from all over North America to test. She found a Canadian manufacturing partner (after cold-calling more than 50), developed samples, threw up a website, and pored over the brand identity and packaging. By 2022, the formulas for two products—the all-purpose cleaner and the hand soap—were locked in. She made them available for sale online, put up a few performance ads on Meta platforms and started pitching every media contact she could think of. The nascent brand got some good press and was picked up by its first retailer, Toronto’s Coco Market, but it was far from an immediate smash.
Part of the challenge was communicating a single unique selling proposition for products that were different from what consumers were used to buying in multiple ways: in ingredients, in format, and in what it looks, feels and smells like to use. After a lot of testing—and re-testing—Prince and her team landed on the messaging that continues to cut through today: “We’ve consistently seen that the experience is what resonates,” she says. “We turn a routine into a ritual. It’s an experience that smells great, that looks great and—by the way—works really well, and is more sustainable than anything else in your house.”
By early 2025, with more repeat customers and more products to sell—including dish soap and laundry detergent—Guests on Earth’s ads started converting with greater consistency, and the retail roster began to expand. And when the first round of U.S. tariffs hit, the ensuing wave of buy-Canadian sentiment sparked a spike in sales that hasn’t abated. “We kept thinking, Is this just a boom? Will it go away? But it hasn’t,” Prince says. “We’ve hit product-market fit, for sure.”
All signs point to continued growth: A new scent is launching this fall—big news for a brand that typically only offers three—and new fabric-care products are on the docket for 2027. And while Prince is the first to stress that changing established consumer behaviour isn’t the easiest entrepreneurial path, she’s bolstered by what she hears from Guests on Earth converts every day: “We’ve created something people seem to love and keep coming back to.”
Keep levelling up
How Brodie Rec League’s relentless focus on improving user experience is redefining adult recreational sports
Rank: 21
Three-year growth: 1,669%
Picture this: You’ve got a basketball game after work. You pull up to the gym in your uniform, have a laugh with your teammates, maybe do a little in-app recon on your rivals. You then hit the court for four quarters of ball with a cohort of players exactly as competitive as you are. By the time you’ve showered, there’s a full report of your stats and a slick highlight reel of your best shots waiting in your phone, ready for you to share (and obsess over) to your heart’s content.
This is what thousands of recreational ballers experience on the regular via Brodie Rec League, a Toronto startup that’s taking off like a jumpshot. There isn’t a whiff of beer-league scrappiness about it. And that’s the point.
Brodie is the brainchild of founder and CEO Connor Renton, who’s applying a lifelong entrepreneurial bent—he peddled lemonade and Pokémon cards as a young kid, and sold ads against a one-million-strong audience for his Vine channel at 15—to fix an issue close to his heart. Renton grew up playing hockey and rugby, and was good enough at both to make the varsity teams at Western University, where he studied business. He loved the trappings of playing at a high level: the coaching, the stats, the team track suits. But when he graduated, all that went away. “If you don’t go on to be a pro, your options to continue to play the sport that shaped who you are, and where you met your best friends, are limited,” he says. “It’s hard.”
As Renton filled his days with a bank job, he began to fixate on the idea of creating an avenue for non-professional athletes to keep enjoying the sports that once defined their lives. Perhaps a rec league that offered an elevated experience, with leaderboards and photographs and real uniforms. Perhaps in basketball: He wasn’t much of a hooper himself (yet), but the Toronto Raptors had just won the NBA Championship, and local interest was at an all-time high. Armed with little more than a clipboard, Renton cobbled together an eight-team league in Burlington, Ont., in the fall of 2019.
Initial experiments were promising, but the pandemic brought early momentum to a halt. Renton busied himself with an ad-hoc Covid-related PPE venture, but a year later, he decided to give the league another shot—and found that scores of lockdown-fatigued players were champing at the bit. “It took off like wildfire,” he says. Today, Brodie leagues run in more than 20 cities in Canada and the U.S., with 50,000 registered players.
A bit of time in the Brodie-verse reveals why the league has become such a slam dunk. It’s fun: Players can choose their preferred level of competitive intensity, so there are no situations in which a newbie has to tip off against a wannabe Michael Jordan. It’s frictionless: Drafting, scheduling, court booking and scorekeeping are all taken care of, thanks to a proprietary back-end platform called PlayerOne. And it’s addictive: The Brodie App is loaded with stats, rewards, photos, message boards and other hooks that keep players checking in again and again (and again) well after the buzzer. The whole experience sates both the primal human need for social connection and the modern human need to post about it. “Everyone wants to feel great about themselves. Everyone wants to feel like a superstar or a pro, even if it’s just for a minute,” Renton says. “We built a product so good at providing that feeling that people are obsessed.” (He counts himself among the devoted: He plays three nights a week.)
Many growing companies face the temptation to scale via “enshittification,” to borrow tech activist Cory Doctorow’s term for the common digital-age practice of degrading the quality of a once-compelling offering to extract as much profit as possible. Renton’s going in the opposite direction. In his view, the company’s success has come in lockstep with improvements to the player experience—athlete satisfaction scores are currently the highest in the company’s history—and he sees no benefit in complacency. (It’s telling that his entrepreneurial hero is Phil Knight, whose famous “grow or die” ethos transformed Nike from an Oregon shoe importer to the world’s most valuable athletic brand.) “Until playing a Brodie game is as accessible as calling an Uber, I don’t feel like we’re at the level in which we should be,” he says.
Basketball will remain Brodie’s focus for the immediate future—there are still plenty of markets to enter within North America, plenty of new players to reach and plenty of ways to perfect the platform—but Renton has big long-term ambitions: “Ultimately, the goal is to operate in all sports and to be global,” he says. “We want to create pathways for people to play sports forever. I want this to be my life’s work.”
When you ask Joshua Pope to explain the Trajekt Arc, the hero product behind his company’s propulsive recent growth, his response is almost comically casual: “We built a baseball pitching robot that can emulate and replicate the exact pitches as thrown in a game.”
It’s funny because what he and co-founder Rowan Ferrabee pulled off is the kind of biomechanical feat that, to the layperson, seems like wizardry. Technically, the Arc system integrates 14 motors, closed-loop control, AI and pitch data from computer vision systems used in real-life games to factor for nearly a dozen interrelated velocity, orientation, position and vector variables. Practically, the robot mirrors the precise trajectory of even the wackiest hucked ball.
Pope and Ferrabee got the initial idea for the Arc in a University of Waterloo classroom. At least one professor thought the concept was technically impossible, for reasons to do with rifle spin and ball-seam durability, but the pair had other ideas. “We thought, if a human can do it, then we can do it, too,” Pope says. So they started a journey of technical validation (hashing out the physical and engineering possibilities), market research (analyzing the flaws in the systems that players and coaches were currently using, and talking to pro pitching co-ordinators about pain points) and, over time, intense product development.
As they refined the prototype, they started building out a business plan around an audacious go-to-market strategy: They wanted the first customers for their robots to be pros. Major League Baseball teams, specifically. It wasn’t at all a safe bet: Deep-tech hardware is a tough business at the best of times, and targeting a small pool of highly visible, difficult-to-access customers was, in Pope’s admission, “super high-risk.” But Pope and Ferrabee were inspired by the approach of Tesla, which first built its core IP around the hardest and fastest kind of car possible—what became the Roadster—and then went on to pare things down for more accessible models. If Trajekt’s technology was good enough to stand up to the best batters in the world, they reasoned, it would be relatively straightforward to adapt it to suit teams with less sophisticated requirements and smaller budgets down the line. “It was counterintuitive to almost all the business advice I got, which was to start with youth leagues and work our way up, so any failures would not be at the highest stakes,” recalls Pope. “But we kind of stuck to our guns and saw some early product-market fit.”
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This season, Trajekt worked with 28 out of 30 MLB clubs, and the Arc has become an indispensable training tool.SHLOMI AMIGA/The Globe and Mail
How does a pair of engineering undergrads get the attention of pro-baseball decision makers? With a healthy dose of “don’t ask, don’t get” chutzpah. In 2019, before the pair even had a prototype, they flew to San Diego to work the rooms at the annual MLB winter meetings. “When you’re young, you can make a fool of yourself, and people will give you the benefit of the doubt,” Pope says. A handful of club reps agreed to meet, many of whom asked the pair to follow up once the prototype was ready. Following that, every time the duo reached a technical milestone, they’d send videos or email updates to their new big-league contacts. One video demo caught the attention of a head of player development with the Chicago Cubs. He liked what he saw and agreed to lease a machine for a year.
As the Arc was whipping balls in the Windy City, Pope invited six more teams he’d met with in California to Toronto to test the system. After a few swinging sessions, all six of them committed to purchase. That particular win created new logistical and financial challenges—the then-skeleton team found itself having to quickly manufacture six highly technical machines—but with some help from some patient capital from friends and family, they rallied and delivered.
Once a few teams were using the Arc—and the benefits to their batter performance started to manifest—FOMO kicked in, and the phone started ringing. This season, Trajekt worked with 28 out of 30 MLB clubs. In short order, the Arc has become an indispensable tool for many of the best sluggers in the business. “It’s very, very popular now,” star Blue Jays infielder Ernie Clement told Sports Illustrated in July. “I miss it on the road.”
As a result, Trajekt’s head office in Mississauga is a pretty busy place these days—and not only because it tends to attract a lot of would-be Vladdys curious about how they’d handle a pro pitch. (“It can be a distraction,” says Pope, with a rueful smile. “Every time someone stops in, they want to try it.”) As the founders hoped, interest has heated up in the broader baseball ecosystem: Pro teams in Japan and Korea have installed Trajekt systems, as have five U.S. Division 1 colleges, and Pope says there’s a “deep funnel” of others expected to convert in the year ahead. The 50-person team is working on hardware and software refinements to create more accessible models, as well as a vision system that tracks actions and outcomes to trend player performance. Pope and Ferrabee’s big swing appears to be connecting.
“We have aspirations to own the hitting lane, to dominate the experience of player development and training,” Pope says. “The growth that we’ve had in the pro market and the college market will enable us to do that.”
It was Ben and Jerry’s that did it.
After downloading a 2017 episode of the popular NPR podcast “How I Built This” featuring Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield (the principle-led impresarios behind the Vermont ice cream giant), Fatima Zaidi came to be a fan of a brand about which she’d previously held a neutral opinion. Moreover, she found herself reaching for the company’s cloud-spackled pints in the freezer aisle. As a sales leader working for a marketing agency, she just couldn’t shake the sudden change in both her perception and behaviour. “That was when it hit me that audio was the most intimate brand-building tool out there,” she recalls. “And almost no company was using it on purpose.”
That insight into the business potential of branded podcasts was the spark that kicked off Zaidi’s entrepreneurial journey. Her foundational idea—that companies needed help reaching the earbuds of potential customers—has proven prescient: Over the past seven years, she’s built Quill Inc. into a growing and profitable company that delivers award-winning work for some of the world’s biggest brands.
Never mind that the company today barely resembles the one she started in 2019.
Zaidi’s original business plan was for a marketplace that connected podcasters with freelancers that could help them make their programs. “I wanted to launch a product,” she says. The marketplace didn’t last long—Zaidi soon realized she’d need serious capital to scale it and, following a few frustrating pitches, she had little desire to spend her time selling investors on a concept they were unlikely to back. But it did guide the fledgling business towards a lucrative niche: giving the corporations who’d been scouring the site for assistance a one-stop shop for everything from recording to marketing.
As a full-service production agency, Quill hit its stride, buoyed in part by a pandemic-era shift in marketing dollars from experiential events into audio content. Building a podcast product was still the goal, but a service-based business with healthy margins seemed a clever on-ramp that could generate both valuable intel about what the market really needed and, importantly, a stream of income to fund development. “I knew I could grow it incrementally,” Zaidi says. “And I knew it was where key learnings were going to happen.”
That immersive incubation led to the development of CoHost, a software platform that consolidates data about listeners and their behaviours to give podcasters (and the brands that commission them) an enriched view into who, exactly, is pressing “play.” It’s a world removed from the industry-standard download tally that marketers had come to expect and makes it much easier for everyone to assess the true ROI of a show. CoHost’s rapid traction since its launch in 2022—it’s now used by most Quill clients and many of its competitors—is no accident: “We built a product to solve the pain points experienced by both ourselves and our customers,” Zaidi says. “It’s been successful because we first spent years in the trenches building podcasts.”
The result is a fast-growing enterprise with far more durability than the sum of its parts, with two highly complementary lines that feed one another: Quill’s production work keeps the company close to the needs of CoHost users, while CoHost delivers audience insights that makes Quill’s content smarter—and its services stickier for brands. (Not for nothing, it also delivers recurring revenue.) “Each side keeps sharpening the other, and that advantage compounds on its own,” explains Zaidi.
And none of it would have happened had Zaidi held fast to her initial approach. “One of the best pieces of advice I’ve received is not to have rose-coloured lenses,” she says. “If I had to distill what makes an entrepreneur successful—outside of opportunity and luck, which is a huge factor—it’s the ability to recognize and pivot fast when something isn’t working. Because eventually you’ll find product-market fit, and you’ll just keep getting better and faster and smarter.”
Vibn began in 2019 as a vintage clothing resale business run out of a Waterloo, Ont., dorm room. Today, the company is selling mystery boxes of curated thrift-store finds into more than 40 countries, thanks to a clutch decision to shift from high-touch, high-overhead delivery into a much more scalable model. Founder and creative director Mehul Adlakha walks us through the glow-up behind his company’s 1,205% growth:
“I started the business because I noticed how many of my fellow students were walking around wearing vintage pieces from the 1980s, 1990s and Y2K, mostly sportswear. I was not specifically into thrifting or vintage myself, but I was very much into fashion, and I saw an opportunity to buy inventory wholesale and resell items individually.
When everything shut down during Covid, retail therapy became a big thing for a lot of people. That worked well for us, and we started to grow. We opened physical stores. We had 3,000 or 4,000 pieces of clothing online at any given time. Every one of those items had to be washed, sorted, tagged, steamed, photographed, measured, uploaded to our Shopify store and promoted. It was very labour intensive. I started to realize it wasn’t sustainable or scalable.
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Adlakha created vintage clothing resale business Vibn in 2019, running it out of a Waterloo, Ont., dorm room. The company started to see big growth during the pandemic, when people turned to retail therapy en mass.JONAH ATKINS/The Globe and Mail
At the end of 2024, I had two stores in two different malls, paying extremely high rent, plus a warehouse and about 20 employees. We had no margin. We had no money and well over 30 grand that was supposed to leave the next day. I remember sitting in front of a whiteboard that was full of ideas, and there was just no solution. The business was going to die if we didn’t make a change.
I knew there wasn’t an issue with the product itself. The problem was with the process: There were just too many steps involved in selling it. So I decided to try getting it to customers in a different way, via mystery boxes.
I wasted months running through the pros and cons, the risks and rewards. But in February 2025, we put up our first mystery boxes. We honed the relationships with suppliers to get more product for a better price. We stopped posting individual items, cut back staff and closed our retail stores. Mystery boxes have proven to be a very scalable model. The decision to pivot has driven the majority of our growth.
When you realize something’s not working, don’t just sit and hope that it magically changes. Most of the time, it will not. If you look at the numbers and what you see doesn’t make sense, it’s time to pivot. Understand what you need to do, and then act on it as fast as possible.”
CultureAlly
Rank: 41
Pivot Point: Stay close to your customer
When CultureAlly started in 2021, its core product—accessible workplace diversity, equity and inclusion training—was in hot demand. But as customer needs started to shift, the company had to decide whether and how to evolve. (Spoiler alert: With 719% growth over the past three years, it made the right call.) Founder and CEO Ashley Kelly shares the story:
“I was working in the DEI space. Across many organizations and industries, I kept hearing the same thing: People didn’t just want information; they also wanted learning that was practical and helpful. I wasn’t seeing a lot of that in the market. I thought, There’s got to be a way to do this that makes it fun and engaging. That’s what led me to start CultureAlly.
It took a year to get traction. Then we began doubling and doubling and doubling. We provided DEI consulting, training, workshops and e-learning, and there was a lot of demand for all of it. Our content was accessible, and it was actionable, and that led to longer-term client relationships and partnerships. We validated our product-market fit.
Things started to change in 2025. We began to notice conversations shifting. Clients were still committed to building inclusive workplaces, but they were asking for help with a broader set of challenges: things like emotional intelligence, leadership, communication, psychological safety and navigating difficult conversations. We saw that there was so much more that we could do. I started to see a risk in not expanding.
It’s so key to listen to the market—like, really listen. I still sell our services, and I’m still on calls. It allows me to hear what’s changing. Our clients tell us every day what they need, where they’re going and where they need support, and I think it’s our responsibility as a company to meet them there.
Our reset didn’t happen overnight. We wanted to be intentional, especially with our positioning and marketing. We had a lot of conversations, which have led to expanded partnerships. We doubled down on what we do best, which is corporate training, and moved away from models that are less scalable, like consulting.
We have served more than 1,000 clients, and we’re continuing to expand our partnerships to even bigger and larger brands on a global basis. Our pivot really helped with that. Looking at our growth trajectory into 2027, I think it was fundamental for us to make that expansion.
You can’t fall in love with your idea. It can cloud your judgment. Your clients might be telling you that there’s a problem they want you to solve—they might be telling you for months—but if you’re too attached to your initial idea, you’ll miss those opportunities.”
H2 Analytics started out in 2018 as a services company, with Canadian Forces veterans and national security experts delivering defence and intelligence training to a clientele primarily composed of government agencies. In 2022, it introduced Ease, a sovereign training and simulation platform for defence and emergency preparedness, wildly expanding its market and driving sales up 552%. But as CEO Hugo Hodgett describes, it hasn’t been an all-or-nothing transition:
“I spent more than 15 years working in intelligence and defence. The reality was that when it came time to do the job for real, the training was nowhere near what it needed to be to actually get people ready for high-risk and dangerous environments. My thesis was that there was a gap in the market for intelligence training that generated the kind of complexity, velocity and quantity of information needed to better prepare people.
We started providing it the old-fashioned way: using Word documents, PowerPoints and Excel spreadsheets. We realized pretty quickly that in order to get to a level of scale, we needed to bring in some automation solutions. That was the inception of a transition to a software platform.
We are a bootstrapped company. We have no institutional capital; at the time, no investor wanted to touch defence. So we used our services business—which is still here to this day—to fund our software development. It was not easy. There was a lot of belt-tightening. We had our whole executive team out in the field delivering programs.
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Over more than 15 years working in intelligence and defence, Hodgett saw a gap in the market for the kind of quality intelligence training required to better prepare people for the reality of high-risk and dangerous environments.BRENDAN GEORGE KO/The Globe and Mail
Ease came out four years ago, as an AI-native product, and it’s been a bit of a rocket ship ever since. Last year, software became the primary revenue driver for us. That’s increasing this year, and we expect it to continue increasing into the future.
The biggest thing it has unlocked is our international opportunities. In our world, there are certain rooms you’ll never get into if you’re Canadian. But we can now provide the IP externally, and clients can use it to their hearts’ content, and we never need to see it. It’s allowed us to crack open the ability to export more efficiently and effectively, and be a more profitable company.
Certainly the tides are changing with defence and intelligence investment in Canada—more people are finally taking this problem seriously. But none of that is changing our DNA. We stay lean and mean. We’ve set the conditions over eight years to be a good business and, luckily, we are coming into a time where we are able to to exploit the opportunities that are in front of us.
We’ve been able to build a hybrid business model that is much more effective than either component would be in isolation. Don’t give up things that are working for moonshots if it means you can fight another day.”
Just Vertical
Rank: 79
Pivot Point: Go where the growth is
The founders of Just Vertical started with a bold vision: to equip homes across North America with small, stylish vertical farming rigs capable of producing fresh fruit and veggies year round. About two years ago, the company pivoted to the more fertile ground of outfitting commercial indoor agriculture operations, a savvy, if complicated, decision that has fed 358% revenue growth. Co-founder and CEO Conner Tidd delves into the change:
“Kevin Jakiela and I started the company in 2017, started selling in earnest in 2019 and had it all off the ground when Covid hit, and a lot of people suddenly became concerned about where their food was coming from.
We built a great million-dollar-a-year business. But our investors wanted us to get to $10 million. We couldn’t see a way to get there without raising and burning through a lot more cash.
One option was to keep rolling out consumer models, and get very price-competitive to compete with stuff coming in from overseas. That didn’t align with our core values around food security and sustainability. Then we thought about pivoting to commercial. That resonated. It was a route to growth and a way to make a real impact by building right into communities.
We did get some pushback from our board and some of our investors, who’d bought into the vision of everyone growing food in their kitchens. But it was clear the move made sense.
We actually didn’t have to change the product much: We just adapted it to grow 12,000 plants at once instead of 12. We did have to totally shift our customer acquisition processes. We went from buying Google ads and making trendy Instagram snippets to communicating to a business audience used to detailed proposals. We had to build a proper sales pipeline. You can’t really sell commercial clients on an email drip.
The pivot to commercial has allowed us to develop more intentionally. The sales cycles are a lot longer but more predictable. We have the room to innovate and make quicker iterative gains between projects. And we still do have a consumer line of business: It’s smaller but completely profitable, and hums along on its own.
The advantage of being an entrepreneur is that you can be nimble. Just because you started doing something one way doesn’t mean you have to do it that way forever.”
Gotcare started in 2018 as a tool to help individuals co-ordinate home healthcare services. The B Corp–certified company—which grew 146% in the past three years—has since evolved into a tech platform meant to give patients agency over all aspects of their care. Co-founder and CEO Chenny Xia explains the evolution:
“We built Gotcare around a simple idea: that home care could work better. We wanted individuals and their families to find support without feeling like they’re navigating a maze. We wanted to provide more meaningful and sustainable careers for care workers. And we wanted payers of care—governments, insurers and health systems—to be able to see whether care is working so they could adapt services before people fall through the cracks. We brought those three perspectives together to create a new approach to orchestrating, organizing and co-ordinating care, built around responsiveness. It was about getting Mom care when something happened, as opposed to care on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.
We’ve now pushed it beyond scheduling and logistics. Our customers—who are the funders of care—asked for help giving patients the ability to make bigger decisions, as well, as part of a broader change happening across healthcare. So we evolved. What started as a tech-enabled service delivery platform is now a patient-driven care management platform. Using our app, families get to choose how they want to spend their approved care allocation, with full autonomy based on what a good life looks like for them.
We’ve been working to enable patients to have a larger voice over their care since the beginning, but we’ve now formalized that into a standalone product. Whereas before we were selling the outcome of the infrastructure that we used in our own operations, now we are also selling the infrastructure itself. It wasn’t a difficult decision. For us, it came back to the mission of the company. Why do we even exist if not to lean into why we built this in the first place?
We’re blessed in that the line of sight we have from product to impact is obvious. Because we get to fully steep ourselves in the lived experiences of the people we serve, we’re less at risk of serving our own egos, as opposed to serving the problem. And when you serve the problem, your judgment becomes a lot clearer.”
How I did it
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Sally Daub, co-CEO, BorderPass.Evan Dion
How to scale with… perspicacity
“Our biggest lesson has been to rebuild a problem around what new tech makes possible, and then pair that ambition with discipline about accuracy and accountability. When we started, the reflex was to layer AI onto existing workflows. We did the opposite: We rebuilt the work around what AI does best and kept licensed lawyers on the judgment and sign-off only they can provide.”
—Sally Daub, co-CEO, BorderPass (No. 7)
How to scale with… speed
“Most decisions are reversible, so speed beats perfection.”
—Wilson Cross, co-founder and CEO, Borderless AI (No. 38)
How to scale with… grit
“Intense small business growth comes from equal parts trust, trauma, resilience and fear.”
—Angus Campbell, co-founder and CEO, Good Robot Brewing Co. (No. 107)
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Linda Dang, CEO of Sukoshi.Amy Sussman/Getty Images
How to scale with… clarity
“Clarity beats certainty. In a fast-growing retail business, you rarely have perfect information—about the market, about a new location, about a hiring decision. Waiting for certainty is a luxury operators cannot afford. The job of a leader is not to have all the answers but to give your team a clear direction, the context behind decisions and the confidence to execute even in ambiguous conditions.”
—Linda Dang, founder and CEO, Sukoshi (No. 108)
How to scale with… profitability
“Propel was launched with a clear path to profitability and achieved that within five years. For us, it’s a mindset: It meant staying frugal and mindful, watching every hire, and growing at a pace that wouldn’t put revenue growth ahead of profitability. We could have grown our top line much faster and still could, but we firmly believe that in the long run, the best and most successful companies always have an eye on profitability.”
—Clive Kinross, co-founder and CEO, Propel Holdings (No. 164)
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CEO of MDA Space Mike Greenley.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
How to scale with… focus
“Years ago, I learned the phrase, ‘The smaller the niche, the bigger the market.’ For us, that means focusing on being a high-growth, pure-play space company, and on new lines that further establish us as a leader in the three areas with global growth potential: space communication networks, radar-based Earth observation, and space infrastructure development and operations.”
—Mike Greenley, CEO, MDA Space (No. 169)
How to scale with… discipline
“Not all growth is good growth. We’ve learned to evaluate opportunities not just on revenue potential, but on alignment—with our values, our team capacity and the kind of work we want to be known for. That discipline has allowed us to scale without compromising what makes the business strong.”
—Lisa Pasquin, president, Craft Public Relations (No. 347)
GREAT IDEAS
Ring Rescue
A quick fix for stuck rings
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A Ring Rescue device made a cameo in an episode of the Emmy-winning medical drama The Pitt.Ring Rescue/Supplied
As a final engineering project, then-Dalhousie students Brad MacKeil and Patrick Hennessey designed a medical device to safely remove rings stuck on swollen and injured fingers. One of the judges, physician Kevin Spencer, immediately saw the real-world need and partnered with the pair to build a business around the idea. Nearly eight years later, the Dolphin Ring Cutter from Ring Rescue (No. 46) is used by hundreds of fire departments in Canada and the U.S., in 30 per cent of North American emergency rooms, and—thanks to a cameo in an episode that aired early this year—on the set of the Emmy-winning medical drama The Pitt.
Rouge Care
Red-light therapy for all
Two years after exiting a marketing technology firm he’d built from scratch, entrepreneur Marc Poirier decided to try his hand in the direct-to-consumer business: Specifically, what he saw as a red-hot opportunity in red-light therapy, as interest in photobiomodulation (the process of using specific light frequencies to influence cellular metabolism) began to surge. Seven years later, Rouge Care Inc.’s fixation on product excellence—its G4 series features eight targeted light wavelengths (most competitive devices cap out at six), boasts what the company says is the strongest irradiance in the category, and is both Health Canada- and U.S. FDA-approved—and aggressive marketing efforts have created a diversified demand engine that has won over a range of customers, from clinicians to curious consumers to hard-core biohackers.
Paume
Skincare for your hands
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Paume has grown from a luxury hand sanitizer brand to add several complementary product lines.Supplied
Human hands really go through it: Just think of all the things yours encounter in a day. That’s why in April 2020 Toronto entrepreneur Amy Welsman launched a luxury hand sanitizer brand meant to simultaneously moisturize and protect our most-used, and most-neglected, appendages. More than six years later, Paume (No. 28) has evolved to add several complementary product lines—including serums, creams, masks, and balms—and pioneered a whole new consumer category around keeping mitts moisturized and thriving. Customers can’t get keep their paws off it: Last year alone, the company listed with Ulta (the largest beauty retailer in the U.S.), notched a holiday bestseller with Nordstrom, and shifted smoothly into profitability.
Revol Cares
Pro-approved leak-proof undies
In 2019, spouses Sara Jonsdottir and Mayo Santos began selling handmade reusable period- and bladder-care underwear, specifically designed for heavy flows, at Vancouver farmers’ markets. People loved what Revol Cares (No. 39) had to offer, and the company expanded organically selling direct-to-consumer for three years. By 2022, however, they’d hit a ceiling—so they moved production overseas, pursued (and received) medical recognition from Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada, and secured partnerships with pharmacy and grocery retailers. Today, the company’s leakproof undies can be found in more than 3,500 stores across North America.
UgoWorks
Smart power for forklift fleets
Québec City-based UgoWork (No. 59) started more than a decade ago, when a group of electrical engineers led by co-founders Philippe Beauchamp and Rami Jarjour developed a novel lithium-ion battery meant to help customers in industrial applications (including manufacturing, food production, and warehousing) electrify their forklift fleets. Today, as industry moves swiftly toward electrification, the company is juicing its charge with a growing roster of OEM compatibilities, an AI-powered software tool that helps enable intelligent fleet optimization, and—thanks to a 2025 decision to add a U.S. assembly operation—more predictable access to customers stateside.