Why Edmonton Is Awesome for Building Companies

Speaker 0: Cool. Hey everybody, can you hear me? AI, let's get it going. Weave back. Another 1. Speaker 0: VC what is this? VC 2 out of 4 here? 2 out of 5? 0 my god. There's so many of us. Speaker 0: I'll be quick. Cool. I'm Tim from Startup TNT here to tell you about why Edmonton is super awesome Bound you should be building here. Hey. Thanks. Speaker 0: Alright. Not me though. Anyways, I'm Tim here to tell you about why Edmonton's awesome. You should be building here. I mean, lots of you are from Edmonton. Speaker 0: Lots of you are from Edmonton, and there's people who have come here because they know that Edmonton's awesome. So frankly, most of the pitch is to the people that are from Edmonton who kinda shit on Edmonton regularly. So here we are. I'm Tim. I'm from Startup TNT. Speaker 0: Bozek and I are the cofounders. We're the most active venture investor in Canada based right here in Edmonton. Weave invested about $21,000,000 into about a 125 companies over the last 6 Remarks. And we run rate Investment 30 companies a year. And then on the other side of my desk, I'm the 1 of the team champions for MIT REAP in Edmonton. Speaker 0: It's a program to bring together a whole bunch of stakeholders on how to build up our Edmonton ecosystem and help make Edmonton awesome. So short story is I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make Edmonton a really great place to build companies Canadian how to make Edmonton a great place to build companies from. To to Mark's point, the AI moat's moving. So a lot of the time was spent talking about how to build a build an application layer. Now Claude has built Methos, and they're 1 shotting these companies day by day. Speaker 0: If you're just building a a SaaS dashboard that's, you know, interpreting data and presenting it to people, that's not a company. I built 1 of those by accident, a a few weeks ago. So Claude Date 2026 answer the question. So data is the new moat to that point. It's, you know, you can use AI to interpret and present that data, but how you're gathering that data is actually very important. Speaker 0: And and how you're how you can extract that data is super cool Bound something that Edmonton can do really well. What's fun is you can do, again, to to Mark's point, that layer 6 in in that stack, that physical layer that inter that interprets the real world does stuff with it on the AI file, and then tells you what to 2026, or or does the things becomes very interesting. So this list of TNT companies of Anduril, Skilled, Ceramic, Waymo, and Tesla, 2 of those are self driving, defense, aquatics, robotics. These Mark, like, fun lead world technologies. And TNT, interestingly, Edmonton's a great place to be doing that. Speaker 0: So to build 1 of these companies, there's an interesting Bound stack, that Edmonton actually has all 5 of these Lynn, and and I'll explain obviously, if you're interacting with the real world, you need to have something interesting in the real world to be dealing with. You need to have customers that deal with those physical problems. You You need to have the space to deal with it because you're dealing with physical molecules. You need to be doing stuff in the space. And they need to have Analyst, both on the hardware and the engineering world Bound also on the AI and ML world, which you can pay for and have people show Upper. Speaker 0: Or ideally, if you're if you're in a space where they have them, that's even better. So Edmonton is at a fun intersection of the physical world that has a very high degree of value. So, as much as as much as if you, if you listen to some of the folks, they'll tend to ignore that we started on ag and file. But Edmonton very much is ag and oil. From an oil perspective, The US is by far the largest producer of oil in the world, but it's distributed across The United Date, whereas Edmonton is the principal hub of the production of all of Canada's, oil. Speaker 0: So about 6,000,000 barrels a Date. Maybe about 5,000,000 barrels a day comes through Edmonton. The remainder is some degree offshore or South Saskatchewan. But Edmonton is is a huge production hub, in the Western world. Weave the largest production hub of oil in the entire Western world. Speaker 0: And it's Lynn interesting this is a fun chart that's ripped off from Mark Energy Charts, which they take from Studio Energy. So shout out to them AI I can see that this is being recorded, if they see this. The the relevant number, you'll see right above above this OPEX number, you can see the GNA of 8 and a half billion. That's the 1 that Calgary gets all excited about. When they're trimming G and A, they're trimming those office towers Yaletown, that, like, 8 and a half, $10,000,000,000 a year of OPEX, super relevant for them. Speaker 0: For Edmonton, it's the other 2 pink circles that are added together at a $110,000,000,000. That that puts, Grand Prairie, Edmonton, and Fort Mac on the map. Big numbers. You talk about, you know, you need 1000000000 dollar AltaML or whatever to build a company, you got a 110,000,000,000 just flowing through Edmonton. And it's not just oil and gas. Speaker 0: So the other 2 circles that were on the map, the ag ones, ag is about 7% of Canada's GDP. So about a 150,000,000,000, and about 90,000,000,000 of that is farm expenses. And so if we can work on automating and and improving some of those farm expenses between the 2 of the OPEX, CAPEX, and, and these farm expenses, that's $200,000,000,000 right here in our backyard. To the point of space, we have about a 170,000,000 square feet of industrial space. It takes a lot of space to to be servicing all that oil and gas. Speaker 0: And we're the northern gateway hub. We're I mean, we're the we're the hub to the north to be able to service all that oil infrastructure. We're also the hub for NORAD. So to the point of defense Bound that and that application layer, that's what the thing is on the right is the those those whatever pink things on the top of the continent. That's NORAD. Speaker 0: But we also have really fun defense things that are going on. This is a janky pull of Google Maps, but, these are actual physical, representations of what the test ranges are that we have. So Edmonton is the, you know, nice little square in the center of the map. That big Folder lake air weapons range is 2026 scale on the map, a 120,000 square kilometers of air weapons test range. It's the largest 1 in NATO. Speaker 0: It's where you test air weapons. If you're doing, you know, if you're doing defense application, congratulations. You should do that from Edmonton. CFB Southfield is doing bioweapons, and artillery and and other types of applications for defense. If you're if you're doing application in that field, congratulations. Speaker 0: Welcome to Alberta. I also don't know how this splits out if if Alberta separates. Like, do you just draw a line Bound you have to, like, have a passport or something? I don't know. TNT know? Speaker 0: I don't wanna deal with that. Don't separate. So the AI layer is also in Edmonton. To the point of talent, we're, you know, we're sitting podium across the across the stack in Canada Bound super high up, globally across a series of ranges that are relevant. And all of these stem, pun intended, from being relevant for oil and gas. Speaker 0: So if you think about the oil and gas skill tree, petroleum engineering, obviously number 1 in that stack, and ag to the other point being the other relevant layer that we have in Edmonton. But a lot of these nursing is just a fun 1, but the rest of these are largely functions of the skill tree Bound and compounding out of oil and gas and ag. So pharmacology is AI really fancy chemical Engineer, automation and control, artificial intelligence. When you start to combine these things, you end up talking about that layer 6 that Mark was talking about. And so, yeah, you can build a company with the talent here too. Speaker 0: Amy, to that LaPointe. Investment learning. You talk about LLMs, reinforcement learning or the the base of it. And we have the talent to be able to build fun reinforcement learning models. And Weave have a company that's in our summit right now doing, reinforcement learning model that's on a very small scale on smart meters to be able to orchestrate electric, capacity Bound electric grid, development, which is super fun. Speaker 0: But you can't do this type of stuff if you're coming from, I don't know, Minnesota. They don't have this stuff. We have it in Edmonton, and it's great. And we've seen examples of this already working. So I'm not gonna go through all of these, because I wanna go relatively quickly. Speaker 0: But to the point of oil and gas and reinforcement learning, in the bottom Senior, NanoPrecise worked with Strathcona, which is, it's blocked by buildings, but a massive refinery that's just over there. NanoPrecise is using physical hardware and and reinforcement learning to detect changes in vibrations on mechanical systems to be able to detect when mechanical systems are about to fail. Which, again, physical real world, real world application because if you knock down a 400,000 barrel a day, refinery every day if your crack spreads $20 a barrel, you're losing $8,000,000 a day. So if you can predict those types of things in advance, becomes very valuable. So they tested it, and Nano AI raised $50,000,000 last year. Speaker 0: It's the largest raise in Edmonton's, in Edmonton's recent past. But, yeah, there's a whole pile of companies that are doing great. So like I said, sort of the skill 2026, we have a whole pile of land if you're talking I don't know. You can see it, which is great. And then we make oil and gas, we have ag. Speaker 0: But then from that, you think about Edmonton. You think about, oh, we're a government town. And then the next layer that people think of is, oh, we have a lot of construction. We have a lot of construction because it's not because we have a lot of people. We only have 1000000 and a half people. Speaker 0: There's a lot of cities that build a lot more houses and stuff. What we have is a lot of industrial construction, and that's for the oil and gas Lynn the ag industry. And that leads to fabrication, that leads to extraction, logistics. On the last slide was, AI, which is doing sort of, like, nexus for for, trucks being able to get through weigh stations, and and all these these sorts of things. The AI layer of the world is very interesting for Edmonton. Speaker 0: So, yeah, we have all that stuff, and it's Date, and you should build your company here. So if you're here, don't fight in the SaaS layer. Fight in the vid in the vertical with physical complexity layer. If you have if you're 1 of the companies, data is your moat. Work with founders, to be able to build a company that's awesome from Edmonton Lynn investors. Speaker 0: That layer AI, I don't know where layer 7 is. Hopefully, that one's Edmonton 2 or 8 or 9. But right now, that layer 6, that frontier, that's Edmonton, and we're doing great. You should, be investing Lynn and looking at what's going on here. That's it. Speaker 0: That wasn't 20 Mitchell, but here I am. We'll use Speaker 1: the box thing again. Speaker 0: The box. Nice. Great catch. This thing's all I said. Okay. Speaker 0: I got oil and gas and then add question. Deal. 1st Okay. AI I'll say I'm a finance AI, so we'll see if I can answer them. Oil and gas, like, such a large Senior. Speaker 0: It's interesting, like, being in the industry 2 and a half years ago versus today is completely different at the C suite level, where it felt like AI, like, tech and AI, 2 and a half years ago ago, it was like you're getting a package and you're going to somewhere else. And now it's like this reverse where it feels like there's AI we gotta figure out, we gotta figure it out. But, working in large companies like that, I've definitely seen Machine management is hard. So where do you think, like, the innovation is going to come? Like, I know that Mark just