University of Toronto professor plans to build 50 AI companies in five years

Daniel Wigdor, CEO and Co-Founder of AXL and a computer science professor at the University of Toronto, joins BNN Bloomberg to discuss fast-tracking AI commercialization in Canada.

A Toronto university professor aims to make the city a global technology leader by launching 50 artificial intelligence (AI) companies to ensure Canada benefits economically from its own research while retaining talent at home.

“Right now, in Canada, 75 per cent of the patents that get filed in the AI space go to global tech giants,” Daniel Wigdor, computer science professor at the University of Toronto and co-founder and CEO of Axl, told BNN Bloomberg Thursday. “Of the remaining 25, only seven per cent stay here in Canada. But we lead the world in this technology and AI applied technology as well. And despite that fact, we’re doing all this great research here, but it’s not making its way into Canadian innovation and Canadian corporations.”

According to the Canadian Press, about three-quarters of AI patents produced by researchers in Canada leave the country, and most end upin the hands of Big Tech.

Wigdor has founded several companies applying technologies to create products, employing hundreds of people across North America and raising over $100 million in revenue and funding, according to Axl’s website. In 2020, he sold Chatham Labs to Facebook and became the founding director of Meta’s Reality Labs in Toronto. He holds 60 patents.

Through Axl, a Toronto-based venture studio, Wigdor aims to build 50 AI-powered companies within the next five years to fuel Canada’s research-to-commercialization pipeline.

“What we’re looking to do is create the right opportunities and talent networks here in Canada, so that we can pick up those results and begin to commercialize it here,” said Wigdor.

Axl is located at the Schwartz-Reisman Innovation Campus at the University of Toronto, co-located with the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the University of Toronto’s Computer Science Department and startup accelerators.

The studio assists clients by identifying business problems they may have and applying new and existing AI while using academic research rather than working to build innovative AI servers from scratch. They work to automate tasks and functions for a company to partner on future projects together.

“We have many partners established already, and we’re excited to announce them over time,” said Wigdor. “There’s the foundational technologies of large language models and the servers and things that people are throwing billions and billions of dollars at right now, but all the real money in any platform is always made through the applications that get built over top of it. And that’s the space that we’re looking to operate. And so the partners that we’re looking for are those companies that have problems that they themselves don’t know could be solved with these amazing technologies.”

Axl recently closed on a $15 million venture fund. They are currently working with Dentons and Dillion Consulting Limited.

“We partner with great, innovative companies,” said Wigdor.

“We’ve announced, for example, our partnership with Dentons, which is Canada’s global law firm. Through that partnership, we go deep with our corporate partners. We study their business over the course of several weeks and months, we gain a deep understanding of all the opportunities that exist.”

“In the Dentons’ case, within the firm themselves, for things they would be a customer of, but then also for Dentons’ clients, what are the opportunities and problems that they’re having that we could solve with AI that other people don’t know could be solved that way? And so, what that means is, before we found one of our companies, we already have a validated problem, a first customer and a strategic investor.”