University of Alberta incubates big international solutions

Necessity is the Canadian mother of innovation for Edmonton projects tackling real-world problems from drought to bone cancer to military build-up to market sovereignty with next-generation technologies — and solutions.

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Hundreds of small- and medium-sized Canadian companies need to compete with Silicon Valley’s giants but are unable to afford the sophisticated computing that requires an ally in their corner.

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Enter the University of Alberta’s Alberta CREATE Centre.

For a fraction of the going rates of Big Data’s American Goliaths, under the protection of the CREATE umbrella, the little guys have a fighting chance in the international sandbox — all while keeping their proprietary research securely within Canadian borders and opening up research jobs and providing top-notch training.

CREATE (Collaborative Resources Empowering Advanced Technology Experiences) helps Canadian companies incubate high-tech savvy where the margin between success and failure can be wafer thin.

Consider PulseMedica Corp, in Edmonton since 2018, and their quest for a real-time, 3D imaging and laser targeting system for precise retinal surgery to repair macular degeneration and other eye diseases for Albertans.

“I think the big thing for us was the security… the security aspect of patient data and patient information… that was a really big rationale for us,” said Nir Katchinskiy of PulseMedica in a blurb on the CREATE website.

Then there’s Regina’s Precision AI, which utilizes advanced drones and custom AI technology for precision farming in a world where water is precious and everyday elements can have cumulative, disastrous effects on crops, livelihood, and the world’s food supply.

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“For us, the support is even more important than the cost… Fast support was significant for us,” said Precision AI’s Amr Omar.

Research accelerates innovation across industrial lines for cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing, AI computing power, quantum technologies, and robotics—all under one open-source umbrella for researchers and start-ups.

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) administrates the CREATE grant for innovative graduate training to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration, address scientific challenges associated with Canada’s research priorities, and facilitate the introduction of highly-skilled, productive employees into the Canadian workforce.

Backers include the U of A, Canada Economic Development, and Alberta Innovates.

Powering up innovation

As industry Cloud manager for ISAIC—Industry Sandbox and Artificial Intelligence Computing—Solange Gagnebin of the U of A engineering faculty supervises a Cloud computing environment for high-performance computing (HPC) for startups and scale-ups, and U of A researchers working directly with companies.

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Think of a mini-Cloud provider, like Google Cloud or Azure, but smaller. Virtual machines, performance GPUs, at a fraction of the price of the Big Data “hyper-scalers.”

“We are unique in Canada. There is nobody who is that big for supporting start-ups and scale-ups,” Gagnebin said.

“People need computing power for creating AI products.”

While Big Data hyper-scalers like Google charge “egress” fees to client companies that want to extricate their data from the system’s servers, CREATE clients like Okaki and DrugBank don’t have to worry about the potential cost of growing large enough to become more independent.

The intellectual property — IP — remains secure, totally kept by the client company, and the University of Alberta—or their sponsors—don’t have access, Gagnebin said.

“We are also local, so the data are not going in the U.S., which is really important, in particular for health start-up companies,” she said.

Operational for five years, ISAIC has helped 149 small and medium-sized enterprises.

Top clientele categories to date have been health (28 per cent), software (21 per cent), agriculture, and technology, each with 15 per cent share.

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Among those clients since 2020, a hundred new jobs were created in the Edmonton area.

Together they’ve raised $27 million in five years and trained about 900 researchers on its servers, crafting a skilled workforce ready to get out and help Canadian companies modernize in a rapidly changing tech world.

“It’s about education, it’s about providing the infrastructure they need to create AI product, and thanks to that, it’s a support which allows them also to do better with fundraising here locally in Alberta or even Canada,” Gagnebin said.

“We provide an alternative for those companies who are pre-commercialization or pre-revenue to have a safe place, where they can do R&D of their AI product before they are able to make enough revenue to be able to pay for the Cloud,” she said.

On the ISAIC web page, Customer Geoffrey Shmigelsky of One Cup AI calls the not-for-profit ISAIC “critically important” and “the single best Cloud customer service I’ve ever seen.”

“The beauty of ISAIC is that you can go and get a computer that has exactly the specifications you need,” Shmigelsky said.

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A chip in the big game

The U of A’s nanoFAB facility’s centralized research and development center is all about supporting academic and industrial applications in micronanotechnology.

For example, Redlen Technologies, a Saanichton, B.C. healthcare company with 160 employees looked to scale up. They found they could affordably access the power of Alberta CREATE for their radiation imaging systems used in high-resolution medical imaging to detect earlier medical conditions like cancer, improving patient outcomes.

At nanoFAB, Redlen got materials characterization and sample analysis — and patients got an edge in their battles with cancer.

An Edmonton semi-conductor start-up company’s emerging manufacturing platform is getting a chip in the big game, thanks to nanoFAB.

With specialty high-performance chips based on lab-grown gallium nitride with raw materials sourced globally, TransEON’s been percolating in Edmonton for six years.

Current projects are initial concepts in the pre-commercial stages for clients, said TransEON founder and CEO Vallen Rezazadeh.

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With nanoFAB’s help, soon their chips will become critical components in radar systems and communication systems in the defence, aerospace and telecom sectors, he said.

“We’re finally at the stage where we’re commercializing the technology and starting to work with commercial partners overseas, in the U.S. and domestically as well,” Rezazadeh said.

“It’s one of those industries that I think right now is quite small in Canada, but is growing pretty rapidly.”

TransEON chips are made locally, bucking former trends.

Canada’s traditional presence has often been “fabless”— creating a unique chip design domestically and then outsourcing labour-intensive fabrication to foundries as far away as Taiwan or Singapore.

“We’ve always flown under the radar, but traditionally, we haven’t done as much manufacturing in the space,” Rezazadeh said.

Another trend has seen shining examples of Canadian semiconductor innovation being snapped up by foreign companies, he said, citing hands-changing buyouts with American firms: Ontario’s ATI became California’s AMD, California’s Skyworks bought up Vancouver-born PMC-Sierra—and Edmonton’s own Micralyne, a manufacturer of MEMS sensor chips, was bought by American conglomerate Teledyne.

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The CREATE Centre is helping keep Canadian innovation Canadian, a market sovereignty which could conceivably have a particular impact if trade connections currently strained between Canada and the U.S. were to sour further.

“Recently, there’s been more companies, more startups, sort of incubating in this space and creating new manufacturing technologies,” Rezazadeh said.

And even if the U.S. market for imported semiconductors cools, there’s demand elsewhere on the globe for Canadian chips, Rezazadeh said.

“We’re very much in a specialized section of the semiconductor world, which most Canadian companies are, because most Canadian companies aren’t making the mass market-type products,” he said.

“There is definitely a huge, huge chunk of the global market in (Europe and friendly countries in Asia). And there’s still a lot of pent-up demand, especially as companies try to shift out of Taiwan, given the geopolitical issues there, or at least limit their exposure there.

“We’re still overall feeling quite positive on the business side with regards to exporting, but we’re going to be watching (the U.S.) a little bit more carefully,” Rezazadeh said.

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Around the world in 90 minutes

From crop management to environmental stability to pipeline security and even national defence, the bird’s eye view has become both critical and more accessible with drones and aerial photography.

A company hatched in a University of Alberta lab has literally elevated distance imagery with satellite-borne hyper-detailed photography so detailed it can detect the species of the trees in a forest, or look for noxious weeds, environmental contamination or even hidden military infrastructure, says Callie Lissinna, a co-founder and co-owner of Edmonton-based Wyvern.

“Satellites can cover much more area, much more cheaply, because once you launch the thing, it’s orbiting Earth every 90 minutes, and so you can cover remote areas and image much larger areas, and it becomes a lot more economical,” Lissinna said.

“Ultimately, what they do is help decision makers make better-informed decisions about resource management and their operations,” she said.

Literally high up on the global forefront, the aerospace data company has three satellites—soon to be five—orbiting earth, taking pictures for an impressive list of clients that includes environmental monitoring, mining, energy, and defence.

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The images are hyperspectral, meaning they reveal something of the chemistry of the materials in the pictures.

“We can tell you what species of tree that is, or we can distinguish between grass and artificial turf, because we can tell the difference between plastic and a real plant,” Lissinna said.

Most digital images have three colours that break down into red, green, and blue, but Wyvern’s Cloud GeoTIF images have a dazzling 32 colours, giving their staff scientists information about light wavelengths registered by pixels, absorbed or reflected according to chemistry.

“What gets me really excited is that this type of data from space has never been available before, so we don’t even know yet what uses for it people are going to discover once we have more data about our planet available for data scientists to play with and learn from,” Lissinna said.

Joining an extracurricular club at school turned out to be solid advice for Wyvern’s co-founders, who were in the right club at the right time in 2017.

Co-founders CEO Chris Robson, Kristin Cote, Kurtis Broda, and Lissinna met in an extracurricular engineering and science club, building and launching the first Alberta-built satellite.

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From that springboard flew the world’s first company to commercially deliver hyperspectral imagery from space, and attracted capital to get it done, raising $21 million Canadian to date for that rare unicorn—an aerospace technology company based in Western Canada.

Designing satellites is satisfying and important work, she said.

“You can even feed our data into AI models, and we can see what it can learn from it. It’s going to unlock so many more efficiencies and and it can even contribute to solving global food security, because we can farm more efficiently with it,” Lissinna said.

And in an era of shifting alliances, the maple leaf on the product means something when it comes to a client’s national security.

“Because we do sell into peace and security, it’s a competitive advantage to be Canadian, because Canada has a reputation on the world stage of being a trustworthy, friendly partner,” she said.

The little company that could got a shout out at its last funding boost from Alberta’s technology and innovation Min. Nate Glubish.

“Wyvern is a real gem of a company in Alberta doing unique and trailblazing work!” he posted on social media.

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Quirks and quests

They may be lab coat-wearing intellectuals, but there’s not a stuffed shirt among the Gen Z leaders in the Wyvern crew.

“We also know how to have a lot of fun and be quirky and embrace the quirkiness of a lot of people who are really interested in space,” Lissinna said.

The team are known to hide images of gnomes in their high-tech business PowerPoint presentations, just to see if people will notice them.

An anonymous employee has been leaving hand-whittled puzzles on the CEO’s desk.

And the company’s staff of 35 don’t have limits to their vacations.

Instead, motivation at the slightly offbeat company flourishes with an internally-fueled work ethic—and with the help of the U of A Innovation Fund, launched in October 2023 as an independent, for-profit entity and a wholly-owned subsidiary of the university, capitalized through support from private donors and public partners, including the provincial government.

For Alberta-based AI entrepreneurs with a connection to the U of A, it offers access to capital, mentorship, local and global networks and support for commercializing products and services.

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The venture capital firm Squadra Ventures was the primary investor in Wyvern’s latest financing round — along with other backers including the Innovation Fund — allowing the company to expand into the U.S. market and continue improving its technology.

Named to Forbes magazine’s 30 Under 30 in science, Lissinna sees the U of A as uniquely poised to understand the commercial potential of Alberta-grown innovations, helping startups get through the seed stage, a particularly difficult phase in the path to commercialization.

“The fund will be able to add strategic value beyond its monetary contribution by, among other things, helping us make connections to achieve our goal of bolstering our international market presence,” she said.

The U of A’s extensive expertise in artificial intelligence is widely hailed, said University of Alberta President and Vice-Chancellor Bill Flanagan.

“We are ranked first in Canada and third globally in related research,” he said at the time of Wyvern’s most recent funding announcement.

“Through the Innovation Fund, the university can empower researchers and innovators to accelerate and translate their findings from campus to the community, transforming innovative research into solutions to global challenges.”

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Sheetal Mehta, CEO of the University of Alberta Innovation Fund, said the cycle benefits all the partners.

“Being first in AI allows us to invest in and scale start-ups who can be globally competitive, which will bring returns back to the fund, the university and the province,” Mehta said.

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