The Boast team returned to the Enercare Center last week for the final Collision Conference in Toronto (stay tuned for WebSummit Vancouver in summer 2025)!
Throughout the week, we caught up with old friends and new pals to talk shop around the latest tech and discuss what it takes to drive innovation across North America’s technology ecosystem.
While Artificial Intelligence (AI) was everywhere you looked, some of the coolest innovations we saw were rooted in material research and development to deliver solutions you can touch—and even consume.
Green tech at the Growth phase
Look no further than some of the amazing Growth teams that displayed throughout the week for game-changing solutions that go far beyond AI.
Relocalize and Climative, for instance, are two of the innovative teams that have developed CleanTech solutions to help businesses and consumers drive down their carbon footprint.
Climative is a clean tech company using AI-assisted digital energy assessments and blockchain to accelerate the decarbonization of the built environment.
Keelen Gagnon caught up with Boast to show how municipalities and individuals can leverage Climative to understand their carbon footprint and ultimately improve it.
Gordon So from Relocalize showed off more cool tech that caught our attention in the Growth corner during Collision. Their team hopes to “revolutionize the food supply chain” with advanced micro-factories that produce, package, and palletize food directly at distribution centers, eliminating middle-mile logistics and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Just like Boast, Matthew Suhay and the ZeroIn team are all about building community and sharing the resources founders need to take innovation in their own hands. With ZeroIn, they’ve created a central point of information, education, and management to aid people in their journey towards zero-waste
But when it comes to another kind of Green living, the team at Royal Emerald Pharmaceuticals is looking to make a big difference, offering non-synthetic, nature-based alternatives to opiates that can deliver powerful care without the well-known drawbacks of traditional subscription pain remedies.
Teams to drive success and scale
There were also a wealth of solutions on the event floor that were aimed at helping human teams deliver more powerful innovation outcomes.
Boast’s own customer CoLab is a perfect example. They’ve created a cloud-based platform purpose built for fast, effective design review, enabling multiple engineers, designers, and other stakeholders to review designs together and build off one another’s feedback.
CoLab CTO Patrick Leckey caught up with us at the Booth to give their take not just on the innovation ecosystem, but how pivotal non-dilutive funding delivered through Boast has been to extending their efficiency, efficacy and product runway.
Our pal David Brennan from Arkeo AI discussed how they are leveraging best-of-breed AI to help turn small teams into the next major unicorn. Just like Boast, Arkeo AI helps teams work smarter and punch above their weight to achieve growth and scale to success.
We also ran into our friends at FYELABS, who have expertise across domains and industries to develop powerful new solutions that are all rooted deeply in unique research and development. Just like David and the Arkeo team, we met Souvik and the FYELABS crew last year at a similar event and were thrilled to see their continued success.
And of course, where Boast does the heavy lifting helping customers tackle R&D tax credits Scrut Automation fills in the gaps for compliance and security. Hayden and her team were incredible neighbors throughout the event, and offer a powerful co-sourcing opportunity for businesses of all sizes.
And on the other side of Booth E261 were our friends at SimuTech. Their solution enables training and development across a wide array of scenarios, helping teams accelerate their R&D while similarly not over-extending human practitioners.
We were also extremely proud to catch up with Boast’s customer Asepha to learn about how Eunice and her team are helping revolutionize the pharmacy space from the top-down, tackling some of the most prolific healthcare challenges facing practitioners globally.
New ideas to drive a new reality
While there were some incredible B2B solutions on the floor, there were also a lot of solutions that were designed to actually solve problems facing consumers that warranted a huge shoutout.
Shelley from tripple inc. has developed a B2B2C solution, in fact, targeting both consumers and those in the tourism industry. Their solution is map-based itinerary planning app that allows DMOs to display their quality, curated data on their websites, while allowing travelers to plan and map their route within the same portal.
We also caught up with our customer ZeroSound, who are tackling not just ugly rackets, but bad aesthetics with their solutions. ZeroSound actively cancels noise, reducing it by up to 92 percent in both outdoor and indoor environments, actively canceling sound waves while collecting data to allow users to proactively manage your environment.
Naturally, there was fun and games at the show, as Adina Maynard from Cattywampus caught our eye first thing on Day 2 and pulled us in for a demo. Their game engages users with daily challenges and an intuitive interface, delivering a fun, fresh take on mobile apps.
These are just a few of the many founders, entrepreneurs and tech all stars we caught up with at Collision Conference 2024.
We’ll be sharing more insights from the show, including more takes from our team and more shoutouts to Boast customers and partners who drew raves throughout this year’s event.
Stay tuned for more, and reach out to one of our tax credit experts today to see how we can help you take your business to the next level.
