The world's hardest problems have a way of attracting a certain kind of person. Not the ones looking for easy wins, but the ones who look at something that seems almost impossible and decide that's exactly where they need to be.
Canada has no shortage of those people. Canadians willing to dedicate themselves to finding solutions with a fundamentally different approach. And in doing so, building solutions with the potential to touch millions of lives.
Meet AWS Canada's AI Innovators: nine organizations using artificial intelligence to tackle challenges that range from the molecular to the planetary, spanning healthcare, education, climate, transportation, drug discovery, and robotics. They don't build technology for technology's sake. They build it because the problems are too important not to.
These are their stories.
1. AlayaCare: Helping deliver better patient outcomes
Montréal, Québec
A home care nurse is sitting in her car, reviewing a patient file on her phone. In twenty minutes, she’ll walk into the home of an 82-year-old man recovering from a hip replacement—and thanks to AlayaCare, his history is already summarized before she rings the doorbell.
That’s the shift AlayaCare is creating. The company uses AI-powered software to help home care agencies improve patient outcomes by giving caregivers more time to focus on care, not administration. With Amazon Bedrock, AlayaCare built Layla, an AI assistant that delivers real-time patient summaries, and AlayaFlow, an agentic workflow engine that streamlines scheduling, visit verification, and care-plan generation.
“We’re oriented around better patient care in the home,” says Founder and CEO Adrian Schauer. “Technology is just the enabler.”
See AlayaCare transform homecare with agentic AI.
2. Haply Robotics: Teaching robots to feel
Montréal, Québec
For nearly six decades, robots have had eyes, ears, and arms—but never true touch, making tasks that require feeling pressure, detecting slip, or handling delicate objects stubbornly out of reach for automation. Inspired by his work in neurosurgery simulation research at the National Research Council of Canada, Felix Désourdy co-founded Haply Robotics. The company is closing that gap with force-feedback controllers and physical AI models that learn from human demonstrations, transforming human dexterity into repeatable robotic action. AWS supports Haply's simulation-to-reality workflows, real-world training, and edge inference through services like Amazon SageMaker and AWS IoT Greengrass.
The result: robots that can finally feel, adapt, and act in the physical world—opening the door to safer, more precise, and more capable robotic systems across industries from healthcare to manufacturing.
“If humans learn by doing and manipulating objects,” notes Désourdy, “why couldn’t robots do the same? We’re writing a new chapter out of Montreal for physical AI, one where the sense of touch is opening up infinite possibilities.”
Watch Haply Robotics teach robots to feel.
3. KOHO: Opening doors for credit-invisible Canadians
Toronto, Ontario
Canada's credit system has a blind spot. Newcomers, young adults, people who have stumbled and are starting over: all of them can pay their bills on time for years and still be shut out of a mortgage or a car loan because they've never held a traditional loan. KOHO is using AWS and generative AI to challenge that model, evaluating real signs of financial responsibility and helping hundreds of thousands of Canadians improve their credit scores.
"We're building KOHO for the average Canadian," says Daniel Eberhard, founder and CEO of KOHO. "That's how you go from directly impacting a few million people to indirectly impacting the entire country."
See KOHO open doors for the credit invisible with generative AI.
4. Logan: unlocking nature's secrets to fight microplastic pollution
Toronto, Ontario
Microplastics are now found in our water, food, and bodies. It is one of the most pervasive environmental challenges of our time. But Artem Babaian, Assistant Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto's Donnelly Centre, believes the solution to this man-made problem may already exists in nature. With his team at the Donnelly Centre’s RNA Lab, Babaian built Logan on AWS—an open-source DNA search engine that indexes the world's public genetic data—representing more than 39 million DNA and RNA sequencing datasets. With the index in place, the team uses Amazon Bedrock's AI models to zero in on plastic-degrading enzymes found in bacteria, fungi, and insects, uncovering over a billion enzyme variants in just ten hours—outperforming anything ever designed in a lab.
"We think of microplastics as a very synthetic problem, but the irony is that the solution might already be in nature," Babaian says. "Anywhere life has found a way to do interesting chemistry, we now have a way to find it and help transform our world for the better."
Discover Logan's open-source DNA engine tackling microplastics.
5. SMART Technologies: Empowering educators and transforming learning
Calgary, Alberta
Canada’s classrooms are stretched from St. John’s to Nunavut, and teachers are under growing pressure to do more with less. SMART Technologies, which has been building tools that bring teaching alive for over 40 years, is helping give teachers time back. Now used in 175 countries, SMART technologies built Lumio, an AI-powered platform built on Amazon Bedrock that supports lesson planning and more personalized learning. Teachers are seeing productivity increase by up to 75%, while classrooms in remote locations gain access to quality instruction they couldn’t reach before.
"Teaching is one of the most important jobs in the world," explains Nicholas Svensson, CEO of SMART Technologies. “The most important thing for a teacher is to teach, not to get caught up in all the technology. It's a big challenge, but it's one that we're here to serve."
Watch how SMART uses AI to give teachers their time back.
6. Variational AI: Using generative AI to revolutionize drug discovery
Vancouver, British Columbia
It takes 10 to 12 years to bring a drug from start to approval, with only a 10% probability of success in clinical trials. Hundreds of millions of dollars are invested at a ten to one odd. Handol Kim felt there had to be a better way to improve those odds. He co-founded Variational AI in 2019, which uses generative AI to design small-molecule drug candidates up to 100 times more efficiently than traditional methods. Its platform, Enki, is built on a foundation model trained on virtually every published, approved, and patented drug—learning the elements of every drug, then generating new candidates with greater probability of success, safety, and potency. AWS provided the compute that helped Variational AI develop its first model, and today the company deploys secure AWS environments for pharmaceutical partners like Merck, enabling collaboration at scale while keeping proprietary data strictly separated.
"Canada has the seventh most pre-clinical programs in the world," Kim says. "And yet we have no homegrown non-generic pharma companies in the top 100. Wouldn't it be great if we did? AI is how we get there so we can achieve health sovereignty."
See Variational AI design drug candidates 100 times faster with generative AI.
7. Voxelis AI: Giving wildfire crews the eyes they need to save lives
Vancouver, British Columbia
Every year, more than 8,000 wildfires burn about 2.1 million hectares across Canada, and climate change is making them faster, hotter, and more unpredictable Voxelis AI, founded by second-generation helicopter pilot Colin O'Neill in Vancouver, built VoxVision—a compact, bowling-ball-size device retrofitted onto helicopters that uses machine learning to analyze thermal imagery and environmental data, transforming raw observations into actionable intelligence shared across pilots, ground crews, and incident commanders in near real time through AWS infrastructure. The company is also leveraging Kiro, AWS's agentic development environment, to ship front-line capabilities in weeks rather than months.
"VoxVision is like strapping a robot to an aircraft," O'Neill explains. "We want to turn every aircraft doing wildfire suppression into an intelligent node that helps people on the ground make better decisions to put fires out faster."
Watch Voxelis AI transform wildfire aircraft into life-saving nodes with AI.
8. Waabi: Revolutionizing autonomous transportation through Physical AI
Toronto, Ontario
Physical AI—systems that can perceive, reason, and act in the world around them—is here, and Waabi is leading the charge. Founded by AI pioneer Raquel Urtasun, the Toronto-based company is applying this technology where it can have the greatest impact: autonomous vehicles.
Transportation moves everything—people, food, medicine—yet the industry is straining under driver shortages and growing congestion. Rather than logging billions of real-world kilometres like others in the space, Waabi develops in simulation first. Waabi World, a generative AI simulation platform running on AWS using Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 tests millions of driving scenarios overnight that would take years to encounter on real roads.At the centre of it all is the Waabi Driver—a fully autonomous system powering both long-haul trucks and robotaxis through a single shared AI model. The results: a partnership with Volvo producing the VNL Autonomous truck, over one billion dollars USD raised in 2026—believed to be the largest funding round in Canadian history—and a deal with Uber to deploy 25,000 robotaxis.
"We can train and test under all conditions, so that we can deploy safely. We are building an incredible generational company here in Canada that is going to change the world." says Urtasun.
See how Waabi drives the Physical AI revolution with autonomous vehicules.
9. Waste Robotics: How computer vision and robotics are turning waste into the world's next resource
Trois-Rivières, Québec
Humanity generates 10 billion tons of waste per year—the equivalent of 45 garbage trucks every single second—and efficient sorting is at the heart of solving it. Waste Robotics is helping to sort what facilities could previously never keep on top of—recyclables, construction materials and trash—with AI-powered robots across facilities worldwide. Using AWS for compute, model training, and global connectivity, Waste Robotics’ robots sort at consistent, predictable rates, recognizing objects at 98–99% precision, and most importantly, help chip away at the ever-growing mountain of waste.
"We are pushing the limits of what's possible in terms of circularity with AI and robotics,” says Eric Camirand, cofounder and CEO of Waste Robotics. “Today, we have all the tools and technology to accomplish true circularity of the products we consume."
Discover Waste Robotics' AI robots, sorting through the world's waste.
A shared belief
These nine organizations operate in vastly different industries—from fintech to healthcare, from classrooms to chemistry labs, from haptics to highway trucking. But they share a conviction that AI's greatest purpose is solving problems that matter for people.
Together, they represent the breadth and depth of Canada's AI ecosystem: world-class talent, bold ambition, and a commitment to building technology that serves human progress—here and beyond.
This is AWS Canada's AI Innovators—where breakthrough ideas meet purpose, and innovation changes lives.
Learn more about each innovator at https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/canadas-ai-innovators/.
