Canada has emerged as a hub for AI, fintech, and cannabis VC investing.

The Canadian market has seen 6 quarters in a row of 100+ deals, per our PwC Canada and CB Insights MoneyTree report on VC trends just out this week. 

We track investment in the above categories (fintech alone has seen 5 quarters in a row of over 10 deals) as well as funding, investor, and geo trends.

Toronto is the main Canadian hub, but Vancouver and Montreal are important centers as well, as seen below.

Some other interesting stats that emerge on this market:

• This is a highly internationalized market: investors from outside Canada account for anywhere from two-fifths to nearly half of investments (depending on company stage). 
• Canada is seeing a nice bubbling up of newer companies recently, judging from the very high seed-stage deal share in Q1 (52%) and Q2 (46%). 
• VC firms aren’t the only players, by any means. Corporations and their corporate venture capital groups are participating in 27% of the deals.

Download our report for more trends and insights on this market, as well as our methodology. 

• +4: This week, 4 companies reached $1B+ valuations and became unicorns. AI-powered selfie company Lightricks, project management platform Monday, enterprise machine learning company DataRobot, and Australia-based lender Judo Capital brought the world’s unicorn number up to 381. Take a look at their combined $1T+ value using our real-time tracker.     
   
• $117B: Alphabet has overtaken Apple as the company with the biggest cash reserves. The Google parent company now has $117B, $15B more than Apple’s current hoard. Apple has been reducing its cash pile by returning money to investors, since it reached a peak of $163B in 2017. Check out Google’s biggest acquisitions to see how the company has spent money in the past.

• $6.4B: New York-based real estate tech company Compass raised $370M in financing at a valuation of $6.4B. The company’s total disclosed funding now stands at just over $1.5B. Compass is reportedly looking to boost expansion efforts as it prepares for a potential IPO in the coming year or so.
   
• $27B: The London Stock Exchange has agreed on a $27B deal to buy financial data analytics company Refinitiv. If approved, the acquisition would create a financial markets data giant that could rival US-based Bloomberg. We dig into how the Bloomberg Terminal is being disrupted here.
   
• $800M: The US Food and Drug Administration approved the ingredient that alternative protein maker Impossible Foods uses to mimic bleeding in its plant-derived burgers — paving the way for its products to be sold in US stores. Impossible Foods has raised over $800M in disclosed funding and is going head-to-head with recently public rival Beyond Meat, which has seen its shares increase in value more than 6x since its IPO in May. For more on the growing alternative-protein trend check out our Meatless Future report.

• 140,000: Capital One announced a hacker compromised the data of over 106M of the bank’s customers, exposing around 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers. For the most important emerging trends in cybersecurity, check out our latest NExTT framework.

• 73 light years: A “Super Earth” planet has been discovered in a star system about 73 light years away, according to a paper published in Nature Astronomy. The researchers also found 2 gaseous planets in the same vicinity, adding to the growing list of planets discovered beyond our solar system.