CANADA IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS, AND TBDC IS HOLDING THE DOOR

TBDC offices

How the Toronto Business Development Centre has become the go-to gateway for global founders building their North American chapter.

The most ambitious startups don’t wait to go global; they build for it from day one. And the market data increasingly points to one conclusion: Canada is where serious global founders should be looking.

The Kearney FDI Confidence Index ranks Canada second globally for investment attractiveness, behind only the United States. Canada has the lowest business investment tax rate in the G7, a world-class talent pool ranked first in the OECD for education, and a regulatory environment stable enough that the Economist Intelligence Unit has ranked it the second best country in the G20 for doing business every year through to 2029.  And Canada is equally interested in Europe. In 2025, Canada’s exports to non-US markets grew 8.3%, with the EU among the standout destinations. 

Why Canada, Why Now?

Ask European founders where they want to take their company next, and increasingly the answer isn’t Silicon Valley. Geopolitical uncertainty, regulatory friction, and a cultural mismatch with US sales cycles have shifted the conversation. 

Ontario alone is home to the world’s most dense cluster of AI startups, with 273 companies in the Greater Toronto Area alone, and it contributes $48.3 billion annually to Canada’s GDP through its IT sector. The country was the first in the world to adopt a national AI strategy, and in 2024, the Canadian government committed $2 billion to accelerate AI infrastructure and talent. Canada’s sovereign cloud investment is reshaping how startups think about data, trust, and enterprise sales across regulated industries.

Then there’s the trade dimension. Through CETA, Canada has a comprehensive free trade agreement with the EU that most European founders have barely begun to leverage. For a company that has proved itself at home, Canada is a market that understands European values, speaks the same language about regulation and data, and opens the door to North American scale, on terms that feel familiar.

More Than a Soft Landing

A not-for-profit originally established by the City of Toronto, TBDC has built a specialized program to help European founders scale in North America via Canada. This single program features a live network of investors, enterprise buyers, government contacts, and subject matter experts from industry associations across more than 20 sectors. It has supported over 10,000 founders, and that institutional depth is exactly what it deploys for European companies entering the market.

When a startup comes through TBDC, they are able to vet their market entry strategy to minimize risks and work directly with networks to make deals and raise capital in the most efficient manner. 

For global scale-ups facing the specific, compounding challenges of entering a new regulated market, unfamiliar procurement cycles, different enterprise buyer expectations, data residency requirements, and certification pathways, TBDC built a modular support structure designed to meet companies where they are. The format is deliberately dense: a sprint week of masterclasses, roundtables, and one-on-one meetings with the right people, followed by up to six months of structured guidance as founders execute their go-to-market plans.

Since 2025, TBDC has brought 40 European companies through this program alone, organizing over 725 curated meetings and making more than 350 mentor introductions for these founders. The sectors varied widely: medtech, agri-food, infrastructure, edtech, and clean energy. What they share is a track record at home and an appetite to build something bigger.

“Business development is key for any scaling Founder. Our job is to reduce the risk for founders coming in from Europe and connect them to the right buyers, capital, and experts, so there is no guesswork. They’re building decisively based on insights."
— Vikram Khurana, Chair of TBDC

What Founders Actually Experience

Bart Roszkowski, Co-CEO of Proteine Resources, a Polish startup that upcycles mushroom byproducts into pet food ingredients, landed in Toronto and came away with six direct introductions to Canadian mushroom producers, warm connections that would have taken months of cold outreach to build independently.

“It builds a lot more trust at the beginning when you are introduced by an official program like TBDC.”

— Bart Roszkowski, Co-CEO, Proteine Resources.

For Nikita Gorbatko, Co-founder of Latvia’s Adventum Tech, the value was in clarity. His company builds real-time structural monitoring sensors for critical infrastructure. TBDC helped the team identify their core customers in Ontario and set up meetings with key decision-makers in regulatory agencies and construction firms.

“We were received very warmly.” — Nikita Gorbatko, Co-founder, Adventum Tech.

Asude Altintas, Co-founder of Twin Science and Robotics, put it plainly:

“Most accelerators have the same kind of programs. But what differentiates this program from others is the curated meetings with real customers. Because you can only learn from your customers.”— Asude Altintas, Co-founder, Twin Science and Robotics.

A Story Worth Knowing: Kardi Ai

Vlastimil Hrabal, CEO of Czech healthtech startup Kardi Ai, came to Toronto with a number he couldn’t stop thinking about. “In North America, there are more than 3,000 deaths a day due to cardiovascular issues,” he says. “The product is unique and needed here.”

His company had already helped save over 300 lives in the Czech Republic in just a matter of months, and was already operating across five countries, including Slovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania, using an AI-powered chest strap that monitors heart rhythm continuously and flags arrhythmias in under five minutes. The insight behind the product is both simple and profound: conventional monitoring lasts one week, but 50% of the arrhythmia cases Kardi Ai has detected showed up between the seventh and twelfth months of monitoring. By the time a standard ECG catches a problem, 90% of arrhythmias have already gone undetected.

“Arrhythmias that are not caught and solved lead to stroke, heart failure, or early onset of dementia. These are the diseases we are preventing.” — Vlastimil Hrabal, CEO, Kardi Ai

North America is their next frontier, but entering a regulated medical device market from scratch is not something you do alone. Kardi Ai came to TBDC through a referral from their investor, Soulmates Ventures, and what they found exceeded their expectations.

“It was an unbelievable week. I never saw such preparation for such an event before. Multiple calls before, timelines, schedules, deadlines. Everything was lined up.” — Vlastimil Hrabal

For CTO Pavel Digaňa, the week delivered something more concrete: direct, candid feedback from North American hospital partners. Even without US regulatory certification in hand, the hospitals signalled they were ready to support and distribute the product once it arrived.

“The feedback from the hospitals was surprisingly positive. We are going to deep dive into how fast we can come here again with the product.” — Pavel Digaňa, CTO, Kardi Ai

The Global Startup Awards Connection

Global Startup Award is thrilled to announce the collaboration with TBDC aiming to build meaningful connections with the founders, builders, and innovators shaping the future of the global startup ecosystem. 

For GSA alumni ready to take that step, Canada represents a compelling opportunity, offering access to a dynamic market, strong networks, and long-term growth potential. With TBDC as a partner, founders gain not just guidance, but a clear and practical pathway to navigate expansion and turn global ambitions into reality.

About TBDC

The Toronto Business Development Centre is a non-profit multi-sector organization established by the City of Toronto, with 36 years of experience supporting entrepreneurs. TBDC serves as a bridge between founders worldwide and Ontario’s investors, industry associations, and government, delivering 8 programs that help startups launch, scale, and grow. To learn more about international expansion into Canada, visit tbdc.com.

About THE GLOBAL STARTUP WARDS

The Global Startup Startup (GSA) is the world’s largest startup ecosystem platform, which covers 154 countries worldwide. The GSA discovers and empowers high-growth and innovative entrepreneurs and their startups through global competitions, events, collaboration, and community.