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A wedge is nothing without a vision
Float went from corporate card to a ~$548M valuation in a few years. Plus: four founders, four problems nobody wanted, from last Monday night.
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A wedge is nothing without a vision, and a vision is nothing without a moat.
Being a founder means holding two contradictory ideas in your head and executing on both at once. Most early-stage founders I meet at TechTO or N49P haven't made peace with that yet. The example I keep coming back to: to raise your first rounds, you have to explain both your wedge and your vision. Most founders show up with one, not both.
One group walks me through the initial product in detail. How they'll build it, how they'll distribute it, how it gets to a few million in revenue. The other group pitches a massive vision but has no hypothesis for how they earn the first dollar. Both are missing half the pitch. A wedge that doesn't open into a large market isn't interesting to a VC. A vision with no starting move is just a dream. The founders who actually raise can draw a straight line from their first wedge to a market worth billions, then tell you why, once they get there, nobody catches them.
A perfect example of a team that understood this from the beginning is Float. Since I first met them in 2021 they could always explain both the wedge and the vision.
The wedge: a corporate card
Float started as a Canadian corporate-card company, the "Brex of Canada," built for the small and mid-sized businesses the big banks under-serve. The card was a sharp wedge. The pain is obvious, the value shows up on day one, and once the card is in a company's hands, Float sits inside the daily finance workflow with a live feed of transaction data. In July 2021 they raised a $5M seed, and followed in November 2021 with a $30M USD Series A led by Tiger Global on that wedge alone.
A card is easy to understand and easy to switch to. That's exactly why it works as an entry point, and exactly why, on its own, it's not a venture-scale business. Float knew that from the start.
The vision: a financial operating system
By the December 2024 Series B, ~$70M CAD led by Goldman Sachs, the card was clearly the door, not the house. Revenue had grown 50x, payment volume 45x, and assets under management 30x, across about 4,000 customers including Jane, Knix, and LumiQ. Float had layered on bill pay, high-yield business accounts, expense management, accounts-payable automation, and cards in both Canadian and US dollars. The pitch was no longer "a better card." It was the financial operating system a Canadian business actually runs on.
Last month, an $85M Series C led by Inovia Capital, at a ~$548M valuation. By then Float had 7,500+ customers (double its Series B count), revenue up more than 120% since December 2024, business account balances up more than 4x, and 170 people.
To take a wedge to a moat you need a competitive advantage
Float's wedge-to-vision arc worked because of its unique insight. It's built deeply for Canada. Canadian tax and GST/HST logic, banking relationships, credit underwriting, and payment rails are exactly the things a US platform can't cheaply copy. Float joined Payments Canada to move closer to national infrastructure, including the coming Real-Time Rail, and secured a $100M debt facility to fund its credit and cash products.
And each product feeds the next. Cards generate transactions. Transactions sharpen underwriting. Underwriting enables credit. Balances enable treasury. In April 2026, Float launched Float Intelligence, an AI layer that works precisely because it sits on top of the cards, bills, balances, and accounting data, with the context and the permission to do the finance work, not just describe it. A generic assistant can tell you software spend went up. A system wired into the workflow can find the duplicate subscriptions, flag them, route the approval, and update the forecast.
That's the whole arc. The card was the wedge. The operating system is the vision. Float could always explain both.
Want to see the founders explain both? Watch two of their past TechTO talks:
Rob Khazzam, Disrupting the Fintech Space: youtu.be/O57MECbb9YU
Has Canadian venture capital stopped taking venture risk? |
Four founders, four problems nobody wanted
One in five patients on the lung-transplant list were dying from something preventable. A nurse in the room built the fix, and walked us through it last Monday night.
That was Together Toronto, July 6, at UofT's Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus. The night opened with the community mic, ran through three founders on stage, and closed with a fireside. Across all of it, one thread kept surfacing: the best ideas live in the problems nobody else wants to own.
Marijana Zubrinic made the case as sharply as anyone. A nurse practitioner at UHN, she watched lung-transplant patients slip into respiratory arrest when an oxygen mask came off. Traditional alarms missed it. Her first prototype was chopped-down IV poles, Amazon speakers, and cameras. HALO now runs in 31 healthcare facilities across three provinces, and it took the preventable mortality rate from 21% to 5%. Her lesson wasn't about the tech. "You don't need to be the smartest person in the room. You just need to know how to build a good team." ▶ Watch
That idea, the right team over the smartest person, ran through the whole night. Yoseph West, who closed the evening in a fireside with Alex Norman, built Relay into a bank for 150,000 US small businesses out of Toronto. He put it in hiring terms: 90% of Relay's code is now AI-generated, and his response is to hire more engineers, not fewer. "If you can afford to hire amazing people, why wouldn't you do more?" ▶ Watch
Afshin Mousavian of Actual landed on the same word: trust. He watched a competitor lose $18 million across 3,600 restaurants, and rebuilt his whole company around one lesson. "Don't build features that customers trust. Build a company that customers trust." Yoseph said it another way: in fintech, you earn that trust every single day. ▶ Watch
And the builders were relentless about one thing: validate with real people before you build. Nomaan Ahmed of Orbits made the contrarian case that innovation is iteration, not invention, and that the move is to kill your riskiest assumption early. He and his co-founder proved demand for Orbits when strangers typed credit card details into a half-broken signup form. Yoseph found Relay's first customers door to door in Kensington Market. Same instinct, different product. ▶ Watch
The night had started at that same mic, open to the room. Founders launching AI agents, a nurse looking for a technical co-founder, a background-check startup hiring, an AI-literacy nonprofit teaching seniors to spot scams, a founder who shipped his beta four days earlier. The pulse of Toronto tech, ten seconds at a time.
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Two more rooms in Montreal last week
We took our two pan-Canadian dinner series to Montreal last week. Both nights, written up in full on LinkedIn.
The hardest part of building a company isn't the work. It's how alone you feel doing it.
Around 24 growth-stage founders, each at a different point of the climb, one of them fresh off closing a round an hour before walking in. The moment I keep coming back to: a founder named a problem they'd been carrying quietly, and someone across the table who'd already lived it offered everything they'd learned. No pitch, no keeping score.
Around 30 female founders sat down and for the evening the human got to speak instead of the startup.
Co-hosted with Mona Minhas (BDC Thrive Venture Fund) and Catherine Ouellet-Dupuis (White Star Capital). What keeps these founders up at night wasn't only the raise. It was holding the founder and the mother, protecting the relationship, the guilt of the missed moments. The kind of trust that earns a 2am call.
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