Three rooms this week.

A private VC dinner on Monday. Growth-stage founders at the table on Tuesday. CIX and the Afterparty on Wednesday.

Different perspectives, same pressure.

20 investors. One room. No cap table talk.

Monday night we hosted our first Off the Cap Table dinner - a private room for 20 VCs.
Three things came up fast.

AI is reshaping how funds operate, but the end model is yet to be figured out. The room also got honest about what the Canadian ecosystem still needs to fix. Not the usual cheerleading. The gaps.

And the quieter shift: slower AI adoption by Canadian teams and a tougher late-stage funding market are already changing the advice investors give and the companies they back.

One dinner. And conversations that will keep going.

Thank you to TIMIA Capital and Blakes Ventures for making the night possible.

On March 24, we brought together 30+ founders leading companies at $3M+ in revenue or venture-backed for a Growth Table dinner.

What stood out was not that the room was smart. That part is expected.

What stood out was how quickly the room got honest.

Different companies, all in the growth stage. The same four decisions kept coming up.

• Who do you hire for the next version of the company, not the last one?

• Where is AI actually improving margin, speed, or customer experience, and where is it still mostly noise?

• How do you expand without making the core business slower, messier, or harder to lead?

• And how do you make better fundraising decisions now, even if you are not raising today?

That is the part of building that gets harder as you grow. The decisions get more expensive. The tradeoffs get less obvious. And the people outside the room usually cannot help much.

That is why Peerscale matters. It is a consistent room of peers who know the stage, know the pressure, and help founders make better calls faster. Same room. Honest conversations. No pretending.

If one of those four decisions is sitting with you right now, apply for a Peerscale seat.

CIX Summit put founder stories from every stage on the table. Emerging, early, and growth companies all had a place in the conversation. So did the hard stuff: fundraising, control, expansion, trust, and what it takes to keep building in this market.

That is what made the CIX Summit Afterparty matter.

The stories were on stage. The conversations kept going after.

By the time people rolled in, the room already had momentum. Some came straight from CIX. Others came just for the night.

Founders, investors, operators, builders, and job seekers all ended up in the same room. People reconnected with faces they had not seen in months. People finally spoke to the ones they had seen around forever. LinkedIns were swapped. Plans got made. Inbox follow-ups started before the night was even over.

Cheers to everyone who showed up and made the room what it was. And thank you to Fasken and GuruLink for helping power the night.

This Xanadu clip hits differently today.

Tomorrow, March 27th, Xanadu is expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq and TSX as XNDU. That makes it the first publicly listed photonic quantum computing company. For Canadian tech, that is a real milestone.

What makes it more interesting is how long this story has been building. Six years ago, Christian Weedbrook (Founder and CEO of Xanadu) was on the TechTO stage talking about building the “ultimate computer” and how the real work happens through milestones along the way. That talk is worth revisiting now.

The numbers look very different today. Xanadu is heading into this moment with a roughly $3.1B pro forma enterprise value, ~US$302M in expected gross proceeds from the transaction, and talks underway for up to CAD$390M in government support to expand quantum manufacturing in Canada.

It is also no longer just a big idea story. Xanadu now has 245+ employees, including 135+ PhDs, plus 130+ patents and patent applications. PennyLane, its software platform, is seeing around 200,000 trailing 30-day downloads and 35,000 trailing 30-day active users.

On the hardware side, Aurora launched with 12 qubits, 35 photonic chips, and 13 km of fiber optics, all operating at room temperature. Borealis delivered the benchmark that makes people stop and look: Xanadu says it completed a task in 2 minutes that would take a classical supercomputer 7 million years.

The quote from Christian’s old TechTO talk that hits differently now is this:

That feels like the right way to read tomorrow. Not as the finish line. As one more milestone on a very long founder journey.

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