Forty-five private companies first crossed a $10B valuation between July 2022 and July 2026. Twenty-four got there in 2025 alone. None of them were Canadian. Cohere is close as they did a merger at $20B but haven't closed (or announced) the funding round that was supposed to close in conjunction with the merger.

I analyzed every one of the companies that hit the $10b this week, because of a complaint I hear often: Canadian VCs don't take enough risk. They want traction before they invest.

The opposite is the reality. Most founders' pitches are not risky enough. The breakout winners usually have an earned insight that leads them to launching their startup, lets them compound quickly and makes them a "household" name. The problem is their earned insight may not be right, may be too early or may not scale. The downside is greater but the upside is larger.

An insight is not "this market exists." The insight is that there's a better way to serve it, and that you specifically know what that way is because of where you've been.

I reviewed all 45 by one question: at founding, was the wedge available to a careful outsider reading the news? Or did it require having been somewhere? The results 70% were based on an earned insight, the other 30% were based on an obvious problem and solution and won via execution.

Wiz, $10B, 2023. Its founders ran cloud security at Microsoft. What they learned there was that security agents were too slow and too fragmented to keep up with cloud infrastructure. So they built agentless scanning plus a graph of connected risk.

Crusoe, $10B, 2025. Cully Cavness is third-generation oil and gas. Chase Lochmiller came out of quant trading and crypto. Childhood friends who reconnected on a hike and kept circling the same fact: gas gets burned off at the wellhead because there's no pipeline to move it. Their answer was to move the compute to the gas. Bitcoin first, AI data centres later. Neither of them gets there alone.

Kalshi, $11B, 2025. Prediction markets have been an obvious idea for 20+ years. Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara spent eighteen months getting the CFTC to designate them a contract market, the first federally regulated event exchange in the U.S. The wedge wasn't the product. It was the regulatory route nobody else was willing to walk.

These are not failures. Some are worth more than anything above.

xAI ($24B, 2024), build another frontier lab. Figure ($39B, 2025), humanoid robots for labour shortages, a thesis stated out loud since the 1970s. Cognition ($10.2B, 2025), once coding models worked, an autonomous software engineer was the most legible application on the board. Nscale ($14.6B, 2026), GPUs are scarce; build the data centres.

Every one of those is a sentence a hundred smart people could have written in 2023. They won anyway, on execution, capital, speed and product quality. But look at what that race demands. If your thesis is legible to everyone, you sign up to out-raise and out-build everyone. That's a real strategy but with different outcome distributions that the earned insights.

The same split shows up here, and the earned side is where our biggest outcomes came from.

Shopify. Tobi Lütke set out to sell snowboards online in 2004, couldn't find e-commerce software he could stand, and built his own. The wedge wasn't "online stores should be easier." It was arming the merchants nobody else thought were worth serving and knowing, from having been one, exactly what they needed.

Clio, $5B, 2025. Jack Newton and Rian Gauvreau launched in 2008 into a market where legal software meant selling to big firms. They went at solo and small firms instead, on cloud, while lawyers were still on paper.

Coher, ~$20B, 2026. Aidan Gomez co-wrote the transformer paper. He started Cohere in 2019, three years before ChatGPT, and bet on enterprise, private deployment and data residency while everyone else chased a consumer chatbot.

And the counterexample: Wealthsimple, $10B CAD, 2025. Betterment and Wealthfront already existed. So did Nest Wealth, Justwealth and CI Direct, chasing the identical thesis at the identical time. Michael Katchen won on brand, design and distribution, then kept extending until the company had $125B in assets. Obvious thesis. Relentless execution.

The pattern isn't "non-obvious ideas win." Nearly every company here attacked a large, visible problem. Two-thirds paired it with a wedge that wasn't visible, an architecture, an economic mechanism, a regulatory path, a first customer nobody else would take seriously.

The problem is usually obvious. The reason you win is not.

So when the pass comes back, the question underneath is rarely "is this market real." It's "why you, and what do you know that I don't." If your answer is a market size slide, you answered a different question.

And the uncomfortable half: your earned insight might be wrong. It might be four years early. It might not survive the first thousand customers. That is the actual risk, bigger downside, bigger upside, and it's the trade most pitches quietly avoid making.

Nobody funds an idea. They fund a reason.

1Password started in 2005 as a weekend project between two Toronto web developers sick of filling in login forms by hand. They stayed profitable and took zero outside capital for fourteen years. Then a $200M Series A, and a $6.8B valuation.

We're sitting down with Jeff Shiner on August 10th to learn more about the company's journey.

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