Meet the founders who presented on April 27.

Ben Guo was early at Stripe in 2015 and spent over 8 years there. His cofounder Rob Cheung was the first engineer at Substack. Together they're building Zo — personal cloud infrastructure reimagined for the next billion people who aren't developers. The great powers of cloud computing have always been locked behind technical skill. Zo is changing that. Launched in November, growing fast, now building the team. $28M raised from Lightspeed, South Park Commons, and Guillermo Rauch.

Hiring: systems engineer and product engineers. Details here.

Akash Magoon built Adonis to fix one of healthcare's most expensive, invisible problems: revenue cycle management. Providers lose billions every year to billing inefficiencies that nobody catches until it's too late. Adonis flips the model — AI-driven automation that's proactive, not reactive, with high autonomous resolution rates. $95M+ raised from General Catalyst, Bling Capital, Point72, and Quadrille Capital. Just announced their Series C. Eight-figure revenue. The category is massive and Adonis is pulling ahead.

Hiring: AI engineering leader, senior forward deployed engineer, senior product manager, and more. Details here.

Andrew Pignanelli is building the infrastructure for fully autonomous businesses. Their product, Cofounder, lets anyone automate an entire company using natural language — coordinating AI agents across sales, marketing, ops, and engineering so humans don't have to. The goal: make launching a real-world business as easy as playing a video game. $10M raised from Union Square Ventures, Compound, and Acrew. Cofounder 2 launches next month.

Hiring: agents research lead, applied AI engineer, fullstack engineer, senior platform engineer, head of agentic marketing, head of agentic GTM. Details here.

Regan Jayne and Sarah Ganzenmuller building the platform that turns customers into communities — and communities into brand moats. Rediem's AI-native platform uses behavioral psychology to drive genuine, cross-channel engagement that strengthens AI discoverability and keeps customers coming back. Forbes 30 Under 30. Backed by Work-Bench and Ivy Ventures. $3M raised, $1M+ ARR. Already working with brands like Sun Bum.

Hiring: account executives (2-3), software engineers (3), and partnerships. Details here.

Brian Distelburger has raised $250M+ across his career as a founder — and his latest bet is on fixing the most dreaded ritual in the modern workplace: performance reviews. Windmill builds a living performance record by pulling data from tools your team already uses, pairing it with continuous feedback, and using AI to synthesize it all into calibrations that are actually data-driven. No more blank page. No more guesswork. Something worth watching — there may be a funding announcement coming very soon.

Hiring: founding design engineer, ML engineer, software engineer, account executive. All roles NYC. Details here.

Daniel Kahn and the Sparrow team are turning a 6-week process into a 6-minute one. Sparrow helps financial institutions build targeted, personalized digital relationships with their members at scale — deploying intelligent, automated journeys through their Crest platform that drive cross-product adoption and deepen engagement. Purpose-built for credit unions and financial institutions nationwide. Backed by SHAKTI VC. Just shy of $7M raised.

Hiring: product engineers, software engineers, account executives, senior account managers. Reach out directly to Lauren Stein, Chief of Staff: [email protected]

Tech weeks get written off as networking theater. They're not.

The best ones compress six months of relationship-building into five days. The right intro, the right conversation, the right room at the right time. Things that would have taken a cold email chain and three follow-ups happen over coffee at 9am on a Tuesday.

Toronto Tech Week is one of those. Canada's startup ecosystem has been building quietly for years and the numbers are starting to show it. The talent is world-class. The founders are hungry. The capital is paying attention.

That's why we're bringing The Shortlist to Toronto on May 29th.

Same format. New city. Six founders who are building something real, in a room full of people who are ready to move.

If you've been sleeping on the Toronto ecosystem, this is your moment. And if you're already there, you already know.

See you next week (we’ll be revealing our lineup soon).