Meet the founders who presented on May 29.

This edition, we partnered with Boardy. If you haven't met him yet: Boardy is an AI networking agent who calls you, learns what you're building, and makes warm intros to the right founders, investors, and operators. There’s no app, no feed, but actually just a conversation. It's the same thing we care about at The Shortlist: getting the right people in the same room. The difference is Boardy keeps the intros going long after the night ends. Talk to him, and the connections you make in Toronto won't stop at the door.

Ruslan Nikolaev and Griffin Keglevich started Float as University of Waterloo students in 2019, then recruited former Uber Canada GM Rob Khazzam as CEO and third co-founder. The pitch: Canadian businesses are stuck with chaotic corporate cards and manual expense work that hasn't changed in decades. Float replaces all of it — corporate cards, bill pay, expense management, and high-yield accounts in one platform, with approval inside 24 hours and no personal guarantees. Used by 3,000+ Canadian companies including Neo, Knix, and the Fox & Fiddle. More than $90M raised, including a $50M Series B led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity in early 2025, with OMERS Ventures, FJ Labs, and Garage Capital.

Hiring: full-stack engineers, engineering managers (Bill Pay, Platform, Accounting APIs), senior + staff product managers, a senior product designer, and a head of product marketing. Mostly Toronto. Details here.

Vitalii Dodonov is co-founder and CTO of Stan, and he took it from zero to $30M ARR with a roughly 30-person team — one of the most capital-efficient companies in the creator economy. Stan is the all-in-one creator store: everything a creator needs to sell digital products, courses, and services, hosted right in their link in bio, for one monthly fee. Co-founded with CEO John Hu, the company's mission is personal — empower anyone to work for themselves. 30K+ creators, with recent backing from Sony Innovation Fund and Google's AI fund.

Hiring: senior full-stack engineer and product manager (Toronto), plus marketing lead, lifecycle marketing manager, ambassador partnerships lead, and a GM for Stanley Short Form (LA). Details here.

Liza Akhvledziani Carew knows the problem firsthand — as a newcomer to Canada, she watched rent payments (the biggest check most people write every month) earn nothing and count for nothing toward their credit. So in 2023 she built Chexy with Abtine Monavvari and Ben Gigone: pay rent and essential bills by credit card, earn cash back and points, and build credit — no landlord onboarding required. 200,000+ users and $30M+ in rent processed in year one. Just raised a $14M Series A led by Khosla Ventures (OpenAI, Stripe, DoorDash), with Air Canada joining and rewards partnerships across Aeroplan and American Express.

Hiring: backend, senior backend, and full-stack engineers; a founding account executive; performance marketing and growth PMM. All Toronto. Details here.

Aidan Gomez was one of the eight authors of "Attention Is All You Need" — the 2017 Google paper that introduced the transformer architecture underpinning every large language model today. He left Google in 2021 to co-found Cohere with Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst, betting that the real value in AI isn't a viral consumer chatbot — it's enterprise infrastructure. They were right. Cohere builds efficient, deployable models for regulated industries — finance, healthcare, energy, the public sector — and its agent platform North is now the flagship. $240M+ ARR with quarter-over-quarter growth above 50%. Last valued around $7B, backed by Nvidia, AMD, and Salesforce. IPO chatter is getting louder.

Hiring: members of technical staff across modeling, pre-training, and inference; applied AI engineers (agentic workflows); forward deployed engineers; product managers; a head of brand marketing; and a CISO — across Toronto, NYC, SF, London, and remote. 100+ open roles. Details here.

Yasser Elsaid moved from Cairo to Toronto to study computer science at York University, and started Chatbase — solo, and bootstrapped. No outside funding. He's since taken it past $10M ARR serving 10,000+ businesses. Chatbase lets any company build customer-facing AI agents that plug into their CRM, payments, and scheduling tools and resolve issues end to end — across web chat, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Slack. It's one of the cleaner proofs that a tiny team can build a category-leading AI product with no war chest.

Hiring: three founding GTM roles — enterprise account executive, enterprise customer success manager, and growth. All Toronto, all with equity. Details here.

Yoseph West and Paul Klicnik founded Relay in 2018 to fix the thing that quietly kills most small businesses: cash flow. ("68% of US small business owners have cash flow problems," West likes to point out.) Relay is a unified business banking and money-management platform that pulls accounts, bills, capital, cards, and invoices into one place so owners always know what they're earning, spending, and saving. It's the official banking platform for Profit First. Now serving 150,000+ small businesses with $1.3B+ in managed deposits. More than $50M raised — a $32M Series B led by Bain Capital Ventures — plus a fresh $50M from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund to pour into growth.

Hiring: software engineers and engineering managers (Revenue, Risk, SRE), a senior data engineer and data scientist, senior product designers, a senior product manager, account executives, and a VP of Customer Experience — mostly Toronto, some Vancouver/Boston/NYC. 30+ roles. Details here.

Here's the paradox of the AI era: the more intelligence becomes cheap and abundant, the more your relationships become the thing that actually sets you apart.

When anyone can spin up a model, write the code, draft the deck — capability stops being the bottleneck. Trust takes its place. Who picks up when you call. Who vouches for you in a room you're not in. Who sends the intro that changes your next two years. As Boardy's founder puts it, when AI is everywhere, your network of trusted relationships becomes the real differentiator.

That's the whole thesis behind The Shortlist and why we partnered with Boardy this time. Founders on a stage, a room full of people who can move, and an AI super-connector making sure the right introductions outlive the night.

The technology keeps getting better at everything except being human. So that's the part we're doubling down on.