Coldplay Music of the Spheres World Tour with PixMob custom 7 LED compostable wristband.Supplied
Perhaps never before in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 program’s 27-year history has a single theme so obviously prevailed. This year, 97% of the fastest-growing tech companies—that is, those with the highest revenue growth over a consecutive four-year period—have welcomed, harnessed and deployed the power and potential of artificial intelligence to propel their massive, often exponential growth.
“We found the presence of AI to be absolutely pervasive across this year’s cohort,” says Anders McKenzie, Deloitte partner and Fast 50’s national leader. That 97% figure may be shocking to some, but not to McKenzie: “What are the other 3% doing?” he jokes. Probably nervously procrastinating like the rest of us, given that AI—like all waves of cutting-edge tech that disrupt the comfortable norm—has brought with it a corresponding surge of human anxiety and apprehension.
If you’re among the worriers or skeptics, the companies on Deloitte’s 2025 Fast 50 list should provide some reassurance that AI can do some pretty wonderful things. Consider, for example, Nevvon, an e-training program educating home caregivers with 800 lessons and 200 hours of content conveniently available on their phones. Or BioRender, a web app with more than 50,000 icons for doctors, teachers and scientists to effortlessly create diagrams and illustrations. And WeyMedia, which makes fintech to simplify personal financial education about budgeting, saving and investing for Canadians—on their phones, any time, for free.
Those businesses, as well as a couple of the ones featured below, show all the good that can come from AI, notes McKenzie. That said, as in any industry, companies in the AI sector face some familiar challenges. “Finding, attaining and retaining talent is a major concern,” he says. Post-pandemic, many workers expect and demand flexible or remote work, which can come at the cost of a company culture difficult to foster and maintain online.
Access to capital is another common issue. “The funding environment as it relates to tech companies has been challenging over the past years in Canada,” says McKenzie; a result of high interest rates and inflation, international conflict and uncertainty around the upcoming U.S. election. The upside, he adds, is that the available capital tends to go to the highest-quality companies. Here are four examples of thriving tech companies from this year’s Deloitte’s Fast 50.
No. 2 | PurposeMed (Calgary)
Three-year growth rate: 16,169%
Where you might expect to see a medical diploma on display, Dr. Husein Moloo’s Calgary office instead boasts a framed photo of Queen’s Freddie Mercury, who died from complications of AIDS in 1991. Thirty-four years later, too many people think the HIV/AIDS epidemic is under control or even over, but Moloo knows it absolutely is not: “AIDS is very far from over. In fact, HIV cases are still on the rise, especially in Saskatchewan and Alberta,” he says. Statistics south of the border, meanwhile, are much worse: Gay Black men in the South have a one in two chance of contracting HIV.
In five years as an emergency room GP, Moloo watched the problems and disparities of health care in action. “I’d see the same people coming in over and over, never solving their unique problems, while knowing other people couldn’t get here at all.” Few doctors double as entrepreneurs, but Moloo hails from a family of business owners and therefore could neither stand the inefficiency nor resist the opportunity to provide a better solution. In July 2020, beneath parent company PurposeMed and in homage to the British rocker, Moloo launched its first brand, Freddie, a virtual care platform focusing on HIV health care and prevention for the LGBTQ community.
Completely vertically integrated, Freddie connects 10,000 patients from remote and underserved communities to more than 200 specialized nurses and clinicians equally committed to the cause. For anyone uncomfortable disclosing to a small-town, rural doctor—assuming they have one, which many do not—Freddie strives for what Moloo calls “an 11 out of 10 experience” of sensitive, confidential, inclusive, non-discriminatory medical care. To even the most northernmost corners of the country and south to America (where they launched this past February), PurposeMed discreetly ships medication, for free, a service with benefits that stretch far and wide: “Every 75 patients we put on preventative medication stops one case of HIV, which is reason enough, but it also saves the government health care system $1.5 million every time,” says Moloo.
Following Freddie’s smashing success, PurposeMed expanded its offerings to include Frida, a similar service catered to patients diagnosed with ADHD, anxiety or depression, and Foria, for trans and non-binary Canadians seeking virtual gender-affirming care. (Frida’s for Frida Kahlo, if you’re curious, who suffered from PTSD and bipolar disorder; “Foria” is a cuter take on the DSM-5’s official diagnosis of “gender dysphoria.”) Despite PurposeMed’s obvious contributions to the Canadian health care system, none of Freddie, Frida or Foria are funded by the government; they make money by charging for (some) services on an incremental scale. If PurposeMed continues on its impressive trajectory, their goal for 2025 is to launch in 40 American states.
No. 22 | PixMob (Montreal)
Three-year growth rate: 1,033%
If you haven’t seen a stadium concert since Soundgarden, extravagant sets and high-tech special effects of modern-day music tours like Taylor Swift’s Eras or Beyoncé‘s Renaissance will absolutely blow your mind. Granted, tickets can go for thousands of dollars, so fans want and expect a mass interactive experience they can’t get on Spotify. For that, they’ll need wearable crowd-synched light-up tech, and for those, artists call Vincent Leclerc at Montreal-based PixMob.
Take, for example, British band Coldplay. “They wanted light-up wristbands for their tour, but because Chris Martin cares a lot about his environmental footprint, they had to be custom eco-friendly,” says Leclerc. A few years later, PixMob delivered reusable, compostable wristbands made of sugarcane. Bad Bunny, meanwhile, envisioned his audience wearing LED Cowboy Boot necklaces (no prob; PixMob did that too). At the LA Clippers’ new dome, PixMob brains are behind armrests with individual interactive light pixels that synch with music, highlights, on-court plays and 20,000+ player trivia games. “We work directly with our clients to make whatever they’re imagining possible,” he says.
Without naming names, they’ve had some over-the-top requests—a weird light-up wig, helicopters raining down from above—but those usually collide with the bleaker reality of budgeting. “For most events, this means an LED wristband which we can provide for less than $2 per person,” says Leclerc, who currently oversees fifty events per week with a minimum of 10,000 people each. That’s a whole lot of wristbands, so collecting them at the door for reuse and making them eco-friendly to begin with is always at the top of Leclerc’s mandate.
No. 33 | Certn (Victoria)
Three-year growth rate: 662%
Andrew McLeod had moved around enough—Toronto, NYC, London, San Francisco—to notice the particular hell that is relocation paperwork. “Every time I moved to a new place, I’d have no credit, no job history, no assets to show the landlord,” says the 37-year-old entrepreneur. To make everyone’s lives easier, he founded Certn in 2017.
Unless you’re a police officer, background checks are too often manual, expensive and slow—up to six weeks, depending on your location. That’s just too long for landlords interested in credit history and evictions, or would-be employers who need education and job history confirmed. Clients can customize ID checks as necessary on Certn’s 100% online platform in a fraction of the time. For example, a “OneID” identity verification is $4 and instant, a basic criminal record check can be done in 4 hours for $30 and a more intensive day-long “social media check” costs $60. Certn’s digital platform uses machine learning to flag bullying, hate speak, drug use and illegal behaviours—all without human biases. “The software doesn’t discriminate,” says McLeod.
Certn began in tenant screening but quickly expanded into employment verification, which proved a right-place, right-time situation in March 2020, when the pandemic sparked an epic shift to remote work and digital hires. “Pre-pandemic, a pre-employment background check was rare in Canada—now it’s standard,” says McLeod. Some 10,000 teams around the globe now use Certn to check their hires in advance.
Certn’s exponential growth is great for McLeod and 400 global employees from Canada to New Zealand to Dubai, but it’s bad news for anyone with (big and brazen, or small and white) lies on their resumé. In 15 minutes or less, Certn can verify identity, education, employment references and credit history, and perform conflict and “adverse media” checks. Individuals, of course, must consent to the check in advance. What happens to the 1% of people who have something bad flagged? “Hopefully that’s a conversation to be had and not a dealbreaker,” says McLeod.
No. 48 | Mindbridge Analytics (Ottawa)
Three-year growth rate: 414%
Speaking of AI, meet MindBridge Analytics: The Ottawa-based machine learning platform revolutionizing the traditional (that is, human) audit via AI tech that analyzes a company’s financial data for anomalies, risk, fraud and errors. A layman’s explanation? “We kinda do what Grammarly does, but for numbers,” explains CEO Stephen DeWitt. While your spelling mistake probably doesn’t have huge repercussions, an accidentally added zero or missed decimal in a financial setting absolutely does. “If you take a large bank or enterprise, this can equate to millions and millions of dollars lost. And how would you possibly know? We’re spotting needles in the haystack.”
To catch these inevitable human errors—besides typos, also incorrect billing, double entries and the like—MindBridge plugs a company’s private dataset into its ever-expanding AI/ML-powered platform. “We can look at all financial transactions in a big enterprise through the lens of an auditor or regulator,” he says. Currently capable of analyzing over 500 million records, MindBridge is the industry leader in handling data at scale. No human auditor could possibly manage numbers of this scope, let alone instantaneously—they’d likely work instead with a statistical sample from any given time. “We’re now operating at a level far beyond anything that came before us, and we’re operating all the time,” says DeWitt. MindBridge’s software is getting better and faster all the time, but right now can crunch a company’s records in a few days.
A serial entrepreneur (this is his “sixth…or seventh?” startup) with over 30 years of experience in Silicon Valley, DeWitt was scooped up to head MindBridge last year. Aptly named for the bridge they’re building between the human and computer brain, the 10-year-old company—a lifetime in AI—is a pioneer in the field that’s watched AI expand exponentially in that time. Huge corporations like KPMG and Chevron have incorporated AI into their business models, and as DeWitt puts it, “we’re the engine behind them.”
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