Inside Ottawa's AI Showcase Night: Five Founders, Real Traction, and 38 Million Data Points

educAI: A Privacy-First, Course-Specific AI Platform for Universities

EducAI provides higher education institutions with localized, privacy-first AI infrastructure to secure student data and coursework.

Soham Gherwada demonstrated EducAI, a localized, privacy-first AI infrastructure built specifically for higher education. By hosting AI models locally on internal university hardware, the platform ensures data sovereignty for coursework and student records. The highlight of the pitch was the 'Chat with Professor' demo, showing how students can safely query course-specific data without AI hallucinations. While the concept sparked debate among the 123 attendees, the startup's successful pilot at Carleton University's Sprott School of Business proved its real-world viability.

EducAI

Founded by Soham Gherwada, EducAI delivers on-campus artificial intelligence powered by Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Gherwada designed the platform to host models locally, ensuring data sovereignty and preventing leakage to public models.

Impulse: Agentic Engineering for Physical Objects

Hylos Labs pitched Impulse, an agentic IDE that translates plain language and reference images into parametric CAD models.

Christopher Da Silva introduced Impulse by Hylos Labs, an agentic IDE designed to bridge the gap between natural language concepts and manufacturable physical hardware. The crowd watched as Impulse transformed a simple image of a dog feeder into a fully parametric, manufacturable CAD model complete with a full parts list. The tool leverages a semantic compiler and physical solvers to ensure the resulting designs are realistic and ready for production. The audience responded with a strong 4.4/5 rating, noting the massive potential for accelerating traditional product development.

Hylos Labs

Presented by Christopher Da Silva, Hylos Labs aims to bridge the gap between natural language concepts and manufacturable physical hardware. The platform bypasses traditional CAD training by allowing users to describe what they want to build in plain English.

Simulyt: Predicting Ad Performance with 1,000 Synthetic Personas

Simulyt is a synthetic audience simulation engine that predicts market responses to ideas and products before capital is committed.

Rohit Jinka pitched Simulyt, a synthetic audience simulation engine designed to predict how target markets respond to marketing campaigns before budgets are committed. By generating up to 1,000 synthetic personas calibrated to specific audiences, the platform delivers directional testing results in minutes. The room leaned in when Jinka revealed an 80% accuracy rate when backtested against a database of 50 to 60 real-world A/B tests. The performance earned a solid 4.0/5 score, with marketers in the crowd eager for deeper validation metrics.

Simulyt

Founded by Rohit Jinka, Simulyt addresses high failure rates and wasted budgets in marketing. The platform simulates target audiences to provide directional creative testing results in minutes.

CuraNexus: Closing the Real-Time Safety Gap in Home Care

CuraNexus is a medication safety and care-coordination platform designed for small, owner-operated home care agencies.

Tobi Oriola presented CuraNexus, a medication safety and care-coordination platform built by Lux Cognitiva Technologies for small, owner-operated home care agencies. Addressing the critical gap where patient safety incidents occur, the platform acts as a proactive safety layer instead of just a retrospective tracking tool. Oriola demonstrated how the clinically aware AI assistant uses ambient scribing to transcribe caregiver-patient conversations directly into standard SOAP notes in real time. This live demonstration of reducing administrative burnout resonated strongly with the audience, earning an average score of 4.1/5.

CuraNexus (by Lux Cognitiva Technologies)

Developed by Lux Cognitiva Technologies and presented by founder and CEO Tobi Oriola, CuraNexus addresses the critical gap where patient safety incidents occur. Oriola designed the platform to provide real-time visibility and prevent medication errors.

Taskd AI: Unmasking $861M in High-Risk Funds with Graph-Powered Logic

Taskd AI builds a deterministic logic layer beneath LLMs to harmonize unstructured datasets and enforce business rules.

Ryan Hanley, CEO of Taskd, addressed the challenge of applying AI to unstructured, siloed enterprise datasets by introducing a deterministic logic layer. In the night's highest-rated presentation, Hanley demonstrated how Taskd AI analyzed 14 siloed public datasets from the Alberta government in just 48 hours. By mapping 38 million nodes, the platform flagged $861 million in potentially misappropriated funds and visually traced a director's suspicious circular transactions. The visual graphing over time captivated the room, earning a stellar 4.5/5 score and leaving a crowd of attendees eager to connect.

Taskd

Presented by CEO Ryan Hanley, Taskd solves the data-rich, answer-poor challenge faced by enterprises. Hanley's platform utilizes Operational AI to combine LLMs with forward-chaining rules and temporal graphs.