Canadians take pride in things made at home. Since the beginning of AI Tinkerers Ottawa, we’ve discussed making it fully Canadian rather than a subsidiary.
It wouldn’t have mattered if we didn’t do such a spectacular job.
AGI Ventures Canada will be the for-profit entity that supports volunteer organizers with community management, promotion and sponsorship to run AI events, starting in Ottawa. This structure will solve several logistical problems and clarify our mission.
This new entity holds sponsorship money, registers for GST/HST and makes funds available to organizers to host local AI events. This reduces the sponsorship fundraising time and complexity dramatically as sponsors no longer need to do just in-kind.
Additionally, our organizers will no longer be liable for damages when something were to happen on-site.
As with most things that sound great on paper, the requirements to maintain one will put more toil on organizers than streamlining it, especially when it comes time to balance fiscal year end budget. We wanted a vehicle to drive logistics faster, not be bounded by it. You'll see in a bit why "toil" and "burden" are the main reason for AGI Ventures Canada's existence.
When we were running our monthly AI meetups, the mission was to host the best meetup. Now, our job is to empower our organizers to host/run the initiative they’re passionate about without having to worry about venue, accounting and logistics.
Community work is hard.
When someone steps up to organize the first Windsurf meetup or an agent hackathon, they don’t know how drained they will be by the end of it. Worse, one large sponsor not committing the second time could mean death to a group (this had happened to many communities in our city). We want to take on that burden so they can enjoy community work for as long as they can and not let this AI movement in Ottawa die of exhaustion.
What does this mean for the regular AI Tinkerers attendee in Ottawa?
AI Tinkerers Ottawa stay a meetup series. The Discord community, alongside other initiatives we had like co-hacking, hackathons, and more will still be run by the same folks. We’re committed to keep them 100% free for attendees.
The AIX events series, which started in February 2025 and aimed at non-technical audience and executives, continue to be paid.
Recently we’ve noticed a new wave of our community members stepping up to lead: co-hacking ( Stephen Rioux ), meetups ( Kaan Un , Thoufeek Baber , Sukhpal Saini , Nolan Druid , Zara Safsovski (MD) , MARIIA YERMOLENKO and many more). We see this trend continues as long as the toil to run these things are low.
After the successful vibe-coding hackathon, Neilda Gagné and I had an emergency meeting with Wilson Li, CPA, CA ( Logan Katz LLP ) about how I needed to act fast as to not receive a huge tax bills on all the sponsorship funds we raised this year.
A question was posed: “Where do you see this thing in 5 years?”.
I see us becoming like Y Combinator .
I see founders bumping into each other at hackathons, building and starting businesses together.