Platform Calgary’s Top 10 startups

Ten of Calgary’s brightest technology startups were announced Monday, in advance of Platform Calgary’s Innovation Week launch party later this fall.

The top 10 Most Promising Startups of 2026 cover a wide range of technology verticals, including Agtech, Fintech, Clean Tech, AI and Legal Tech, and will be recognized at the innovation hub’s 16th annual Innovation Week launch party.

The successful companies were selected by a committee of Calgary tech and corporate leaders and was based on a startup’s rapid traction, technical innovation and global scale potential.

“Calgary’s startup ecosystem continues to build incredible momentum, attracting national and international attention for the caliber of companies being built right here,” said Jen Lussier, CEO of Platform Calgary.

“This is an opportunity to recognize our most industrious founders, surrounding them with key investors and industry leaders, and accelerating their path to scale.”

Earlier this year, Calgary was recognized as having one of the top North American tech employment markets, with tech talent now representing 9.4 per cent of Calgary’s total employment – up from 7.9 per cent in 2025.

LWC asked these companies what this recognition means and how they think it might boost their company’s prospects in the coming years. Most of the companies LWC asked said they believe their company was chosen because it fills a demonstrated market need.

Calgary-based Agrivanna is taking grazing rotation to the next level, using weather data, amount of forage, satellite data and the animals to help ranchers determine when to move the herd.

Foroughi said being named to the Top 10 gives his company credibility that they didn’t have to buy. It’s also the type of motivation that keeps the team engaged and aligned.

“Ranchers are rightly skeptical of Agtech, as most of it is designed for dairy or climates that never reach −30°C,” Foroughi said.

“Being named a Top 10 company demonstrates to producers that an independent panel reviewed our technology and team and validated our work.”

They hope to leverage the acclaim to help drive their expansion across pastureland in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

“We view it as a door-opener rather than just a trophy,” Foroughi said.

“It streamlines initial conversations with investors, distribution partners, and funding agencies, allowing us to spend less time establishing our credibility and more time discussing substance.”

Fellow Agtech company Paradigm Inputs wants to cut the cost of crop protection by between 25 and 50 per cent, with an ag platform that allows producers access to software and supply chain that allows farmers to run their own crop input business.

Johnstone said that being named a Top 10 startup is a sign that Calgary’s innovation story includes the Prairie economy – not just the buildings on the blocks around the city.

“Most of what we do happens a long way from downtown Calgary,” Johnstone said.

“Our customers are independent ag entrepreneurs and the farmers they sell to, spread across Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and they don’t read startup lists. So, the Top 10 isn’t a sales tool for us.”

Over the coming year, Johnstone said they’re going to hire more people, continue to grow their network, and continue to push crop production prices down.

He said being named a top startup gives them credibility and removes the doubt that comes in the first five minutes of a meeting.

“We’ll spend our credibility it in three places. Recruiting. Institutions: banks, lenders, regulators and large partners move slowly on companies they’ve never heard of, and outside validation shortens that,” he said.

“The cohort itself, which is nine other founders working in public on problems as hard as ours. These connections are almost guaranteed to be symbiotic.”

Electrical grids are under increasing pressure across Canada and around the world. Splice N Connect is a Calgary-based energy technology company that builds clamp-on sensors that are coupled with cloud-based analytics that continuously monitor power cable connections, with predictions on when one is likely to fail.

With power demand expected to surge in the coming years, Sibih said that solving power reliability issues is key.“This recognition provides powerful validation of the problem we are solving for enhanced power reliability,” Sibih said.

“Cable connection points account for over 55 per cent of power cable failures, yet they remain one of the most overlooked blind spots in the grid.”

Sibih said that the Top 10 recognition helps in conversations with utilities, industrial partners and investors who don’t know them yet, or the company’s mission.

“Practically, we plan to use it to strengthen our pitch heading into pilot conversations, for visibility as we look to expand our team, and our investment round next year,” Sibih said.

Over the next year, Splice N Connect will move into an upcoming pilot project later this year with an Alberta utility, giving them real-world field data to validate the technology. That will lead to a commercial-ready design they expect to be available in the next year.

In a world with myriad subscriptions – many that we forget about – Waypoint Budget is a personal finance app that helps you track your spending and catch those forgotten subscriptions. It will also allow you to set personal finance goals and help you stay on top of what’s coming in and what’s going out.

Chomski said that she and her business partner, Ahmad Jamal, are two developers who are figuring out the business side of things – and having folks tell them they’re running a healthy company means a lot.

“It also puts us in front of rooms we can’t reach on our own,” she said.

“We hear the same thing from new users time and time again, that they can’t believe they hadn’t heard of us. There are a lot of Canadians still stuck choosing between managing their money in some inefficient way or paying in US dollars for an American app that was never built for them. Recognition like this helps us reach them.”

Chomski said that being named in the Top 10 gives them a reason to lift their heads from the development side and to pause and engage with others in the community.

“Those connections are what bring in resources and ideas that make the product better for our users, and they open doors to growth we wouldn’t have found on our own,” she said.

Made it Legal wanted to address a problem they’d experienced firsthand – a mountain of contract work, the repetition and the need for coordination across multiple departments, while still trying to operate at full capacity.

Their flagship product, Nelle, is an AI-assisted contract playbook platform designed for in-house legal departments, and rapid-growth companies.

Ramsay said that being named a Top 10 company was meaningful validation for the problem they’re trying to solve.

“We built Nelle around a problem we experienced firsthand: legal teams are under immense pressure to move at business speed, but are bogged down by manual contract reviews and endless back-and-forth for internal approvals,” he said.

“Nelle solves this by understanding a company’s legal standards and transforming them into a playbook in minutes, drafting proposed redlines for review right inside Microsoft Word, and streamlining approvals between legal, sales, and operations.”

Ramsay said that this recognition creates a starting point – not an end point – that helps create credibility and visibility for the organization.

“The opportunity is to use this announcement to connect directly with the legal and business leaders we build for every day, solve their real-world friction, and turn this visibility into stronger relationships and lasting momentum,” he said.

Candidly AI wants to make sure that everyone has a voice. Their intelligent conversation system helps conduct discussions with interest holders, at their convenience and on their schedule.

McDonough said that it’s an incredible achievement for the team, and special to them because Platform Calgary has been part of their story since the beginning.

“For a young company, credibility is everything,” he said.

“Buyers want to know you’re real, that you’ll be around, and that serious people have looked under the hood. This is a badge of honour for us.”

McDonough said they’ve grown considerably over the past 60 days, and they expect to continue to expand to other organizations across Alberta and Canada.

“We’ve got an exciting announcement on our first municipality coming later this week, and given our Canadian Data Sovereignty, we are excited to expand our presence in the public sector,” McDonough said.

Candidly AI hopes to use this recognition as a launch pad. It also allows them to connect with other founders, mentors and investors.“A recognition like this earns you a first meeting you might not have gotten otherwise. What you do in that meeting is still on you,” McDonough said.

“We’ll be putting it in front of prospects, partners and investors as proof that a third party has validated the business, then getting straight back to the work.”

This father and son team has created a solution that centralizes lease accounting for complex lease portfolios, including both the lessor and lessees. They’ve built in audit-ready reporting and compliance controls that qualify for current accounting standards.

Kautz said that most of their recognition has come from outside the country, given that many of their clients are Fortune 100 or Fortune 500 companies in the United States.

“Getting (recognition) at home is something special,” he said.

He said being named a Top 10 company provides credibility to a group of potential buyers who are paid to be skeptical.

“What it does is make the first conversation easier,” Kautz said.

“When a large company is deciding whether a small Calgary team can handle the accounting across five countries, it helps that other people have looked closely and come away impressed.”

Kautz said they will immediately begin taking their product further into the market. They’ve been built on founder-led sales up to this point but are building a team of professionals ready to help them expand.

This will help them build awareness at home.“Black Owl is a small company with Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 clients, and those companies did not arrive by accident,” he said.

“They ran competitive evaluations against vendors that have been in this market far longer and chose us anyway.”

Building strong, resilient children from the ground up, using evidence-based techniques that are created specifically for parents and educators, is the driving force behind Fledge Health.

Their platform is designed to help support families and schools in making well-being education practical and engaging.

Galloway said that the recognition is affirmation that Fledge is accomplishing the impact and growth they initially set out to create.

“When the days of building a company begin to blend together, the next milestone can sometimes feel out of reach,” she said.

“It is the meaningful signs of progress such as positive customer feedback, growing engagement with our platform, and recognition from our community that motivate our team to keep moving forward.”

The Top 10 comes at a time when they’ve built out the foundation of their platform locally and they’re ready to take their story and product national, Galloway said.

“We plan to leverage this recognition to amplify our mission, share the impact of our work more widely, and open new conversations as we expand nationally,” she said.

“It also validates the progress we have made and provides meaningful momentum as we continue building a trusted, sustainable company that helps more children develop lifelong mental and emotional skills.”

When companies grow, it can be challenging to stay on top of the skills and capacity of an increasing workforce base. Leeg has built a platform that gives companies a real-time view of their workforce capability that allows employer and employee to work together.

This gives organizations the ability to build a strategy around what kind of talent they have and what they need to continue moving forward.

Falls said that it’s a meaningful recognition from an innovation system they care about. It’s also validation for the problem that exists and the solution they’ve created to address it.

“Personally, as a fully female-founded team, it means even more,” she said.

“It reinforces that Calgary puts its values into action, building a tech ecosystem that’s genuinely vibrant and well represented.”

They continue to actively grow their customer base in Canada and the United States, and this kind of recognition is important to help drive that expansion.

“Recognition like this puts wind in your sails. It opens access to new organizations, individuals, and conversations you might not have had otherwise,” Falls said.

“For customers, it’s a credible third-party signal that people are paying attention to what you’re building.”

She said that they’ve put together a solution for a problem that’s long gone unaddressed and it’s getting more costly.

“Talent decisions drive up to 70% of organizational cost, yet most companies are still making them blind, on surface-level or proxy information, in a highly manual way,” Falls said.

“What we’ve built approaches that differently, giving ownership to the individual and creating a new, more collaborative way for employer and employee to work together toward better outcomes for both.”

Regulatory compliance can be an increasingly burdensome task for companies as they continue to expand. Verano.ai’s platform helps automate regulatory compliance workflow, reducing resource use by 90 per cent, and at that same time provides ongoing risk mitigation.

Swerdelian said that they’re building a technology company that’s addressing a complex global problem and fundamentally changing how highly regulated organizations manage compliance and risk.

“Recognition from our local innovation community reinforces that we are building something relevant, differentiated and with the potential to scale well beyond Calgary,” he said.

The validation is important, and Swerdelian said they hope to leverage that into scaling their platform and expanding the commercial adoption, including embedding their proprietary technology into platforms and workflows that established companies already use.

“Ultimately, our goal is to move regulatory compliance away from highly manual, reactive processes toward an intelligent, proactive model where AI does much of the heavy lifting and people can focus on higher-value decisions,” he said.

Swerdelian said that Top 10 recognition creates credibility, but what you do with that matters even more.

The startups will be honoured at the Innovation Week launch party on Nov. 5. More information can be found here.