AccelerateOTT 2026: Ottawa's Founders Take a Global Stage
Ten Eastern Ontario startups competed at the Startup World Cup Ottawa Regional on June 11. Kavodax took first place and advances to San Francisco for the Global Grand Finale. Here's who was on stage.
The top 10 finalists walked onto the AccelerateOTT stage at Lansdowne Park on June 11 to compete at the Startup World Cup Ottawa Regional competition. AccelerateOTT is Invest Ottawa's flagship entrepreneurship summit. This year the theme was "Built for the Age of AI." The day's panel discussions centered around the financial realities and how they influence how founders build. There are seven-figure model bills, engineering teams running on Cursor at $2,000 per developer per month, startups migrating between AI providers to chase promotional credits, and serious conversations about open-source alternatives as frontier model IPOs approach.
The competition brought something different to the stage. The ten finalists were not debating AI infrastructure costs. They were reporting from the other side. With products in market, clinical validations in progress, and customers already signed, they showed that starts can prevail in the difficult waters. The top three shared $50,000 in non-dilutive grant funding from FedDev Ontario, and first place earned a spot at the Startup World Cup Grand Finale in San Francisco on November 6, 2026, competing against regional champions from more than 60 countries for a $1 million USD prize.
The Competition Winner
Kavodax won the Startup World Cup Ottawa Regional and advances to represent Ottawa in San Francisco this November. Founded in 2025, Kavodax built Canada's first stablecoin which is powered by a B2B payment platform which is specifically for SMEs. Koavdax moves money across borders in minutes, with transparent fees, upfront FX rates, and real-time tracking. They replace bank wires that take days and charge 2 to 5 %.
The platform is now live in more than 30 countries across Europe and Latin America, with Africa expansion underway. Founder Gharsa Amin put the company on the map before today's win. Kavodax took top honours at the Africa Economic Summit Pitch Competition, won CodeLaunch Canada 2025, and was named a Top 5 Startup at the EmpowerHer 2025 Showcase. That's strong growth for a company which is less than two years old.
The Runners-Up
Celestra Health Systems took second place with a platform that brings clinical-grade gait analysis into patients' daily lives. The Kanata company's device is FDA-designated Class II. It has an AI software layer running over third-party smart insoles which produces a 98% accuracy compared to a traditional gait laboratories. They deliver with roughly 1/100th the cost and with an 85% patient usability rating. The platform is designed to detect changes in MS progression months earlier than current clinical methods, and the company is preparing trials in Parkinson's disease. Founder Bruce Ford has built the evidence base in collaboration with University of Ottawa researcher Dr. Ryan Graham.
81.5% of founders now use AI for content. 58.7% say it doesn't sound like them.
They surveyed 92 founders to find out why — and what the ones who've cracked it are doing differently. Free report, no gate.
CardiAxis Medical placed third with SHARP-VT, a precision imaging platform for non-invasive treatment of ventricular tachycardia founded by Connor Haberl. The software integrates multiple imaging modalities to pinpoint arrhythmia sources to guide targeted radiation to the heart. The same ablative approach is used in cancer treatments and is now being applied to a life-threatening heart rhythm disorder. SHARP-VT compresses treatment planning from more than two hours to 15 minutes. The company was spun out of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute and is led by Dr. Calum Redpath, who performed the first cardiac radioablation in Canada in 2020, and Dr. Robert deKemp, who previously commercialized Rubidium PET technology out of the same institution.
Standouts
BioThera Solutions is created by Frédéric St-Denis-Bissonnette who has spent years building the scientific credibility that most exosome companies skip. He's a MISEV2023 contributor and a co-author of the field's leading reporting standards document, a Fulbright Canada award recipient, and the PhD behind a biomanufacturing platform producing 30 billion verified exosome particles per mL with full characterization. The company's first commercial product is mPDEV Serum which is a dermo-cosmetic containing plant-derived extracellular vesicles from Aloe barbadensis. BioThera is running safety and efficacy studies running in partnership with practicing dermatologists. The platform is architected to scale across both dermocosmetic and regenerative medicine applications as the regulatory and manufacturing infrastructure matures.
Constant Health built by Dr. Yoni Freedhoff is one of Canada's most recognized obesity medicine practitioners. For over two decades, he has treated more than 10,000 patients and is an Associate Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Ottawa. Constant Health is the platform built on everything he learned. It delivers chronic disease and weight management programs through registered dietitians, integrating Cognitive Behavioural Therapy via a proprietary behavioural technology stack. The clinical foundation is unusually deep for a digital health company, and Dr. Alexandra Segal, C. Psych. provides the psychological oversight behind the CBT component.
Taskd is founded by Ryan Hanley who built Taskd for the problem that every enterprise AI deployment eventually runs into: the answer has to be right, every time, and a language model's best guess isn't good enough. The platform compiles business logic which is extracted automatically from policies, contracts, emails, and regulations documents into a deterministic decision engine that produces sub-second, auditable outputs with a full proof chain from decision back to source document. It's a governance layer for mission-critical compliance workflows where repeatability and auditability are non-negotiable.
Stratotegic created by Graeme Daly is developing autonomous high-altitude balloon systems for persistent, low-cost monitoring and surveillance. It's a category getting serious attention as stratospheric platforms prove out as a cost-effective alternative to satellites and traditional drones for ISR missions.
Also in the cohort: CanVeer Biopharma, developing a first-in-class therapeutic for bronchopulmonary dysplasia in newborns; Peepal Research, building self-healing intelligence systems for complex multi-vendor networks; and SamSearch, an AI-powered platform helping businesses discover and win government contracts.
Why It Matters for the UpNext Community
Ottawa sent a cohort to the Startup World Cup that skews toward hard problems with real evidence behind them: an FDA-designated medical device, a scientific research backed commercial cosmetic product, a University of Ottawa Heart Institute spinout that guides cancer like treatment for the heart, a payments platform live across 30+ countries. The day's keynote discussions made clear that AI is now a cost of doing business, not a differentiator on its own. What the competition stage showed is what still differentiates: a specific problem, solved with depth, validated in the real world.
