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Accelerate your AI-fueled growth
The FastLane program enables over 250 Canadian startups to accelerate their AI commercialization journey and compete more effectively in the global economy.
Technology:Leverage Vector’s AI engineering and project management expertise in bootcamps, Ask-Me-Anything, applied AI projects
Professional Development: Build the skills you need to succeed with AI
Talent: Take the guesswork out of finding the best AI talent
AI Benchmarking: Find out what you need, and track your progress over time
Commercialization & IP Education: Improve your AI commercialization and IP strategies
Community: Exposure to leading VCs, corporate and key stakeholders of Canada AI innovation community
Meet some of our current FastLane members
SkyWatch
Mutuo Health Solutions
BioBox Analytics
Evolving Intelligence
Tabiat
Trax Codes
Formic AI
Profound Impact
Magnify Access
PhenoTips
Mazlite Inc
B3 Systems
KnowMeQ
Beatdapp
LUCA Theory
PAVE AI
Bell Kearns & Associates Ltd.
MM Global Solutions Consulting Inc.
Arima
Nytia Labs (Formerly Nytia Health)
ASKaFOX
A.I. VALI Inc.
Metisbot
Thriving AI
Verto Health
SkyWatch
SkyWatch faced a common challenge for growing AI teams: limited access to specialized expertise. Through Vector’s FastLane Program, SkyWatch partnered with Vector researchers and applied AI experts to develop and deploy an anomaly detection model that identifies defects in satellite imagery.This capability led to a measurable improvement in a critical business metric – image fulfillment rate – which increased from 50% to 70%, contributing directly to enhanced customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
“Vector’s FastLane Program leveled up our team’s capabilities and moved our product development into high gear -all while plugging us into a world-class AI ecosystem,” said Joel Cumming, CTO at SkyWatch.
Mutuo Health Solutions set out to solve a complex challenge: building highly accurate, real-time AI transcription for clinician-patient interactions.Through Vector’s FastLane program, they fine-tuned large language models to dramatically improve transcription accuracy—transforming their AutoScribe product into a best-in-class solution. This breakthrough positioned them as a category leader in clinical documentation and led to their acquisition by HEALWELL AI for $5.5 million to power the next generation of AI-enabled physician co-pilots.
Dr. Noah Crampton credits Vector for laying the AI foundation that made this possible, saying “the FastLane program was key to building a state-of-the-art AI product”.
BioBox set out to solve two major challenges: bridging communication gaps between pharmaceutical research teams and grounding AI tools in biological data. Through Vector’s FastLane program, they pivoted their approach – moving from building their own AI model to implementing a faster, more cost-effective solution that delivered on their most requested product. With Vector’s guidance, they accelerated time-to-market, reduced costs, and achieved 300% client growth.
Hamza Farooq, CTO of BioBox Analytics, shared: “The FastLane program gave us an efficient path to a more elegant, faster, and cost-effective solution for tackling tough product development challenges.”
Ali Saleh and his team at Evolving Intelligence faced two major challenges in AI adoption: integrating cutting-edge AI and overcoming technical hurdles in deployment. Through Vector’s FastLane Program, they built and deployed a risk assessment model for wealth transfer. The model was soon integrated into their platform as a core feature, enhancing their product’s value proposition and market readiness.
Ali Saleh, CEO, shared: “Vector’s FastLane program enables Canadian startups to compete internationally.”
Daniyal Liaqat and his team at Tabiat are tackling a major healthcare challenge: the lack of support and monitoring for chronic illnesses at home. Through Vector’s FastLane Data Readiness cohort, they explored how machine learning could improve predictions for patients with COPD. By the end of the four-month program, they were able to predict hospitalizations two days in advance using symptom extraction data.
Daniyal shared that a key benefit was “having access to a TA who understood our use case and could offer feedback grounded in the latest AI research and models.”
Trax Codes is currently streamlining the building permit approval process by integrating regulatory information into a powerful, user-friendly interface. Through Vector’s FastLane program, they improved product accuracy and built a Q&A tool that lets users interact with building codes more intuitively.
As a result, they cut costs for the Q&A model by 50%, doubled their customer base, expanded operations, and hired from Vector’s talent pool to grow their in-house team. They found the program to be a valuable way to recruit talent and connect with other startups in the Canadian AI ecosystem.
Varun from Formic AI joined Vector’s Machine Learning Associates program with a specific use case to enhance their legal assistant search tool. Through the program, he brought on technical talent to tackle complex natural language queries on the backend. This support helped Varun offload technical challenges and focus on growing the business, reaching 200 monthly active users.
He shared: “Vector’s talent integration at the start let me concentrate on what I was good at on the business side -it was a huge help.”
Sherry, founder of Profound Impact and a 2025 Women in AI North America finalist, joined the FastLane program to explore how AI could improve grant matching for researchers. Through Vector’s FastLane program, her team gained their first hands-on experience training large language models for this use case.
The program helped them rethink their model and unlock greater accuracy by tapping into new LLM sources. Sherry shared: “The courses offered for FastLane members are amazing—very detailed and in-depth—and I appreciated how open the team was to feedback.”
Coming from a business-oriented team, Magnify Access was looking for a path to start their AI journey and to leverage more efficient tools for their business. Since joining Vector’s FastLane program, the team learned crucial foundational knowledge that empowered their AI journey and proficiency.
Magnify Access was able to hire their first data scientist, which unlocked the ability for the company to have their first foray into AI model testing and validation. These foundational works led to a “change in mentality, from a static data approach to a dynamic one, which allowed for new epiphanies in how the product could be further developed”.
PhenoTips approached Vector’s FastLane program with a generative AI use case to improve clinical coding in genetics. The team got hands-on experience with large language models and created a successful proof of concept with state of the art performance, paving the way for future use within clinical workflows. The project supported PhenoTips in partnership discussions, and opened up multiple collaboration opportunities.
Orion Buske, CEO of PhenoTips, said that “Deploying innovation into clinical workflows can be a long process, but the MLA cohort accelerated our R&D efforts. They were capable and excellent to work with.”
Mazlite started their AI journey with Vector’s FastLane program and expanded its AI knowledge, gained hands-on experience in applying AI to its operations, and learned how to build and commercialize products. With Vector’s Support, the team developed a model for defect detection and optimization, allowing manufacturers to identify and resolve issues for predictive maintenance.
The program helped Mazlite to refine its marketing strategy, engage prospective clients from a commercialization standpoint, and secure partnerships to further validate its models.
The CTO at Mazlite, Cameron Dallas, noted “Vector is a fantastic organization for companies that are interested in applying AI to their business. It is an opportunity to learn about AI development, research, and responsible deployment.”
B3 Systems set out to expand their generative AI capabilities, primarily by extracting real-time insights from vast manufacturing data to provide real-time insights to customers and enhancing chatbot performance. Through Vector’s FastLane program, they gained advanced AI expertise, and developed a turnkey solution for more accurate, user-centric AI solutions. As a result, they’re growing their data science team, boosting user satisfaction, and are on track for a 200% revenue increase driven by their improved AI-driven platform.
“Partnering with Vector was a great way to quickly deepen our AI domain knowledge and accelerate product development in a fast-evolving field,” shared Chris Graham, CEO of B3 Systems.
KnowMeQ joined the Vector Institute’s Fast Lane program in 2022 to build the AI foundation for ArchieCPL, a tool that transforms how colleges evaluate Credit for Prior Learning. With access to top-tier AI talent, KnowMeQ developed a solution that aligns learners’ work and education histories with course outcomes—reducing review times from months to seconds. Now in use across Canada and the U.S., ArchieCPL supports Veterans, laid-off workers, and adult learners returning to school.
“The Vector Institute helped us move from vision to reality. This partnership enabled us to deliver a breakthrough in spaces that enable accredited learning for all workers worldwide.” — Matt Foran, CEO, KnowMeQ.
Beatdapp set out to tackle one of the streaming industry’s biggest challenges: stopping fraudulent activity that costs platforms and artists millions in lost revenue.By partnering with the Vector Institute’s FastLane program, they gained access to outstanding AI talent who rapidly developed advanced machine learning and deep learning fraud detection models—helping Beatdapp’s customers substantially reduce the impact of streaming fraud. As a result, Beatdapp enhanced its fraud detection capabilities, unlocked new verticals like password-sharing detection, and expanded beyond music into additional markets—driving continuous innovation throughout their product suite. “
Vector is a rare find,” says CEO Morgan Hayduk. “Most accelerators don’t deliver much, but FastLane provided the high-caliber technical expertise that truly moved the needle for our business and fueled ongoing innovation.”
Through our collaboration with Next AI, LUCA Theory joined Vector’s FastLane program to hone their craft in creating a balanced AI decision prediction model with human insights. Through Vector’s training programs, LUCA Theory was able to learn and improve their full stack system pipeline – to take it from just design and data, to the right preparations for scale.
Since completing this program, the startup has fostered ten new partnerships and contracts. According to David Oram, co-founder of LUCA Theory: “One of the stronger parts we got out of the overall Next AI program was actually getting partnered, introduced and onboarded with Vector’s FastLane program to be able to learn a lot more about exactly how to do this, and then integrating and kind of continuing to take those lessons and everything we learned.”
PAVE AI needed to replace slow, manual vehicle-inspection processes – reading VINs and odometers – with reliable AI, after off-the-shelf tools delivered only 55 % accuracy and required 20 data-entry staff each month. Vector’s FastLane program upskilled PAVE’s leadership and provided them with four AI developers who built custom AI models for VIN and odometer readings. Two months after the program, the models were live, enabling 98% accuracy across 100,000 monthly VIN and odometer readings and saving the equivalent work of 20 full-time data entry roles a month.
“Vector is a must-have partner – helping us build world-class AI, giving us access to top AI talent, improving our product, and fast-tracking our path to millions in ARR,” says Stephen Southin, PAVE AI CEO.
Bell Kearns needed to reduce the significant time and labour required to summarize more than 150 investment reports each quarter, which consumed two full weeks for their five-person writing team. Through the Vector Institute’s FastLane program, they built their first AI solution—a GenAI-powered tool that summarizes PDF-based reports using the latest AI techniques—developed by machine learning interns with hands-on support from Vector. The solution launched within six months, is now used in operations, and has already saved the firm over 40 hours of manual work per reporting cycle.
“Vector gave us the tools, knowledge, and confidence to bring AI into a non-technical firm—and it’s now transforming how we work,” says Darshan Mistry, Assistant Vice President.
MM Global Solutions Consulting Inc, a Canadian technology firm for the financial services industry needed a reliable, real-time way to flag anomalous ATM transactions for financial institutions without overwhelming them with false alerts. Partnering with Vector’s FastLane program, the team developed and validated an AI anomaly-detection model while upskilling new graduate hires on industry best practices. Within six months after the program, the model launched as a commercial product for financial institutions and is on track to deliver significant ROI.
“Vector’s FastLane program immensely helped our product development by showing us the right approach, validating our model, and helping us turn a concept into a market-ready solution that strengthens Canada’s financial sector.” says Johannes Niekerk, Solutions Architect
Arima, a market intelligence company, was looking to continue its AI journey and take advantage of emerging technologies to improve its platform. By participating in Vector’s AI training program, the team built a chatbot prototype that allowed users to better navigate synthetic datasets. The company is refining the model and its integration will help to improve the user experience and retention.
The founder, Winston Li, mentioned “Vector’s programming was a valuable opportunity to experiment with new ideas to determine whether it was worthwhile to implement our working product and access AI talent.”
Nytia Labs was interested in kick starting their AI journey to learn about AI fundamentals, evaluate the quality of their dataset and start building a ML pipeline. By engaging with Vector’s FastLane program, the team experimented with multiple ML algorithms, compared metrics and found the best-performing algorithm. This resulted in an accuracy between 90-97% and the credibility from Vector’s programming allowed the company to gain additional grant and partnership opportunities with leading hospitals.
The founder, Nouridine stated “There is no better place to get support in AI than Vector Institute, they are the best place to be and the best people to work with if you want to be competitive in AI and industry”.
Before joining Vector’s training programming in 2023, AskaFOX was faced with the need to evolve their tech stack with more current AI technologies. Their founding team was able to build on and leverage Vector’s expertise and sessions to learn about LLM and Generative AI – this provided the startup an early advantage in exploring various AI models. AskaFOX is now able to help manufacturers become more resilient in building their supply chains amidst the current tariff situation, and has even expanded their business into international markets thanks to the National Research Council of Canada.
In their own words, Hanyin Chen, CEO of ASKaFOX has said: “Without the help of specialized institutions like Vector, I think it would take us much longer, and I will say, a steeper path to reach where we are now.”
A.I. VALI Inc. needed to train high‑accuracy cancer‑detection models without moving patient data outside hospital walls. Through Vector’s expertise in privacy enhancing techniques, A.I. VALI Inc. was introduced to federated learning and rebuilt their pipeline for secure, on‑premise training. In twelve months – AIDREA advanced from prototype to Health Canada and FDA Class I clearance, rolled out to five Ontario clinics, secured a Mayo Clinic data partnership, hired two additional staff and are now preparing to launch a five‑million‑dollar seed round.
“Vector gave us the privacy blueprint and talent to turn an ambitious idea into a market‑ready tool that helps clinicians find cancer earlier,” says CEO Azar Azad.
Headquartered in Montréal and selling into Turkey’s tightly regulated insurance market, Metisbot had to deliver powerful LLM chatbots without letting a single byte of customer data leave local servers. Vector’s DaRMoD program showed the team how to prep data, fuse retrieval-augmented generation with transformers, and deploy everything behind client firewalls. The company now ships projects 40% faster, and has signed four new customers – including three of Turkey’s top insurers and its first U.S. client.
“Vector turned our privacy constraints into a global sales advantage, giving us the playbook and credibility to take Canadian-built chatbots worldwide,” says CEO Burak Dikici.
One of the key challenges in the senior care market is the lack of translation between abstract or conceptual patient recounts into tangible health indicators. To establish baselines on normal and abnormal health, Vector’s FastLane Program paired Thriving AI with two students to co-design a methodology that looked at cardiovascular, respiratory, and diabetes data across research papers from multiple ethnic groups. The project has helped set the technical foundations needed to support Thriving AI’s business proposition, which has resulted in a go-to market launch at the beginning of the year, growing a 500 user base and prospecting four enterprise providers.
“Vector turned an abstract vision into a working demo customers can touch, accelerating our route to market,” says Shain Khoja, founder and CEO.
Structured data drives digital health innovation, but ~80% of clinical information remains trapped in unstructured formats like free-text notes. This inaccessible data contains crucial context and nuance that providers increasingly need. Vector’s Applied AI program helped Verto Health’s team build an efficient AI-powered ingestion engine using model-compression techniques and a refined natural-language query tool. This collaboration moved a core roadmap feature six months ahead of schedule, realized up to $500,000 in potential resource savings, accelerated five live deployments, and helped Verto secure a new, national opportunity.
“Startup founders are sprinters – advancing technology in the race against everyone else. Vector has always had a view of what is ahead – guiding us on the developments in AI and offering external perspective so we can focus on our sprint.” says Verto Health’s CEO, Michael Millar.
“At Canvass AI, we believe that AI plays a pivotal role in helping manufacturers create value and accelerate net-zero emissions. By collaborating with the Vector Institute, we look forward to staying up-to-date on leading AI methodologies and practices via Vector’s targeted bootcamps and working with them to help us find the right AI talent via Vector’s strong networks with graduates and professionals coming from Ontario’s well-developed AI ecosystem.”
Humera Malik
CEO, Canvass AI
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FastLane frequently asked questions:
What is the criteria for FastLane eligibility?
To be eligible for the FastLane program, the company must:
Be incorporated and operating within Canada with a technical team
Have between 1 – 500 employees; meeting the definition of Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) according to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED)
If exceeding 500 employees, please contact us for other programs and services from the Vector Institute
Have a functional minimum viable product
Demonstrate from the executive management team interest and commitment in the transformational impact of AI
Do I need to be headquartered in Ontario? / (Do we need to incorporate before applying?)
Yes, your company must be headquartered in Canada, or have a core operational/technical team situated in Canada. Your business or part of your business must be incorporated within Canada.
Is it okay to be pre revenue?
Yes. Some of the ventures admitted to FastLane do not have recurring revenue.
Does FastLane invest in the companies it accepts?
No, FastLane is not an incubator or accelerator itself, we can connect you with our ecosystem partners that do provide investments.
Can the program benefits be applied remotely?
Most programs will take place in a virtual setting. We will clearly communicate which events will take place virtually, hybrid or in person.
What benefit does FastLane provide to my employees?
You will receive access to courses and workshops on the latest AI tools & techniques. We support training and upskilling your staff in AI.
Can I join if I am in another accelerator or incubator?
Yes, FastLane actively works with ecosystem partners to support their AI ventures. We also amplify external opportunities from our ecosystem partners.
How long does the program last?
FastLane is an open-ended program. We review the engagements of the members on an annual basis to determine continued access to the program.
How does the selection process work and what to expect once I’m accepted?
Once you have completed the application form we will review your file according to our eligibility criteria. We will contact you for a brief discussion to determine your AI maturity level and make sure there is a fit with our program.
If your company is accepted, you will receive an email confirmation which includes a welcome package detailing our programs and other opportunities.
You will be included in our monthly newsletter that will highlight the latest sessions, workshops and collaboration opportunities of the FastLane program. If you have any further questions or requests, please contact us.
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