I was born in Bombay, but I moved to the U.S. for college, to study computer science. Once I was done with that, I wanted to found a company, but I couldn’t. I was on a student visa, so it wasn’t legally possible. I moved to Singapore in 2006, because it seemed like a more accepting place, and I built a company there: Socialwok, an enterprise collaboration platform, similar to Slack. We won a TechCrunch competition in 2009, which led to a lot of interest from companies in Silicon Valley. We didn’t get any huge acquisition offers, but we caught the eye of someone at LinkedIn. A few months later, I moved to Silicon Valley to work for them.

University of Toronto faculty and students are helping the City of Toronto to reach its greenhouse gas reduction goals, develop policies to ensure that everyone in the city has access to affordable, healthy food, and promote the city as one of the world’s leading cultural centres.

These projects are just a few of the ways U of T’s urban experts are helping to make Toronto safer, more inclusive and globally recognized.

Tulip.io Inc., whose mobile software allows sales associates and retailers to engage more effectively with customers, has raised $40 million in a new round of venture-capital financing led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

The financing, which marks Kleiner Perkins' largest investment in a Canadian technology startup, will help Tulip double its staff, expand to retailers in Europe, South America and Asia as well as develop its software for other industries such as the hospitality sector.

Vancouver isn’t the only metropolis north of the border buzzing with tech.

Quebec’s largest city is becoming internationally renowned as a research hub for artificial intelligence. Google (GOOGL, -0.55%) last November established a new A.I. research group in its Montreal office, pledging to invest $4.5 million over three years in the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, an A.I. research lab at the University of Montreal. And earlier this year, Microsoft doubled the size of its local A.I. research group. The tech giant also pledged $6 million to the University of Montreal and $1 million to McGill University over the next five years. Outside of A.I., Amazon (AMZN, +1.02%) houses massive cloud data centers nearby.

TORONTO, July 11, 2017 /CNW/ - Leaders from Toronto's startup and corporate innovation community gathered at the top of the CN Tower to announce a new technology festival called Elevate Toronto that will take place September 12 - 14, 2017. This new festival will showcase Toronto's thriving tech ecosystem while promoting Toronto internationally as a world class destination for innovation, startups, talent and investment.

Toronto is already recognized for its leadership in Artificial Intelligence, FinTech, Blockchain, and other areas of emerging technology, which will dramatically alter how we work and communicate. During the conference portion of Elevate Toronto, experts from these fields will give keynote addresses.

A new accelerator program being run by Canada’s Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) is hoping to find technologists in the quantum machine learning field who want to become founders and give them access to cutting-edge equipment to make their projects into companies. The program will be run out of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, and will include investment from venture funds Bloomberg Beta, Data Collective and Spectrum 28.

Toronto police officers now have an app that will help them connect someone experiencing a mental health crisis with the support services closest to them.

But the hope, one of its creators says, is that the public starts using the app — which pinpoints the user's location and generates a map of services — to prevent an emergency.

Immigration restrictions in the U.S. could hurt game companies in our country. It will limit the potential talent pool, making it difficult for top designers, programmers, and artists to come to this country to work. But Canada, and its looser immigration policies, can take in just about all the foreign workers it wants.

And this is one reason why Canada’s gaming scene is growing — the country now has 472 game companies, up by 143 since 2013 — and not just in the cities you would expect like Montreal or Vancouver.

Uber is setting up a lab in Toronto to develop artificial intelligence needed for autonomous cars to recognize objects so they can travel safely.

It's the ride-hailing company's first such lab outside the U.S. The company also does research in San Francisco and Pittsburgh. Uber says University of Toronto Associate Professor Raquel Urtasun (UHR-tah-sun) will lead the lab. The company says she's among the world's top artificial intelligence researchers. She will remain as a professor at the school one day per week.

AMERICA’S BIGGEST TECH companies are remaking the internet through artificial intelligence. And more than ever, these companies are looking north to Canada for the ideas that will advance AI itself.

This morning, Google announced it’s starting an AI lab in Toronto. At the same time, it’s helping to fund a public-private partnership with the University of Toronto to develop and commercialize AI talent and ideas. In November, the company made a similar move in Montreal—a city that has also attracted Microsoft’s attention.