Beyond the hype, what measurable difference is AI actually making in the growth trajectories of the Black-owned startups BDC works with – and where are expectations outpacing reality?
AI is doing what disciplined technology has always done for businesses: compressing time, lowering cost per unit of output, and unlocking capacity. Where I see real impact – across our portfolio and the broader ecosystem of Black founders we track – it’s in genuine innovation. These companies are applying AI to solve practical business challenges and deliver measurable results.
That impact is showing up in different ways: voice agents providing immediate customer service and lifting bookings for local operators, computer vision replacing manual estimating in construction and manufacturing, and generative AI automatically creating and updating company documents, collapsing enterprise document creation and learning cycles from weeks or months to days or minutes.
That is where the conversation is evolving. We’ve moved past the initial hype. Astute teams are realizing that simply subscribing to AI tools and telling people to use them is not enough – the real value comes from applying AI to specific problems with clear outcomes in mind.
The strongest businesses are using AI to solve meaningful problems for customers, with defined outcomes and explicit measurement. They are focused on generating business results, not just adding AI tools or features to existing products.
OutreachGenius, SketchDeck.ai, and Oasis Learning AI each apply AI differently. What did BDC see in these companies specifically, and what does that say about where AI-driven innovation is heading?
These portfolio companies represent genuine innovation – not repackaged features on top of someone else’s model. That’s the bar, and it’s not a coincidence, it’s our thesis.
- OutreachGenius is helping home-service businesses engage customers through multilingual AI voice automation in a market that has traditionally not been a heavy technology user.
- ai uses computer vision to help fabricators and estimators complete work faster and more efficiently in an industry facing significant labour challenges.
- Oasis Learning AI is reducing document and course creation timelines from months to days while helping organizations keep content current as knowledge evolves.
What ties them together is a clear focus on customer outcomes, deep industry expertise, AI embedded in core business workflows, and capabilities that competitors can’t easily replicate. That’s where AI innovation is heading. The winners won’t be building surface-level AI solutions or general-purpose chatbots – they’ll be founders solving specific industry problems the larger players can’t or won’t.
What are the biggest obstacles Black entrepreneurs still face in accessing capital for AI-driven ventures, and how is the Black Entrepreneurs Fund designed to address those specific gaps?
Venture capital is a very specific kind of investment. It requires founders to step outside the box, take on genuinely hard problems, and build solutions large enough to justify the risk and the return expectations of the asset class.
A lot of talented Black founders have been shaped by an ecosystem where available capital has often been program-driven and smaller in scale. That can unintentionally calibrate ambition around what is fundable today, rather than around the largest problem a founder is capable of solving.
Those can be great companies, but not every great company is a venture company. Venture capital backs the outlier — the founder trying to create or reshape a market – and when founders do not regularly see people who look like them funded for that level of ambition, expectations naturally calibrate accordingly.
The Black Entrepreneurs Fund’ $100M platform is designed to break that cycle. It provides early-stage venture capital for Black founders building genuine, category-defining companies. It also supports private equity and Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA) for operators scaling durable Canadian businesses; and fund-of-fund partnerships with Black-led GPs to deepen the ecosystem.
Capital is part of the answer — but the more important part is showing the next generation of founders that thinking big is not only allowed, it’s expected, and it’s fundable.
What early-stage trends are you seeing right now in how Black founders are building with AIÂ are there particular sectors, business models, or approaches gaining momentum?
What’s exciting is that many of the Black founders coming through my pipeline are building genuine innovation across industries with technology such as:
- Vertical, workflow-embedded AI over horizontal tools. Founders picking one industry, learning it inside out, and embedding AI into workflows where the customer measures ROI directly.
- Physical AI and industrial SaaS. The overlap between AI and the real economy — trades, construction, manufacturing, logistics — is where I see the strongest opportunities.
- Enterprise knowledge and voice automation. High-volume interaction and institutional knowledge management, built with enterprise-grade security from day one.
- Capital-efficient, revenue-first business models. Lean teams are reaching recurring revenue earlier, staying disciplined and building businesses designed to work in any market environment.
The common thread is applied AI, deep industry expertise, unique intellectual property or data, and disciplined execution. That’s the kind of innovation Canada needs to compete and grow. It’s also the kind of innovation BDC’s Black Entrepreneurs Fund is designed to back as we help build the next generation of Canadian business champions.
As a jury member for the $100,000 investment prize, what will you be looking for in the pitches, and what advice would you give founders hoping to catch a juror’s eye?
I’ll be looking for the same things I look for at the IC table:
- A real customer problem, told concretely. One customer, one pain point, one measurable outcome you’ve delivered.
- Genuine innovation, not a feature. If your product could be built as a weekend prompt-engineering project, so could your competitor’s. Show me what’s actually unique about what you’re building.
- Traction proportional to the stage. Pilots, retention, expansion or early revenue — evidence that customers are willing to use and pay for what you’ve built.
- Capital efficiency. More done with less is the single biggest predictor of a founder’s ability to survive to the next round, but mostly, for long-term success.
- Deep industry expertise. The best founders know their customers, understand the problem firsthand and have insights that others don’t.
- A clear ask and a clear plan. Explain what the capital will unlock, and what milestone it will help you reach.
Cut the hype and lead with the outcomes. Talk about your business the way a builder would: what problem you’re solving, and why it matters.
The real opportunity isn’t diversity – it’s identifying exceptional founders and business builders before everyone else does.
This isn’t a diversity story dressed up as an investment story. It’s an investment story.
Black founders in Canada are building genuinely innovative companies with real customers, real revenue and the potential to become the next generation of Canadian business champions. The gap between what they’ve built and what they’ve been backed to build is a market inefficiency.
Our job at the Black Entrepreneurs Fund is to recognize that opportunity early and back founders whose businesses will become self-sustaining, durable businesses. The opportunity goes beyond venture capital. As Canada enters a once-in-a-generation business transfer wave, we’re also looking for entrepreneurs who are ready to acquire, grow and scale Canadian SMEs.
If you’re building a genuinely innovative company with unicorn potential — or you’re an operator looking to acquire and grow a Canadian SME — come talk to us. We move at the speed of good businesses and we hold a high bar, because that’s what durable companies deserve.
