Spoke
Year Founded: 2025
Founder(s)/CEO: Guy Vales (CEO), Sara Rykov, Zak James
Number of Employees: Three
Office Location: Fully Remote
Product Description: Spoke captures airport and other public space audio announcements and delivers them as text and sign-language on its mobile app and on large display screens.
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Target Customers: Spoke has an initial focus on airports in North America, but can fill a communication gap in a variety of public transportation and health-care venues.
Competitive Differentiator: Spoke offers travellers both flight data and gate audio announcements at airports and during flights, in 50-plus languages including sign language translation.
Traction or Notable Milestone: Piloted at Pearson International Airport and at the Ottawa International Airport. Winner of TravelAbility Innovation and Invest Ottawa Ignition Pitch award.
SparkPath
Year Founded: 2016
Founder(s)/CEO: JP Michel
Number of Employees: Three
Office Location: Hybrid
Product Description: Career education tools and programs that help students identify meaningful challenges to solve and translate them into education and career pathways.
Target Customers: Secondary schools, post-secondary institutions, school boards, career educators, mid-career professionals and organizations supporting people in career exploration.
Competitive Differentiator: Explore meaningful challenges to solve, instead of job titles to fit into. SparkPath’s mindset, tools and services increase career engagement, clarity and action.
Traction or Notable Milestone: Used by over 100,000 people across Canada and internationally; adopted by 500-plus schools; featured in international career development conferences.
KnowledgeNow eLearning Solutions
Year Founded: 2020 incorporated
Founder(s)/CEO: Amanda Douglas-Young (CEO), and Chris Douglas (COO)
Number of Employees: 14
Office Location: Ottawa
Product Description: Canadian ed-tech and learning design services company delivering custom e-learning, LMS migration and course modernization through a smart course automation engine.
Target Customers: Highly regulated corporate industries, associations, government and higher-ed requiring compliance-driven, accessible and inclusive e-learning at scale.
Competitive Differentiator: The only Canadian e-learning company pairing proprietary course automation with elite instructional design, so clients never have to choose between speed and quality.
Traction: Migrated and modernized 400 courses in eight months for Western University with a smart course automation engine reducing course creation time by 60 per cent and integration time by 80 per cent.
Phista Technologies Inc.
Year Founded: 2022
Founder(s)/CEO: Dan Basambombo and Martin Belporo, co-founders
Number of Employees: Five
Office Location: Gatineau
Product Description: A smart parking platform enabling drivers to find, reserve and pay for parking while helping property owners monetize spaces in high-traffic university areas and campuses.
Target Customers: Residential and commercial property owners seeking to monetize parking spaces, and drivers needing convenient, reliable parking access in busy urban and high-traffic university areas.
Competitive Differentiator: AI-powered parking intelligence with seamless integration, enabling communities and property owners to unlock, manage and monetize private parking inventory efficiently.
Traction or Notable Milestones: Selected as the parking-technology partner for the City of Saint-Lin-Laurentides. Secured a partnership with the Glebe BIA to enhance local parking access and community mobility. Named Best Pitch at an Invest Ottawa Ignition/BetaWorks finale event. Local winner of the Défi OSEntreprendre 25th edition. Selected as the laureate of the sixth edition Ethnocultural Diversity Honorific Grant.
Structi Systems Inc.
Year Founded: 2022
Founder(s)/CEO: Jesse Ajayi
Number of Employees: Two employees and two consultants
Office Location: Fully remote
Product Description: Structi’s platform provides mapping and regulatory tools that help municipalities across Canada’s North quickly review and approve construction projects.
Target Customers: Municipal governments looking to improve and simplify the way they manage land and approvals.
Competitive Differentiator: Industry-leading subject matter expertise in Northern community planning combined with design expertise from global-scale products.
Traction or Notable Milestone: The software will be live and publicly available across all 25 municipalities in the Territory of Nunavut.
This year, Invest Ottawa will be hosting the 30th cohort’s Pitch Finale on March 19.
