🦷 New tech launch, Ottawa opens new doors for business ownership and latest podcast episode

🔔 Your campaign updates feed

🦷 General Technologies has launched!

General Technologies is a Canadian AI company built to take the admin burden off dental practices. Their flagship product, ChartAI, combines patent-pending hardware with ambient AI to handle everything from voice to clinical notes to full end-to-end workflows, so practices can run more efficiently and profitably.

Invest in General Technologies | $299K Raised | 37% of target

🚛 Edison Motors has relaunched!

Edison Motors has relaunched on FrontFundr with an updated offering memorandum. Working to fill in the gap in the heavy duty truck market, the raise will go toward manufacturing Electric Hybrid Vocational Trucks and EV Conversion Kits in Canada.

Invest in Edison Motors | $14.3M Raised | 72% of target

🔔 Alumni updates

🔵 joni: A sustainable period care brand

joni is now stocked in equipment kits across Jays Care Foundation's Girls at Bat and Indigenous Rookie League programs.

🌸 Blossom Social: Social investing app

Blossom Social’s CEO Maxwell Nicholson spoke at the inaugural NYSE Creator Summit, joining YouTubers, podcasters, and TikTokers who have helped millions of everyday people start investing.

🏦 Expedier: Credit-building fintech app

Expedier will be at the RCCG A Second Touch Convention in Mississauga from June 10–12, showcasing their cross-border payment solutions and financial tools for the global community.

🤔 What’s on our minds

💪 Ottawa opens a new door for business ownership

Buried in the federal government's spring economic update is a policy change that could gradually shift who owns Canadian businesses. By making a temporary tax incentive for Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs) permanent, Ottawa is providing long-term support for a model of corporate succession that prioritizes stability over liquidation.

🤏 Closing the succession gap

Canada is facing a massive demographic transition. There are roughly 100,000 entrepreneurs over the age of 65, representing $300 billion in revenue set to change hands. Despite this, fewer than 10% of small business owners have a formal succession plan. Traditionally, owners sold to competitors or private equity. The EOT model allows an owner to sell to a trust that holds the company for the employees, using future profits to finance the buyout.

The measure allows qualifying owners to avoid capital gains tax on the first $10 million from that sale, which is worth roughly $3.5 million in savings at top provincial tax rates. For employees, the transition requires no personal financial investment. For example, at Friesens Corporation, this structure has already resulted in annual dividend payouts of $8,000 to $10,000 for its 600 employee-owners.

🏢 What it looks like in practice

According to CBC, the CEO of Brightspot Climate, a Canadian engineering consultancy, kept receiving unsolicited offers from larger companies and hedge funds to sell. When he decided to leave, he chose to create a trust to make all 40 of his employees owners of Brightspot Climate. This trust-based sale allowed him to reward his staff and safeguard the firm against the layoffs that often follow a corporate takeover.

🔭 What’s ahead

The EOT model is not a fit for every company. High-growth tech companies often prefer stock options, and very small businesses may find the trust structure too complex to manage. Economists like Jack Mintz have previously noted that specialized tax incentives can sometimes distort the productive use of resources, and changing the ownership structure does not fix a business with weak fundamentals 

Even so, the permanence of the tax incentive removes the urgency that was previously stalling deals. Advocacy groups like Employee Ownership Canada project that this policy could help scale the sector to 450 companies within seven years, covering 50,000 workers. For many founders, this move ensures their values remains intact while rewarding the staff that helped build it.

🎙️ Hear from our founder feature

🥬 Elevate Farms: Cultivating Canada through indoor farming and innovation with Amin Jadavji

Q: You spent two decades in paper manufacturing before starting Elevate Farms. What made you pivot to food?

A: In the paper business, our biggest customers were the largest food distributors in North America. And I always noticed that nobody cared where their paper came from, but people do care where their food comes from. When I exited the paper company, I kept coming back to that idea, there has to be a way to use technology to grow food locally. That was really the beginning of Elevate Farms.

Q: The technology behind Elevate Farms is rooted in space research. Can you explain that connection?

A: My co-founder is based in Oslo and has spent his career in photobiology, the study of how light affects living organisms. In 2006, he started working on how to grow food at a fraction of Earth's atmosphere, which was really the precursor to Mars mission research. He ended up working with the Space Research Group at the University of Guelph and has been cited by NASA and the European Space Agency for that work. I was introduced to him through Guelph, and we co-founded Elevate Farms together in 2017.

Q: Indoor farming has seen a lot of hype and a lot of failures. What has Elevate done differently?

A: The challenge has always been doing this cost-effectively and at scale. If you're the most expensive product in the category, you haven't really solved the problem. We took a deep tech approach, which means it takes more time and more capital, but we weren't trying to rush to sell something quickly. We were trying to solve the problem properly. Scale is still the biggest hurdle in this industry, nobody has hit the volumes that make this truly viable at a mass market level yet. That's what we're building toward.

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📌 FrontFundr Bulletin

Trieste Reading Nominated for She & Success Women in Finance Award

FrontFundr's Chief Growth Officer, Trieste Reading, has been nominated for the She & Success Women in Finance Award, a national recognition celebrating women driving meaningful impact across business and finance. The award celebrates leaders helping shape the future of the country's economy, and Trieste is among those being recognized for her work expanding access to private markets. Read her full story here.

FrontFundr featured in National Crowdfunding & Fintech Associate

FrontFundr was featured in the National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association of Canada (NCFA) for its record-breaking 2025 Community Capital Report. The platform facilitated $83.2M in total capital across 8,064 investment transactions, a 91% jump in activity and 23% growth in capital year over year. Read it here.