Vaughan AI company Daisy Intelligence moves to Toronto to scoop young tech talents

However, it might return once it becomes a multibillion company

Yorkregion.com
October 24, 2019
Dina Al-Shibeeb

One of the few authentic AI companies that stole the limelight was Daisy Intelligence in Vaughan.

Daisy Intelligence uses a cloud-based AI platform to help companies ranging from grocery stores to insurance firms process their huge data to understand their customer base.

Daisy has some of the world’s largest retailers such as SpartanNash --a U.S. grocery distributor and retailer, Harps --a U.S. supermarket chain, and Green Shield Canada --Canadian benefits provider.

But after many years in York Region, which has the highest concentration of tech companies in all of Canada, Daisy moved its office in early October to downtown Toronto to join other tech companies mainly present at King Street East.

“When moving downtown, it’s a lot easier to attract talent,” said Gary Saarenvirta, founder and CEO of Daisy. “The number of people applying has more than doubled since we’ve moved downtown.”

Saarenvirta himself has experienced this first-hand when he invited his son, who is in tech, to join Daisy but the latter didn’t want to leave Toronto for Vaughan, citing long commutes as the reason.

“All the young talent is in downtown Toronto,” Saarenvirta lamented. “We have a hard time attracting young talents to come to York.”

While Daisy grew to 50 employees in Vaughan, so far it has about 60 employees. “We’re probably doubling over the next year. Now, we're in the short term hiring, needing 20 or 30 more people.”

The company is looking to fill a variety of positions from client facing roles such as sales to technical.

“I think York Region is great for early startups,” he said, given the lower real-estate costs in terms of renting in comparison to much bigger cities like Toronto.

Vaughan is trying to transform

While north of York University, which is Vaughan, is seeing the opening of new restaurants and condos, gradually transforming it to a more cosmopolitan City, “young people don’t want to commute like the previous generation did.”

In its September report, the Building Industry and Land Development Association’s figures showed how Vaughan has sold a staggering number of 2,456 condominiums units and 414 single family homes for 2019.

Vaughan has allowed York Region to come second after Toronto ranked in the sale of condos. Toronto sold 7,484 units, York Region 3,453 and Peel third 2,813.

However, it’s still not competing with Toronto downtown’s abundance of choices, the “lively social environment outside of the work cluster,” and at times “high speed internet.”

“It’s not attractive from a lifestyle perspective,” he lamented.

The move comes after it won a $5 million award last year, beating 16 other companies, and on top of that it managed to fundraise $10 million to scale its unique AI platform.

After meeting with up to to 100 VCs over the last year and a half, “finding the right partners in Toronto that was really the magic and continuing that growth path,” he added, describing how many VCs have a "very formulaic approach."

“When we met Framework Venture, they told us that we were the only AI company they ever met that had an (AI) product.”

“So the fact that we had a repeatable product was very exciting for them,” he said, explaining how it’s important to find the “right partner.”

He said many companies aren’t AI but they are rather “sidetracked by this computer science statistic analysis path,” emphasizing how Daisy is big on Reinforcement Learning; it’s when machines do highly complex tasks unmanned, but they need to start learning first.

With at least 25 years experience in the domain, including a long history working for IBM, Saarenvirta dubs his company as one of the “first leaders in applying RL in a practical way.”

It might return

As Toronto’s cultural vibrancy continues to allure young talents and investors, it’s not cheap.

“I think, frankly, Daisy, we have our vision and goal and become a multibillion dollar business,” he said. “We'll likely then move back out to your region, because we're not going to buy a big building downtown."

He cited examples of big giants such as IBM and Microsoft as well as other “big retail companies” that have offices in the northern corridor that’s York Region with Markham being the main location.

“Your Region was great for us. I live and raised my children there,” he said, promising to come back once Daisy launches its IPO and becomes a multibillion-worth company.