Canadian Robotics Council Forms Capital Committee as Ottawa Sidelines a National Robotics Strategy
The Canadian Robotics Council has assembled a committee of Canadian banks and venture capital firms to push more domestic capital into the country's robotics sector — a move that lands at a particularly awkward moment for Canadian industrial policy. The federal government confirmed earlier this year that it is not pursuing a standalone national robotics strategy, even as China, South Korea, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States all operate dedicated national plans for the sector.
The CRC's new Capital Committee is, in effect, the private sector's attempt to do what Ottawa has decided not to.
The seven-member committee is chaired by Ryan Gariepy, who chairs the CRC's board of directors and co-founded Clearpath Robotics, the Kitchener-Waterloo autonomous robot maker acquired by Rockwell Automation in 2023. Joining him are Aditya Aggarwal of BDC Capital's Industrial Innovation Venture Fund, Mike McCauley of Garage Capital, Karamdeep Nijjar of Inovia Capital, Andrew Dienst of RBC Dominion Securities, Eva Lau of Two Small Fish Ventures, and Angela Tran of Version One Ventures. Between them, the committee's firms have already deployed more than $150 million into Canadian robotics companies that have either exited or are scaling — including Avidbots, Clearpath, Haply Robotics, Kindred Systems, and Waabi.
The committee launches with three stated priorities: increasing funding for both robot makers and the industries adopting automation, providing investors with a technical framework to evaluate robotics startups, and matching entrepreneurs with supply chains, early adopters, and specialized financing.
"The CRC has seen a rapid increase in the amount of Canadian and international robotics startups, as well as a similar increase in businesses and countries who are looking to robotics to increase their productivity," Gariepy told BetaKit. "We want to help Canadian companies ride this wave while making sure that as much of the financial returns as possible stay in Canada."
That last clause is doing real work. Canadian robotics has a long history of producing world-class IP and then watching it leave the country. Clearpath itself was acquired by an American industrial automation giant. Kindred Systems — the AI-driven robotics company spun out of D-Wave — was acquired by Ocado in 2020. Sanctuary AI, the Vancouver humanoid robotics company widely cited as one of Canada's strongest physical AI plays, has raised much of its capital from outside Canada. The pattern is familiar enough that "scale-up cliff" has become shorthand in the Canadian innovation conversation.
The capital problem is structural, not sentimental
Robotics companies don't fit neatly into the venture capital models that have shaped most Canadian tech investing over the past decade. Software startups can scale on relatively modest early-stage capital because the marginal cost of distribution is near zero. Robotics companies require hardware development, manufacturing capacity, supply chain relationships, regulatory clearances, and often field deployment with anchor customers before they can demonstrate the kind of revenue trajectory a Series B or Series C investor expects. The capital intensity is closer to deep tech or biotech than to SaaS, but the institutional muscle for evaluating and underwriting that kind of risk hasn't built up to the same scale in Canada.
Compounding the problem: the technical due diligence required to evaluate a robotics company is substantial. A generalist VC analyst can develop a workable thesis on a B2B software company within weeks. Evaluating whether a manipulation startup has actually solved a hard physical AI problem, or whether an autonomous mobile robot company has genuine differentiation in localization or fleet management, requires domain expertise that most Canadian funds don't have in-house. The committee's stated goal of providing investors with a technical framework to evaluate robotics startups is a direct response to that gap.
That capability gap is part of why so much Canadian robotics capital has historically come from American or international sources. When the technical due diligence happens in Boston, Silicon Valley, or Tokyo, the relationships, the boards seats, and eventually the acquisitions tend to follow.
The numbers underline the stakes
A 2024 Statistics Canada study found that the roughly two percent of Canadian companies using robots are responsible for 7.5 percent of domestic jobs and 11.5 percent of sales — and are nearly twice as likely as non-adopters to introduce new or improved products to market. That's a striking productivity differential in a country where the Bank of Canada governor has called low productivity growth the country's "Achilles heel."
The broader picture is harder. Canada ranked 13th in the world for operational stock of industrial robots in 2024, behind Spain, India, and France, and well behind the leaders — South Korea, China, and the United States. Take the auto sector out of the equation and the picture gets worse, with food and beverage manufacturing, construction, and general logistics largely untapped as adoption sectors. Meanwhile, the global robotics market was valued at nearly $50 billion USD in 2025 and is projected to reach as high as $111 billion by 2030, according to ABI Research.
For a country with strong robotics research credentials and a respectable cluster of scaling startups, ranking 13th in adoption is a strategic problem. It means Canadian robotics companies face a thin domestic customer base, which makes the early commercial milestones harder to hit, which makes raising follow-on capital harder, which sends more deals to international investors — the loop the Capital Committee is trying to break.
The policy backdrop: AI strategy without a robotics chapter
The committee's launch is sharpened by what's happening at the federal level. In late April 2026, the federal government unveiled the six pillars of its long-delayed national AI strategy. Robotics — physical AI — does not appear as a standalone pillar. When CBC News asked Innovation, Science and Economic Development about a dedicated robotics strategy in January, the department confirmed the government is "not pursuing a standalone national robotics strategy at this time," noting only that the broader AI strategy would address physical AI applications and automation as part of its scope.
That framing is exactly what Gariepy and CRC CEO Jovana Siegel have been pushing back against for the past year. "An AI strategy which does not extend to physical AI will bring only incremental benefits to the Canadian economy and society," Gariepy told BetaKit. "It will not bring the transformation Canada needs."
Siegel has made the same case in policy venues: software-only AI strategies miss the parts of the economy that actually run on physical labour — manufacturing, construction, logistics, healthcare, eldercare, agriculture — and those are precisely the sectors where productivity gains have been hardest to find. Robotics, she has argued, offers a quicker path to return on investment than quantum computing or clean tech, both of which have been singled out for explicit national strategies.
What the committee can and cannot do
A capital coordination body, even a well-resourced one, can't substitute for federal policy. It can't direct procurement spending toward Canadian robotics firms. It can't set tax incentives for adoption. It can't fund the kind of large-scale demonstration programs that have helped China, South Korea, and Germany seed early markets for their domestic robotics sectors. Those are tools that sit with Ottawa.
What the committee can do is significant on its own terms. It can build the technical evaluation muscle that Canadian capital allocators have lacked. It can accelerate the deal flow between Canadian funds and Canadian founders, reducing the gravitational pull toward international rounds. It can match scaling robotics companies with the early adopters and supply chain partners they need to hit the commercial milestones that unlock follow-on funding. And it can, perhaps most importantly, signal to the Canadian robotics ecosystem that the capital side of the table is organized, engaged, and serious — which is itself a recruiting and retention argument for founders weighing whether to base their next company in Toronto, Waterloo, or Montreal versus Boston, Pittsburgh, or the Bay Area.
The CRC currently counts 84 robotics companies, universities, academic research labs, and government partners as members, the vast majority of which joined within the past 12 months. That growth rate suggests the ecosystem is consolidating around the Council as a coordinating body in the absence of federal direction.
Whether that's enough to shift Canada's trajectory in physical AI remains an open question. The committee is well-positioned but operating against substantial headwinds — including, increasingly, the headwind of competing against countries whose governments have decided this fight matters and have organized accordingly. For now, Canadian robotics has a venture committee instead of a national strategy. The next year or two will reveal whether that proves sufficient.
