What The Tech?

In our latest episode of What the Tech from Boast, recorded in person at Thin Air Labs in Calgary, we sat down with Sebastien Hiscock, Co-Founder of Purelend, to discuss how his company is using AI to fully automate the manual checks and underwriting that have plagued the mortgage industry for decades, and why the best AI solutions empower humans rather than replace them. 

Sebastien's path to founding Purelend is a masterclass in experiential learning. He started as a software developer at WestJet, got his first "fake startup experience" building the Swoop subsidiary, then joined Neo Financial at an incredibly early stage as one of the first 10 employees in mid-2019. 

Boast accelerates the success of innovative businesses globally with software that integrates financial, payroll, and engineering data into a single platform of R&D intelligence.

Visit Boast.ai, sign up for our Blog newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn for weekly #InnovatorsLive sessions and the latest news to fuel your growth.

Intro and Outro music provided by Dennis Ma whose mixes you can find on Soundcloud at DJ DennyDex.

In our latest episode of What the Tech from Boast, recorded in person at Tech Thursday in Calgary, we sat down with Omar Sabbagh, CEO of Bidaya AI, to discuss how his company is using AI to level the playing field for small and mid-sized firms bidding on government contracts 

Omar's journey to founding Bidaya is wonderfully nonlinear. He's a mechanical engineer by training who thought he'd be a biomedical engineer. Instead, he worked in finance doing equity research on oil and gas stocks, watched his firm transform from a traditional research company into a tech company, then decided to work at Shopify to be "in the thick of it." 

Boast accelerates the success of innovative businesses globally with software that integrates financial, payroll, and engineering data into a single platform of R&D intelligence.

Visit Boast.ai, sign up for our Blog newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn for weekly #InnovatorsLive sessions and the latest news to fuel your growth.

Intro and Outro music provided by Dennis Ma whose mixes you can find on Soundcloud at DJ DennyDex.

In our latest episode of What the Tech from Boast, we sat down with Varun Sehgal, CPA and Founding Partner of Think Accounting, to discuss how his firm's transformation from a traditional location-based practice to a cloud-first national firm changed everything, and how accountants play a critical coordination role in helping Canadian businesses maximize R&D tax credits like SR&ED. 

Varun's journey started at Ernst & Young in audit, then moved to industry roles. But in 2016, he made the leap that would define his career: Leaving corporate life to build Think Accounting with his business partners. 

Today, Think Accounting delivers accounting, bookkeeping, tax services, tax advisory, M&A advisory, and fractional CFO work. They also play a crucial role in identifying SR&ED candidates and coordinating with specialists like Boast to ensure clients maximize non-dilutive funding. 

Boast accelerates the success of innovative businesses globally with software that integrates financial, payroll, and engineering data into a single platform of R&D intelligence.

Visit Boast.ai, sign up for our Blog newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn for weekly #InnovatorsLive sessions and the latest news to fuel your growth.

Intro and Outro music provided by Dennis Ma whose mixes you can find on Soundcloud at DJ DennyDex.

In our latest episode of What the Tech from Boast, we sat down with Philipp Baumanns, Co-Founder and COO at telli, to discuss how AI voice agents are transforming B2C customer journeys, and why the most successful entrepreneurs focus on solving problems they've experienced firsthand. 

Philipp's journey started on the other side of the entrepreneurship equation. He worked in venture capital and private equity, looking at companies from the outside. But he quickly realized the most interesting stories came from the entrepreneurs actually building the businesses. 

Backed by Y Combinator and Cherry Ventures, telli serves customers ranging from Sky (Comcast subsidiary) to Viessmann (part of Carrier) with a mission that resonates deeply with Boast's ethos: Enable businesses to achieve growth and scale without overextending their resources. 

Boast accelerates the success of innovative businesses globally with software that integrates financial, payroll, and engineering data into a single platform of R&D intelligence.

Visit Boast.ai, sign up for our Blog newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn for weekly #InnovatorsLive sessions and the latest news to fuel your growth.

Intro and Outro music provided by Dennis Ma whose mixes you can find on Soundcloud at DJ DennyDex.

In our latest episode of What the Tech from Boast, we sat down with Vlad Leytus, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of AirDev, the global leader in no-code and Bubble.io development. Vlad shared how AirDev enables customers to build powerful custom web apps in a fraction of the time, cost, and effort of traditional agencies, and how R&D tax credits have been critical to their growth as a bootstrapped, US-based company serving hundreds of clients from one-person startups to Fortune 100 enterprises. 

The mission: Make software development faster, cheaper, and more accessible—without requiring coding expertise. 

The approach: Treat software development like an industrial process. Standardize what can be standardized, modularize what's common, and customize only what's unique. 

The result: A San Francisco-based company that's been growing for 10+ years, bootstrapped entirely on revenue, now retooling for the AI era. 

And they're doing it all while claiming R&D tax credits to fuel continued innovation in their development framework, project management tools, and assembly-line approach to custom software. 

Boast accelerates the success of innovative businesses globally with software that integrates financial, payroll, and engineering data into a single platform of R&D intelligence.

Visit Boast.ai, sign up for our Blog newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn for weekly #InnovatorsLive sessions and the latest news to fuel your growth.

Intro and Outro music provided by Dennis Ma whose mixes you can find on Soundcloud at DJ DennyDex.

In our latest episode of What the Tech from Boast, we sat down with Arjun Puri, CEO and Co-Founder of Symbiotic AI, to discuss democratizing precision heart health, why SR&ED tax credits should be a badge of honor, and how personal tragedy sparked a mission to reduce variability in life-or-death medical decisions. 

Today, Symbiotic AI is building Revaz AI—an AI-enabled clinical decision support solution specifically focused on coronary artery disease, the leading cause of death and disease globally. Revaz helps clinicians choose between treatment options like medical therapy, stenting, or bypass surgery by generating personalized risk predictions for each pathway. 

Boast accelerates the success of innovative businesses globally with software that integrates financial, payroll, and engineering data into a single platform of R&D intelligence.

Visit Boast.ai, sign up for our Blog newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn for weekly #InnovatorsLive sessions and the latest news to fuel your growth.

Intro and Outro music provided by Dennis Ma whose mixes you can find on Soundcloud at DJ DennyDex.

In our latest episode of What the Tech from Boast, we sat down with Dion Kelly, Co-Founder and CEO of Possibility Neurotechnologies, to discuss brain-computer interfaces, the power of getting comfortable being uncomfortable, and how Canadian non-dilutive funding programs are enabling groundbreaking neurotechnology innovation. 

Dion's journey is unconventional. She started with lemonade stands, redesigned secondhand clothes to sell at local markets by age 10, and planned to attend fashion school. Instead, she became one of the few researchers in the world with expertise in brain-computer interfaces, then built a company making brain-controlled interaction accessible to everyone. 

Her first product, Think2Switch™, is "a bit like Siri for your thoughts." It translates brain signals from off-the-shelf brain-sensing headsets into usable commands so you can control computers, toys, or smart devices using your thoughts. 

Boast accelerates the success of innovative businesses globally with software that integrates financial, payroll, and engineering data into a single platform of R&D intelligence.

Visit Boast.ai, sign up for our Blog newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn for weekly #InnovatorsLive sessions and the latest news to fuel your growth.

Intro and Outro music provided by Dennis Ma whose mixes you can find on Soundcloud at DJ DennyDex.

n our latest episode of What the Tech from Boast, we sat down with Sabina Bruehlmann, CEO of Nimble Science, to discuss a truly revolutionary innovation: Accessing the "dark side of the moon" of human health, the small intestine. 

Sabina's journey started with free computers and straight lines. She became a mechanical engineer in the mid-90s because of a push for women to enter engineering, and because she could "draw really straight lines." But after landing at a biomedical institute, she discovered her true calling: Biomedical engineering, "the ultimate engineering because you have to reverse engineer one of the most complex machines on the planet." 

Today, at Nimble Science, Sabina and her team have developed the SIMBA™ Capsule, a clinically validated ingestible device that's changing how we understand gut health, food absorption, drug effectiveness, and diagnostics. They're working with Food giants to biopharma companies developing biologics. 

Boast accelerates the success of innovative businesses globally with software that integrates financial, payroll, and engineering data into a single platform of R&D intelligence.

Visit Boast.ai, sign up for our Blog newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn for weekly #InnovatorsLive sessions and the latest news to fuel your growth.

Intro and Outro music provided by Dennis Ma whose mixes you can find on Soundcloud at DJ DennyDex.

In our latest episode of What the Tech from Boast, we sat down with Melvin Newman, CEO and Co-Founder of Patabid, to discuss how AI is transforming construction estimating and why innovation in this space matters more than most people realize. 

Melvin's journey is unconventional. He's a mechanical engineer who taught himself neural network development by buying textbooks on natural language processing in 2015, built an AI system that worked so well it "terrified" him, and turned a side project into the #1 unified public tender and electrical estimating software platform in North America. Along the way, he's become a passionate advocate for R&D tax credits, construction innovation, and using AI to amplify human expertise, not replace it. 

Boast accelerates the success of innovative businesses globally with software that integrates financial, payroll, and engineering data into a single platform of R&D intelligence.

Visit Boast.ai, sign up for our Blog newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn for weekly #InnovatorsLive sessions and the latest news to fuel your growth.

Intro and Outro music provided by Dennis Ma whose mixes you can find on Soundcloud at DJ DennyDex.

In our latest episode of What the Tech from Boast, we sat down with Dr. Ty McKinney, founder of 8 Bit Cortex, to discuss a topic that's often overlooked in the innovation economy: How burnout silently drains revenue, productivity, and innovation capacity from growing companies. 

Ty brings a unique lens grounded in neuroscience and a deep understanding of what he calls the "burnout tax,” which is the hidden costs organizations pay when their leadership, operations, and innovation teams aren't working at full capacity. For leadership, that tax shows up as money left on the table when teams can't visualize clear paths to revenue growth. For operations, it manifests as absenteeism and presenteeism that kill productivity. And for innovation teams, it translates directly into delayed product launches, increased bugs, higher churn, and slower ARR scaling. 

Boast accelerates the success of innovative businesses globally with software that integrates financial, payroll, and engineering data into a single platform of R&D intelligence.

Visit Boast.ai, sign up for our Blog newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn for weekly #InnovatorsLive sessions and the latest news to fuel your growth.

Intro and Outro music provided by Dennis Ma whose mixes you can find on Soundcloud at DJ DennyDex.