Emerging Venture Scientist
Cliquer ici pour accéder à la version française de cette invitation: https://luma.com/pl405yr9
The lab is where it starts.
What do Intel, Qualcomm, Databricks, TSMC, Google, and Cohere have in common? Every one of them had a scientist on the founding team. Not repeat operators, but researchers who understood that the real leverage of a discovery isn't in the paper. It's in the deployment.
Mila is empowering exactly this founder archetype. We call them Venture Scientists researchers who choose to build.
On September 24, at Mila, the first cohort of this founder profile will walk on stage. For investors, this is first access: the earliest look at these companies, before the market prices them in.
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A number worth sitting with
Canada holds half a percent of the world's population and roughly a tenth of its very best AI researchers. Few places bring together this level of talent as Mila does. We hold one of the largest gatherings of elite AI scientists on the planet.
Since January 2025, all six of the largest first financings for independent AI startups worldwide, each above $300M, had a scientist co-founder. Three of them had a Mila-affiliated co-founder.
At a time when capital is racing toward AI, the real story becomes where the outsized returns are forming: we believe it is at the intersection of frontier AI and deep science. It is a corner that is quieter, harder to reach, and it's where tomorrow's defining companies are being built right now.
As Stéphane Marceau, Managing Director of Mila Ventures, puts it: ‘’venture scientists on founding teams are gateways to exponential outcomes. Tomorrow's leading companies will be built at the intersection of frontier AI and scientific breakthroughs. By the time the fog lifts, the greatest opportunities are already spoken for. The advantage goes to investors who build trust early with science-based founders, who show up in the corridors of research institutions like Mila, and who take the leap well before consensus forms’’.
The Emerging Venture Scientist event is an opportunity to do just that. Get involved early.
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What the cohort has been through
The Venture Scientist Bootcamp is a four-month, full-time, in-person program that takes Canada's top STEM PhDs and puts them through the reps of company-building; customer discovery, real products in front of real users, deeptech go-to-market, the identity shift from scientist to founder. They didn't arrive as founders. They've grown into that persona.
It works. Companies from earlier cohorts, Automedon, Cognate Labs, and others, are already out in the market, building.
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What's in store for you at the event
12 deeptech companies, built by scientists, will be pitching live. These are Venture Scientists building companies at the emergence point: deep-tech, investable, and early enough that you're seeing them before the market does. Between the pitches, two candid panels take the stage, one from the investor's perspective, one from the founder's. After the showcase of Venture Scientists, the room will cast a coup de cœur vote.
The event closes with Clarissa Desjardins, PhD, the scientist who has already walked the Venture Scientist path. She founded Clementia Pharmaceuticals, took it public on Nasdaq, and sold it to Ipsen for $1.3B. Along the way she's delivered the first and only treatment ever approved for a devastating rare bone disease. She's founded four companies. She created a category created from nothing. She is what a Venture Scientist looks like at the far end of the arc.
The afternoon ends with a celebration: DJ, cocktails, and canapés.
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Who this is for
Investors and founders, first. This is the room where the next generation of science-led AI companies meets the people who back them and build alongside them.
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The Agora, Mila — Montréal
September 24, 2026 · 1:00–5:30 PM, followed by a celebratory social