Tricks of the trade

Globe and Mail

a day ago

The VivaTech trade show had barely opened at the sprawling Porte de Versailles convention centre in Paris and Alexander Jacquet was already feeling the stress.
The Vancouver-based entrepreneur had been an hour late setting up his booth inside the Canada pavilion, which he'd been told he had for just half a day under a rotation system designed to showcase as much Canadian talent as possible over four days. It had taken forever to get a taxi to the outer edges of the 15th arrondissement and he ended up paying €80 (roughly $126), a sum he hadn't counted on.
By 11 a.m., just three people had stopped by to talk to Mr. Jacquet, but his mood had improved considerably: Those three visitors represented some of France's largest beauty companies – potentially huge clients for his startup, Trusting Pixels Inc.
He and his business partner launched the enterprise in 2018, building on Mr. Jacquet's work as a visual effects artist on film and TV shows such as Game of Thrones. The pair developed software that uses artificial intelligence to detect digital alterations in photos and videos. Their aim was to pinpoint social-media influencers who offer beauty and fashion tips online without disclosing that much of their content has been manipulated.
Mr. Jacquet came to VivaTech in 2024, but this year, he was part of a much larger, 600-strong Canadian contingent – by far the largest national delegation and one that consisted of entrepreneurs, academics and non-profits.
The number of Canadian participants was also an indication of how seriously the people behind some of Canada's newest ventures have begun looking to Europe for customers.
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As U.S. President Donald Trump wreaks havoc on global trade and taunts Canadians with talk of annexation, Canadian companies have found fresh incentive to look beyond the United States. But that's no easy task given decades of trade dependence on Canada's southern neighbour and a historical lack of interest in seeking new markets an ocean away.
Canada's goods-and-services trade with the U.S. tops $1-trillion annually. That's roughly five-times larger than our trade with the European Union's 27 member countries. In services alone, where the tech sector dominates, trade with the U.S. totalled $227.6-billion in 2023, compared with $78.1-billion with the EU.
It's easy to understand why Canadian companies have largely shied away from the European market, where they have to grapple with different languages, shipping and logistics headaches, and varying regulations across a multitude of jurisdictions.
But necessity – not to mention a new breed of Canadian tech entrepreneur – have combined to open new opportunities much further afield. If Canadian representation at VivaTech and Germany's recent Hannover Messe trade show are any indication, the number of businesspeople heading to Europe has never been higher.
France and Europe 'are almost the market for us,' said Mr. Jacquet, who is 39. 'This wasn't just like, 'Oh, let's go to France and have fun.' It's, 'Let's go to France because it's the right market.''
The Globe and Mail followed Mr. Jacquet and two other Canadian entrepreneurs – Alex Qi and Emily Charry Tissier – over four days at VivaTech to get a sense of the opportunities and challenges they face in Europe.
For all three, attending VivaTech was almost compulsory.
The trade show has exploded in popularity since it was founded nine years ago, and it's now the largest annual tech gathering in Europe. This year's event attracted 14,000 entrepreneurs from around the world and a host of high-profile guests, including Nvidia Corp. chief executive Jensen Huang and French President Emmanuel Macron.
The 230,000-square-metre Porte de Versailles pulsed all week with thumping music and flashing lights. Robots were everywhere, alongside innovative gadgets such as an AI-powered electric motorcycle, shopping bags made from recycled tree leaves and a foot-mounted navigational system for the visually impaired.
Canada took centre stage as VivaTech's 2025 'country of the year.' Its giant bright-red pavilion – one of the floor's largest – offered up free coffee, along with a dozen or so booths where entrepreneurs could show off their wares.
VivaTech also hosted presentations from high-profile Canadians including Martin Kon, president of machine language learning specialists Cohere Inc., and Sasha Luccioni, a leading researcher on the environmental impact of AI.
Canada's country-of-the-year selection was made months before Mr. Trump's tariff squeeze – the selection is based largely on a country's tech development, with Japan, South Korea and India preceding Canada in the past three years.
But the timing was auspicious. 'That was an incredibly wise decision, much more than we thought,' said VivaTech co-founder Pierre Louette, chief executive of French media company Groupe Les Echos-Le Parisien.
Canada's star turn thrust technology to the forefront of the debate over economic sovereignty, he added. Suddenly everyone from Mr. Macron to Canada's new Minister of AI and Digital Innovation, Evan Solomon, was talking about the importance of increasing national computing capacity and building sovereign AI data centres.
'VivaTech is a perfect moment for Canada because it fits our political imperatives to broaden our trade ties, and it fits our technological imperatives to scale our champions,' Mr. Solomon said in an interview at the show.
Mr. Jacquet, Ms. Charry Tissier and Mr. Qi shared that ambition, and they welcomed the government's growing interest in tech. But their focus at VivaTech was more down to Earth: finding customers.
Mr. Qi's eyes lit up as he made his way along the trade show floor and jostled with throngs of fellow entrepreneurs. 'It's almost like a different world,' he said, one of very few people in the crowd wearing a suit and tie. 'There's really great energy.'
He'd come to VivaTech in a mad rush after a business trip to Asia; he didn't even bring brochures to hand out.
His six-year-old Waterloo, Ont.-based venture, Pontosense Inc., is a father-son affair. Mr. Qi's dad, Yihong Qi, was once a top engineer at Research In Motion Ltd. (now known as BlackBerry Ltd.) who's credited with changing the location of the antenna on a cellphone, from top to bottom, to address concerns about brain cancer caused by radio waves. He's also a serial innovator who has more than 650 patents to his name and half a dozen companies under his belt, including China's Shenzhen Sunway Communication Co. Ltd., which makes dozens of components for cellphones.
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Pontosense specializes in tiny sensors that act like super-sophisticated radar.
Initially, the Qis sold the sensors – which are powerful enough to monitor the heartbeat of a baby from across a room – to automakers to serve a variety of functions such as preventing theft, activating airbags and identifying the location of a child in a car.
But they soon expanded into elder care. Pontosense's wall-mounted sensors, which cost a couple of hundred dollars apiece, can track an elderly person's vital signs and transmit the information to relatives thousands of kilometres away via a subscription-based app.
Mr. Qi wasn't sure if the company, which has around 60 full-time employees, would fit in at VivaTech, since it's not really a startup. But when he received an invite from Scale AI, a Montreal-based non-profit organization that helped organize the Canadian delegation, he jumped at the chance.
It paid off. Roaming the convention floor, Mr. Qi met executives and heads of research from several major companies. He was so excited by the potential opportunities that he rushed back to his hotel to find someone to print up brochures.
Pontosense has a large presence in Ontario, and Mr. Qi is hoping to land some elder-care contracts in the U.S., too. But his main focus has been outside North America, in places such as Britain, Japan and Singapore, and he came to VivaTech looking to expand into France and across Europe. 'We're basically going country to country,' he said. 'I see Western Europe being locked down for us in the next year.'
At VivaTech, he found a receptive audience, particularly from telecom providers and insurers looking for new services to offer. Delivery companies were also interested in using the sensors to keep better track of their vehicles. 'There's a big push in Europe now toward AI, and startups, and these new frontier technologies,' he said.
But Mr. Qi faces some hurdles in Europe, including regulations and government policies that give precedence to national suppliers. Germany, for example, offers subsidies to automakers to source components from local businesses. The challenge, Mr. Qi said, 'is understanding how the local governments work and their incentives.'
Then there's the ever-changing nature of Mr. Trump's tariffs. Pontosense relies on dozens of factories in 10 countries in Asia, Europe and Mexico, and Mr. Qi has had to shift production with almost every tweak to Mr. Trump's levies to stay competitive in the U.S. Pontosense has an advantage in Europe because it can supply EU customers tariff-free from plants in Romania and Italy.
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Mr. Qi, 38, has had a couple of takeover offers, but he has no interest in selling the business. He wants to build the next Canadian tech giant in Waterloo. 'We do want to kind of bring that feeling back to the town,' he said. 'We want to build the next BlackBerry, right there.'
VivaTech proved to be well worth the trip (despite a few days of illness due to food poisoning). 'I think we scratched 10 per cent of what we could do, if I had only planned it better,' he said over coffee after the show ended.
Then he smiled, reached into his backpack and pulled out the flyers he rushed to get printed when he arrived. They were delivered to his hotel the day he was leaving.
The moment Donald Trump was elected U.S. President again last year, Emily Charry Tissier knew her startup had no future in the U.S.
She'd launched Whale Seeker in 2018 in Montreal with a team of marine biologists, data scientists and software developers. They came up with a system that can analyze reams of aerial photographs using AI to pinpoint the location of whales and other sea life at a rate that's 25 times faster than the human eye.
The software has a myriad of uses. It can help governments control fishing zones, offshore oil companies find the best locations for new drilling platforms and cruise-ship operators plot new routes, all without causing unnecessary harm to marine wildlife.
Ms. Charry Tissier had always planned to expand into the U.S., and she was on a Canadian trade mission to Boston in November, 2024, meeting prospective clients in the offshore wind sector, when the U.S. election results came in. 'We had lots of connections and were really invested in that as our growth strategy,' she said.
When it became clear Mr. Trump had won, 'we just saw that there was no way a foreign company was going to get a contract in the U.S.,' she said. 'All of his rhetoric was so nerve-wracking, especially for a woman running an AI company in the environment space.'
Mr. Trump's 'drill, baby, drill' rhetoric and hostility toward environmental protection left her feeling unwelcome.
She pulled out of the trade mission, gave up on the U.S., and focused her energy on Europe and South America.
Ms. Charry Tissier arrived in Paris well prepared for VivaTech. She set up a series of meetings, including participating in a roundtable event at the Chilean embassy. She was also invited to join a panel discussion on AI and the environment at VivaTech, where she spoke about the need for more, and better, ocean data analysis.
She's hoping those connections will help her with potential clients in Britain, and with government regulators in Germany and France. After VivaTech, she was headed to another conference in Paris, Seaenergy, which concentrated on offshore renewable power.
She'd been assigned time at a booth in the Canada pavilion during VivaTech but arrived too late from the United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice. So she explored some of the other booths and arranged more meetings.
Landing customers in Europe can be tricky for an outsider. 'What we're having trouble with is not being European,' she said as she sat on a stool in the pavilion dressed in a bright orange jacket and watching the constant flow of people.
The company's Quebec roots help somewhat in France, but European clients often want to stick with who they know. Cracking that bias, she said, 'takes so long. Even though we're being considered, there won't be anything coming to fruition for years.'
She's also grappling with how to persuade cost-conscious leaders why high-quality AI tools such as hers are a vital means of monitoring marine life. 'What we get asked a lot is, 'Why is it so expensive for you to label data?'' she said, referring to the process of identifying whales in aerial images.
Some companies offer less expensive AI-enabled data collection services, she said, but they don't have the expertise to make sense of it. Instead of identifying only whales, for example, these services throw up everything that's visible, without distinguishing between whales, boats, buoys, whitecaps and penguins.
'They did the thing that they were asked to do, but they didn't understand the use case, and they didn't understand the data they were working with, so the output wasn't usable,' said Ms. Charry Tissier. 'I know how to interpret those images, and I know what that looks like in real life.'
The issue speaks to a broader concern she has about AI and how it's used in areas such as conservation. 'You can have the best algorithms in the world,' she said, 'but if it's still derived from crappy training, it will never be good.'
Back at the Canada pavilion, Mr. Jacquet managed to score more time at the booth, and he crammed in as many presentations, meetings and chats as possible. By the third day, he was running on fumes. 'I'm barely alive. I'm on a fine line right now,' he said looking exhausted as he waited for yet another group to arrive.
During one demonstration, he drew a shocked response from representatives of Sephora, the global beauty retailer owned by France's LVMH Group that regularly partners with influencers as part of its marketing campaigns. Using Trusting Pixels' tech, he showed them a list of some of France's most popular influencers and indicated how much of their online posts had been altered. That's a potential violation of a French law that requires influencers to disclose any manipulations.
One top influencer, who has millions of followers and was well known to the Sephora reps, retouched 43 per cent of her content, Mr. Jacquet's analysis showed. Some of the others edited just 3 per cent.
He'd also audited the social-media accounts of France's top beauty brands and found that one, which he didn't name, manipulated 19 per cent of its material.
His conclusion for the Sephora delegation: 'The point is that not everyone values authenticity the same. So you can pick someone who has a lot of followers, but half their content might be retouched. Is that really who you want to work with?'
Mr. Jacquet said he launched his business after becoming frustrated by the amount of doctored photos he came across online. Then he saw that some countries – notably France, Norway, Germany and Britain – were cracking down on fake content. So he turned his talent for manipulating content for special effects into Trusting Pixels.
Getting European brands and retailers interested in his software hasn't been easy. Many have no idea that their material is being doctored, and as long as an influencer discloses any editing, no laws have been violated. Also, so far, just a couple of European countries have laws that target manipulation by influencers.
'A lot of brands' content is not created in-house – it's created by an agency or influencer,' Mr. Jacquet said. 'So, brands don't even know if their own content is retouched or labelled accordingly or not. Because the law doesn't say don't retouch. The law just says if you do, label it.'
He's met French regulators a couple of times to pitch his software, but they have yet to sign up. That's frustrating, he said, because it takes him no time to identify influencers who are breaking the law.
'We're seeing, literally, beauty tutorials with retouched faces – someone trying on makeup and their face is retouched,' he said. 'This leads to serious issues – mental health issues, body image issues – and it's just not fair for advertisers to profit off of people by showing them a complete misconception of what they can attain.'
By the time VivaTech ended, Mr. Jacquet had made more contacts than he did in 2024, with better leads. But he'll only know if it paid off once he closes some deals.
There's no doubt in his mind that Trusting Pixels' future lies in Europe. 'That's an unquestionable. It's, like, for sure.'