Avacam at the Canada Start Up Program 2026: a week between Toronto and Montréal

The Canada Start Up Program 2026, the acceleration program promoted by ICE – Italian Trade Agency and Italy's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, has come to a close. Avacam was selected among the 10 participating Italian companies, 5 startups and 5 SMEs, and spent a week in Canada across two of North America's most active ecosystems for tech companies: DMZ in Toronto and Centech in Montréal. The goal was to understand how to bring the remote geotechnical monitoring we developed in Italy to a market that faces challenges very similar to ours, on a much larger scale.

How the program worked

The program started over the summer with an online track on the Ontario and Québec ecosystems, the legal side of entering the Canadian market and pitch preparation.

From September 21 to 23 Avacam was in Toronto, hosted by DMZ, the Toronto Metropolitan University accelerator. The Toronto leg wrapped up at Elevate Festival. On September 24 and 25 the program continued in Montréal at Centech, a university incubator ranked among the world's top 10 by UBI Global.

In both cities the program included coaching sessions with DMZ and Centech mentors and meetings with the innovation ecosystem: companies, investors and research centres.

Why Canada for geotechnical monitoring

Canada lives with unstable slopes, clay landslides along Québec's river valleys, and road and rail infrastructure crossing vast territories. Many sites take hours of travel to reach and are hard to inspect for much of the winter.

These are the conditions Avacam built its technology for:

• GEO devices, designed and built in Avacam's labs and adapted to each site;
• GEO Starlink and GEO Solar setups, for sites with no power grid or mobile coverage;
• the platform that turns images into ground displacement time series, with data validated by licensed geologists.

What we're bringing home

Avacam left with three questions: how operators of such vast territories and infrastructure actually work, what the concrete steps are to enter the North American market, and who to start field pilot projects with.

The first answer is about the value of remote data. Where every inspection means a trip, data that keeps arriving without sending anyone out is often the only way to know what's happening on a slope.

The second is about method. The advice we heard at both DMZ and Centech was to start from one specific site and one specific problem, not from a generic pitch. North America isn't a single market but a patchwork of provinces, agencies and operators with different rules and priorities.

The third question is still open, and it's the work of the coming weeks: following up on the conversations started in Toronto and Montréal to identify our first pilot projects.

Thank you

We thank ICE – Italian Trade Agency and Italy's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation for selecting us, DMZ and Centech for hosting us and for the support of their mentors, and the other Italian companies we shared the program with.

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