GovAI

The company's framing of the problem is that the information exists and is unusable: businesses waste hundreds of hours pulling together what they need from across federal, provincial and municipal jurisdictions, and fall back on search engines or word of mouth instead of authoritative sources. GovAI's answer is a generative-AI platform trained on government material specifically, so that a business owner can ask what applies to them — regulations, permits, funding opportunities, support services — and get an answer sourced from the right jurisdiction. Its stated mission is to empower small and medium-sized businesses by simplifying their interactions with government at all levels, and the examples on its own pages are ordinary main-street ones: a shop in Elora, an artisan bakery in Guelph. Alex Millar is co-founder and chief technology officer. He previously founded Bonfire, the Kitchener–Waterloo public-sector procurement platform that went through Y Combinator and was acquired in 2019 — which is roughly a decade spent on the other end of the same relationship, selling software into government rather than helping businesses navigate it.