2026 Agenda

Today’s founders face a dramatically different funding and transaction environment than they did just a few years ago. Strategic buyers, private equity firms, venture investors, and lenders are evaluating opportunities through different lenses, often rewarding different characteristics within a business. This discussion explores what makes companies attractive to investors and acquirers, how expectations have evolved, and what founders should focus on if they want to create future strategic optionality.

Session Focus:

• What makes a company financeable today
• What strategic buyers value
• What financial buyers value
• Building companies that attract capital

CoolIT Systems engineered the liquid cooling backbone powering some of the world’s most demanding AI and high-performance computing infrastructure, culminating in one of Alberta’s most significant technology exits. But the final valuation is only the last chapter of a much longer story.

This fireside chat explores the strategic decisions, turning points, and moments of resilience that shaped CoolIT’s journey over more than a decade. From building for a market that had yet to emerge, to navigating changing investors, protecting critical intellectual property, and resisting opportunities to exit too early, this is a conversation about what it truly takes to build enduring enterprise value.

Hear directly from the leaders who helped guide the company through its evolution as they discuss three defining themes:

• Protecting the Competitive Advantage – Why defending intellectual property through lengthy and costly litigation became a defining strategic investment.
• Financing Through Multiple Chapters – How successive investors, strategic partners, and capital providers each played distinct roles in helping the company survive, scale, and ultimately achieve an extraordinary outcome.
• Knowing When to Hold—and When to Exit – The decisions, discipline, and market timing that transformed years of patient execution into one of Canada’s landmark technology exits.

Selling a technology company isn’t a single event—it’s the outcome of years of deliberate decisions. Drawing from real-world software acquisitions, Narbe Alexandrian, Founder & CEO of Define Capital, shares the practical lessons that separate smooth, value-maximizing exits from difficult transactions. Beyond preparing for a sale, this keynote explores how founders can create enterprise value through strong operational architecture, disciplined governance, and the strategic decisions that make companies attractive to both financial and strategic buyers long before they ever go to market. Rather than treating exit readiness as a checklist completed just before a transaction, this keynote demonstrates how operational architecture, disciplined governance, and thoughtful value creation become competitive advantages years before founders ever enter a sale process.

Session Focus:

• The operational architecture that makes a company valuable years before a sale process starts
• How disciplined governance becomes a competitive advantage, not just a diligence checkbox
• Real lessons from the trenches: what separates smooth exits from difficult ones
• Building enterprise value deliberately, long before you’re talking to buyers

Acquisitions are no longer reserved for large corporations. Search funds, founder-led rollups, and private-equity-backed platforms are increasingly using M&A to buy capability, customers, or market position rather than build it organically. This session brings together the investor and advisor perspectives on how those deals actually get done — how they’re financed, structured, and closed. Knowing when and how to transact takes financial discipline, a clear read on what capital providers reward, and the legal and structural groundwork that makes a deal survivable.  

Session Focus: 

• The buy-vs-build calculus: when search funds and PE-backed platforms reach for M&A instead of building  

• What investors and advisors look for before they’ll back or paper a deal  

• Building deal-readiness before you’re ever at the table  

• How acquisitions get financed and structured — and the terms that make or break them