Ali Asaria
Founder
Transformer Lab
TechExit.io gives you access to the resources, relationships, and information from leaders who’ve done it before. That’s where so much of the value comes from.
Presenting The TechExit.io Experience
What is TechExit.io?
Canada’s Value Creation Conference.
Value creation is a discipline. An acquisition is just one outcome.
Build for value from year one, and the options multiply. The same company built to be worth buying can raise, acquire, or keep going.
TechExit.io is for tech founders who want to build real enterprise value and keep the power to choose what comes next.
Whether your strategy is to absorb competitors, secure capital on your own terms, or execute a premium exit, the discipline is the same.
Every Session At TechExit.io Maps To One Of Three Disciplines
Clean financials. Unit Economics. Defensible product. Team depth.
The foundational work that makes a company real before anyone makes an offer. At TechExit.io, we sharpen all four whether you’re early, growing, or scaling.
Valuation drivers. Deal terms. Diligence realities.
Why two similar companies get very different valuations. AQ is a competency. Canadian founders have been building it at TechExit.io since 2017.
Relationships with operators, capital partners, and acquirers.
Optionality isn’t indecision. It’s leverage. TechExit.io is for founders who plan the moves that maximize value, not the deals accepted when options run out.
2026 CONFERENCE CHAIR
Ali Asaria
Ali Asaria has built across three eras of software. He shipped BrickBreaker to fifteen million BlackBerrys when distribution was the moat. He scaled Well.ca into one of Canada’s largest e-commerce companies when the playbook was operational. He founded Tulip and spent a decade selling mobile commerce into the enterprise alongside the rise of Shopify and modern retail.
Now he is co-founder of Transformer Lab, the open-source platform letting teams train, fine-tune, and own their models instead of renting intelligence from someone else.
Ali’s view is direct. The companies that compound value in this cycle will build AI, not just consume it. He is chairing TechExit.io Toronto because that question is the one founders cannot afford to get wrong.
Get The Latest From The Experts
I knew all my competitors on a first name basis… we’d compete during the day and grab a beer at night.
JD Saint-Martin
Managing Partner, Boreal Ventures; Founder, Chronogolf (acquired by Lightspeed) & Former President, Lightspeed
Frequently Asked Questions
TechExit.io Toronto 2026 is on October 15, 2026 at the MaRS Discovery District. The event runs as a one-day conference with keynotes, practitioner panels, case studies, and operator sessions. MaRS is at 101 College Street, in the heart of the Toronto Discovery District. Doors open early; the program runs through afternoon networking.
Toronto is Canada’s largest concentration of capital and talent. The city has produced $12B+ in tech exits including Cohere (US$5.5B), 1Password (US$6.8B), Wealthsimple (~C$5B), Ada (US$1.2B), and Tenstorrent (US$693M raised). Institutional capital sits on-site: CPPIB, OTPP, OMERS, Brookfield. Big Five banks and the TSX are minutes from MaRS. 48% of Toronto tech workers were born outside Canada.
TechExit.io Toronto attendees are growth-stage tech founders ($1M to $50M+ ARR), operators from VP to C-suite at scaled Canadian tech companies, capital partners from PE, growth equity, and corporate development teams, plus acquirers active in Canadian tech M&A. Past audiences have included founders and operators from Cohere, 1Password, Wealthsimple, Ada, Shopify, Faire, and Clio.
Toronto runs Canada’s deepest M&A market. Strategic buyers, PE firms, and corporate development teams operate locally, which compresses deal cycles and increases competitive tension on the right assets. The city is also Canada’s AI epicentre (Vector Institute, Cohere HQ, the AI Index Toronto cluster). Toronto deals skew larger than national averages and attract more US and international acquirer interest.
Yes. TechExit.io Toronto draws PE and growth equity firms, corporate development teams from US and Canadian strategic acquirers, institutional capital from CPPIB, OTPP, OMERS, Brookfield, and venture firms with M&A practices. The buy-side share of Toronto’s audience runs higher than other TechExit.io cities. Founders attend to meet capital partners; capital partners attend to source proprietary deal flow.
Registration for TechExit.io Toronto 2026 is at techexit.io/toronto. Tickets cover the full one-day program at MaRS, networking sessions, and access to the speaker hall. Group rates apply for teams of three or more.
TechExit.io Toronto is the right fit for growth-stage Canadian tech founders 12 months to 5+ years from a capital event, plus the operators, capital partners, and acquirers who work with them. It is not the right fit for pre-revenue founders, accelerator-stage operators, or product-tech audiences (TECHSPO, Toronto Tech Week, and Elevate cover those).
Hear from Our TechExit.io Alumni
The value at TechExit.io is hearing on the ground stories from founders who have sold their companies and being surrounded by a network of people who know the upsides and downsides of selling a company.
What I like about this event is the experience of sharing behind-the-scene stories that you wouldn’t be able to Google or read in the news. People are sharing their stories very authentically and transparently.
What TechExit.io does so well is offer a smorgasbord of insights for people looking to build a valuable business.
Hearing the war stories, the struggles, the pain, and the wins from fellow entrepreneurs is incredibly valuable. That’s what makes places like TechExit.io so powerful. You get real collective wisdom
TechExit.io is the only conference in Canada that brings buyers and sellers together for candid conversations about the good, the bad, and the ugly of acquisitions
TechExit NOW
Each week: one Canadian tech founder on how they built value. Named companies. Real decisions. Value creation, operational rigor, and the stuff you can’t Google about exits.
Built To Choose: How Founders Create Real Optionality
JD Saint-Martin
Managing Partner, Boreal Ventures; Founder, Chronogolf (acquired by Lightspeed) & Former President, Lightspeed
Optionality doesn’t show up when a buyer calls. It’s built much earlier through how a company is financed, how it grows and the decisions made long before any transaction is on the table.
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What Buyers Actually Care About (& What Founders Often Miss)
Paige Addesi (Explora Partners), Randeep Janjua (BDC Capital), David Thomas (Terra Dygital), & Zargar (Miller Thomson LLP)
If you're building toward an exit, it’s easy to focus on growth, revenue, and headline numbers. But when buyers step in, they’re not just evaluating what you’ve built, they’re evaluating risk, durability and what could go wrong after they take over.
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Leading At Scale: How Great Tech CEOs Navigate Growth, Pressure, & Global Competition
Mark Longo (Osler), Jack Newton (Clio) & Jeff Shiner (1Password)
There’s a point in every company’s growth where the job fundamentally changes. At TechExit.io, moderator Mark Longo (Osler) sat down with Jack Newton (Clio) and Jeff Shiner (1Password) to talk about what it really looks like to lead through that transition, from early traction to global scale.
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