TORONTO — “Canadian companies don’t even call us.”

That’s what Cohere president and COO Martin Kon said at an Empire Club event in Toronto on Thursday, explaining why almost all the Canadian generative AI firm’s business comes from outside its home country.

The executive cited the telecom sector. Toronto-headquartered Cohere has received interest in its technology from international giants like Deutsche Telekom, SK Telecom, Verizon and Vodafone. But the Canadian carriers haven’t called, Kon said. 

Governments and major corporate players in countries like Germany and France have gotten behind national champions Aleph Alpha and Mistral AI, respectively, according to Kon. He called for the private and public sectors here to adopt Canadian tech.

Cohere has offices in Toronto and San Francisco, and tags both cities in its press releases. “That’s not for Americans; they do not care,” Kon said at the event, where The Logic was a media partner. “It’s for Canadians, because that makes [them] take us more seriously.” North of the border, Silicon Valley’s validation counts for a lot. “That is so sad,” Kon said. (HR software scale-up Workbrain did the same thing for the opposite reason two decades ago).

Mara Lederman, co-founder and COO of Signal 1, noted that the U.S. spends a lot more per capita on health-care technology. The Toronto-based startup makes AI tools for patient monitoring. “It is definitely easier to sell this and market it in the U.S.,” she said, citing Canada’s greater risk aversion and lower financial incentives to improve the quality of service.