Written by Al Vigier, founder and CEO of Caseway, an AI company that develops products with large enterprises and shares the resulting revenue.
Since we announced on Sept. 22 that Caseway was pulling out of Canada’s technology accelerator in Silicon Valley, other Vancouver founders have kept asking me the same question. Where do you go instead?
Here’s the short version for anyone weighing their own expansion. Pick the partner before you pick the market. A company abroad that needs what you make, and has a customer in mind, will tell you more about an opportunity than any forecast. Get your procurement paperwork done before a tender appears, because by then it’s too late. And keep using the trade commissioners you already pay for, whatever program you’re in or out of.
That’s what we did. Here’s how it played out.
Caseway is a 15-person AI company on West Hastings. We make software that fills in forms from an organization’s own documents and checks the result against the rules, and a data layer that pulls information from many sources into a record someone can defend when it’s questioned. Courts use it through Journal Technologies. More than 100 law firms use it inside MyCase, where it handles over 7,000 court forms. On the defence side we’re building for TKMS, the German submarine builder. The problem is the same everywhere: people in regulated work retyping information they already hold, and needing the software to run where they control the data.
That last point is why our defence customers questioned the American trip. Our pitch to them is that the software runs on their hardware, under their law, with nothing leaving the building. A Canadian company building a U.S. business ends up with American staff, American servers and American legal exposure, and buyers asked how we’d square that. Then they asked a plainer question: why was a Canadian defence supplier spending a week in San Francisco on a Global Affairs program while the administration there was putting tariffs on Canada and leaning on NATO. I didn’t have a good answer.
The Sept. 8 directive settled it. We hold a U.S. federal supplier registration and a NATO supplier code, both of which took real work to get. The directive tells American agencies to take Canadian-made products off the schedules they buy through. The registrations are still valid. The buyers they were built to reach can now be told not to use us. We’ve kept the registrations, and we’ve kept our two American customers, both legal technology companies. What stopped is new business development in the U.S.
So, Taiwan. I should be precise about what “growth” means there, because it isn’t revenue yet. Our revenue today comes from the courts and law firms. Taiwan is where the signed agreements and the pilots we’re scoping are. In July we announced work with MiTAC Advance Technology on counter-drone and maritime decision support. We’ve since added partnerships with Phison Electronics, Kunway Technology and Coretronic Intelligent Robotics.
Kunway builds drones in Chiayi. We met them in July. In September their CEO and his team sat down with me and our chief business officer and told us exactly what they need: software that picks out people, vehicles and boats, and lets one operator fly ten aircraft at once. That’s a specification and a customer in one meeting. We’ve signed a non-disclosure agreement and are finalizing a memorandum of understanding: a paid pilot first, their hardware supplied in kind, then a per-unit licence and a revenue share. No trade show has ever given us that.
The fit is practical. They build hardware. We build software for customers who need to keep control of sensitive data. Together we can sell something neither of us could deliver alone, and they reach buyers we’d never find from Vancouver. Phison is opening a Vancouver office, and we’re working on being its software partner for Canadian government and defence customers when it does.
It isn’t easy. Training software to tell a person from a car from a boat takes footage, and the best footage is in Ukraine. We’re registered on Brave1, Ukraine’s defence-technology platform, and have applied to test there. Access to its data is security-screened, the test sample and getting it there are our cost, and the testing happens on site. A small company has to decide whether to send someone. We’ve decided to. The other cost is simpler: Taipei is 15 hours ahead and 12 hours away, and our chief business officer’s working day runs on both clocks.
Taiwan, for its part, is working on this. In May its Drone Diplomacy Task Force signed a letter of intent with the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International, and a Taiwanese industry alliance signed agreements with the Michigan Drone Association and the North Dakota Trade Office. When I say B.C. should pursue relationships that specific, I mean three things. Companies here should go find the counterpart that needs what they make. Trade and Invest BC’s Taipei office and the Ministry of Jobs and Economic Growth, which already know the firms on both sides, should make introductions by product and by buyer rather than by delegation. And B.C.’s defence and marine industry groups should be the ones signing with that Taiwanese alliance, the way Michigan did.
Vancouver has the raw material: a large Taiwanese community, nonstop flights to Taipei, research partners at UBC and SFU. And the people at Canada’s trade office in Taipei answer their email. For a small company trying to get something done overseas, that counts.
Europe is the other priority. Canada’s agreement on SAFE, the EU’s €150-billion defence financing program, gives Canadian suppliers a way into European defence procurement. Companies still have to qualify and win the work. TKMS gave us our first reason to learn those rules. The agreement gives us a second.
Leaving one program doesn’t mean giving up the Trade Commissioner Service. The same people run the Taipei office and the posts across Europe, and we intend to keep working with them.
There are costs. Taiwan and Europe are farther away and relationships take time. But we have partners with names, a specification in hand and a buyer in mind. That’s more than the San Francisco week would have left us with.
Vancouver has spent years calling itself Canada’s gateway to Asia. From our office on West Hastings, that idea now has names attached: partners, products and customers. That’s where we’re putting our time.
