Staircase Ventures: Q3 2026 Highlights

We’ve had a busy Q3 at Staircase Ventures and wanted to share some of our favourite milestones, highlights and wins from the team and portfolio:

Q3 2026 Highlights:

KINO Investment: We proudly announced our investment in KINO, where we led their latest $4 million financing round. KINO gives studios, production companies, and their partners one platform to review, comment, approve, protect, and share premium content from set to screen, and we’re excited to partner with Daril, David, and Brit as they build their incredible team and product.

Biossil Series C Financing Round: OpenAI led a $153M USD Series C financing round of Biossil at a $1 billion USD valuation. This funding will help to accelerate Biossil’s mission to bring life-altering drugs to market at a fraction of the cost, in a fraction of the time to help patients battling sickle cell disease, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, glioblastoma, breast cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease.

Ultimarii Series A Financing Round: We invested in Ultimarii’s $13M+ Series A financing round to help expand its regulatory intelligence platform across Canada and the United States following our initial Seed investment last year. Our conviction in the Ultimarii team, product and market opportunity has grown tremendously since then and has been validated by their strong commercial traction with leading North American energy, infrastructure, government and utility customers.

Canada Investment Summit Panel: Janet spoke on the main stage at the historic Canada Investment Summit about three compelling factors driving the Canadian tech ecosystem: talent, global outlook from day one, and cost-effectiveness on a panel with Jordan Jacobs of Radical Ventures, Aiden Gomez from Cohere, and Christian Weedbrook from Xanadu. She also highlighted Venture Capital Catalyst Initiative (VCCI) funds, which make it more attractive for foreign investors to invest in Canadian fund-of-funds as we continue to champion and help build the Canadian technology ecosystem.

Banting AI has secured a CAN Health Network supported collaboration with the Sunnybrook Research Institute to bring AI into clinical trial startup and research administration. The collaboration will help research teams turn complex study protocols into structured, actionable workflows, reducing manual work, improving consistency, and enabling faster, more scalable clinical research operations.

DBGorilla Cloud & MySQL Launch: DBGorilla launched DBGorilla Cloud, an agentic database operator that can prevent and fix database issues for organizations of all sizes. DBGorilla also supports Postgres and MySQL on Google Cloud, including Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, Cloud SQL for MySQL, AlloyDB, and self-managed Postgres or MySQL on Compute Engine.

Sibli’s improved product and positioning are driving its expansion with leading global investment firms as well as partnerships with key global data & analytics providers.

Mave launched its first exclusive level board partnership with the Greater Vancouver Board of Realtors (GVR) and became the official AI educational partner of the Ontario Real Estate Association (OREA)

SiftMed has built out its leadership team with the recent additions of CTO Margaret Leibovic, CAIO Amir Tavafi, VP Product Nitla Cooke and US Insurance GM Rob Forsythe.