Backing Canadian Small Businesses Grant Program

The Canada Regional Artificial Intelligence Initiative (RAII) is a grant from Prairies Economic Development Canada that funds AI technology commercialization and adoption projects in the Prairie provinces. Backed by $33.8 million over five years (2024–2029), the program supports businesses bringing new AI solutions to market and organizations helping SMEs adopt AI across sectors including agriculture, clean technology, healthcare, and advanced manufacturing. Eligible applicants include incorporated for-profit businesses operating at least two years in the Prairies and not-for-profit organizations such as accelerators, post-secondary institutions, and Indigenous organizations. Funding ranges from $250,000 to $5,000,000 per project, covering up to 50% of eligible costs for for-profit applicants, with a 6-year repayment requirement. Not-for-profit applicants may receive non-repayable contributions.

The Canada CIFAR AI Chairs program, a pillar of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy, provides long-term, dedicated research funding to attract and retain world-leading AI researchers at Canada's three national AI institutes (Amii in Edmonton, Mila in Montreal, and the Vector Institute in Toronto) and affiliated universities. Each Chair receives multi-year funding to build a research program, recruit and train students and postdocs, and advance foundational and applied AI. In May 2026 the Government of Canada and CIFAR announced 42 new and renewed Chairs backed by a CAD $24 million investment, bringing the program to 143 Chairs nationwide.

Scale AI is Canada's AI-Powered Supply Chains global innovation cluster, based in Montreal and funded through Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, and its Projects stream is deliberately positioned at the opposite end of the maturity curve from a research grant. Scale AI funds AI products and solutions that are past the prototype stage and already have at least one real customer or industry partner, reimbursing up to 40 percent of eligible project costs against a minimum total project value of CAD 1,000,000. The programme states explicitly that it prioritises AI commercialisation and adoption initiatives with deliverables producing measurable business impact, and does not fund pure research or conceptual studies - a screening criterion that disqualifies a large share of applicants before technical review. The practical consequence is that the application is a business case first and a technical proposal second: a defensible statement of the deployment's economic effect on the customer, backed by a committed industry partner and a credible cost-share, carries more weight than model novelty. The structure suits consortia rather than single companies, since the project floor and the cost-share requirement together mean an applicant is typically assembling a technology provider and an adopting enterprise into one submission. Applications run on a rolling basis rather than against fixed calls, so the binding timeline is usually the industry partner's own procurement cycle rather than a Scale AI deadline.