Innovation

On November 1, 1959, three minutes into a game at Madison Square Garden, a shot by New York Ranger forward Andy Bathgate broke Jacques Plante’s nose. The Montreal Canadiens’ goalie left the ice, received several stitches, and returned wearing a fiberglass mask he had moulded himself. Montreal won 3–1 and went on an 18-game unbeaten streak. From then on, Plante refused to play without one. Within a decade, every goalie in the league had followed his lead. Plante was not trying to disrupt anything. He had simply decided that stopping a frozen puck with his face was a problem worth solving—and that impulse, identify a problem, build a solution, let the results speak for themselves, has been a through-line in Canadian sport ever since.

A sector with real economic weight

The global sport tech market was valued at roughly US$19 billion in 2024 and growing about 20% annually. Canada has a US$450-million share, a little more than 3%, and an annual growth rate of nearly 19% ranking among the fastest of any national market. Yet, on the funding side, Canada is treating sport and sport technology as a discretionary expense. As Canadian Olympic Committee CEO David Shoemaker notes in a recent episode of Disruptors, peer countries are “out‑investing [Canada] at the federal level, five, six, 10 times.” Germany alone is putting “about a billion dollars a year into sport.”

What the ecosystem has produced

Toronto Metropolitan University’s Future of Sport Lab, launched with Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment (MLSE) in 2015 as one of North America’s first sport tech incubators, has helped launch companies that have collectively raised more than $100 million.

That includes Montreal’s Sportlogiq, co-founded by former Olympic figure skater Craig Buntin, which has developed computer vision technology now trusted by almost every NHL team. And Rapsodo and 3Motion AI, which are putting biomechanical coaching tools into the hands of club-level athletes and local coaches. Tools that are now accessible through a portable device or a smartphone app.

The pattern that needs to be broken

The issue with Canada’s sport tech story has never been what gets built. But what happens after it does. Sportlogiq was acquired by U.S.-based Teamworks in January 2026. Halifax-founded Kinduct, whose athlete‑management platform was used by more than 550 teams and organizations worldwide, was bought by Silicon Valley’s mCube in 2020, in what its founder called the largest sport tech exit in Canadian history.

The cycle is familiar: public research dollars seed the company, which proves its technology at global scale, before getting snapped up by foreign owners that provide the commercial infrastructure that Canada lacks. The same pattern is emerging in human capital. On Disruptors, Jennifer Heil, Canada’s chef de mission for Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics and founder of a performance‑tech startup, describes “a moment of total brain drain” in high‑performance sport, with top scientists and nutritionists shifting their time to the United States because “we can’t afford them right now.”

Where the stakes are highest

Three-quarters of Canada’s medallists at Milano Cortina were 30 or older. The bench strength is thinning, with Speed Skating Canada’s World Cup roster dropping from 24 to 16. Close to half of Canadian families report that organized sport is too expensive, and athletes at the national level pay as much as $25,000 out of pocket to represent their country.

Sport technology can address the problem directly. RBC Training Ground identified gymnast Marion Thénault at 17 with no skiing background; within five years she had won Olympic bronze. AI-assisted talent identification could replicate that kind of discovery at scale, reaching communities that traditional scouting never will.

Shoemaker imagines that scaled through AI: “Show us how you jump, how you run, how you throw—and we’ll tell you what sport you should sign up for at your local club.” Heil’s own startup, Revel, is built on the idea that AI can “democratize access” to elite coaching knowledge once reserved for Olympians.

And keeping the companies that build those tools Canadian-owned means keeping the returns: the jobs, the intellectual property, the platform revenue, stay here as well.

What it comes down to

The sector has the companies and the research infrastructure. It lacks the domestic capital to keep them scaling at home, as well as a national strategy that pairs the products with the young athletes that need them.

That gap is visible in the public system itself: national sport organizations have not seen a core‑funding increase since 2005, and Shoemaker notes that some athletes now face team fees of as much as $30,000. A national strategy for sport tech could treat data, infrastructure and talent identification as long‑term capital investment.