Hi CEOs,

Some of Toronto's most beloved neighbourhood businesses technically belong to an earlier version of the city.

For generations, small shops were woven into the residential neighbourhoods around them: the corner store where you picked up milk, the local tailor, a café or the small plaza serving the people who lived nearby. Many of those places survive today, but zoning rules introduced in the middle of the last century made it increasingly difficult for new ones to take their place. As older businesses closed, neighbourhood retail gradually disappeared with them. Between 1989 and 2019, Toronto lost more than a third of the retail and service establishments operating within its neighbourhoods.

Last fall, City Council decided to start bringing some of that neighbourhood life back, approving changes that make it easier for small shops, cafés and services to operate closer to where people live. The goal is bigger than finding somewhere nearby to buy a coffee. Toronto wants more complete neighbourhoods: places where people can walk to the things they need, where independent businesses can thrive and where housing, employment, shops and gathering places coexist rather than being carefully zoned away from one another.

I thought about that as we put together this week's Field Notes, because the same relationship between work and neighbourhood is visible across Toronto's innovation economy. Our technology companies aren't concentrated in one district. They're spread across the city, and as ambitious companies grow, they become anchors in the places around them. Employees support the café downstairs and the restaurant around the corner. Customers and investors come into the neighbourhood for meetings. People want to live nearby. And the quality of the neighbourhood, in turn, becomes part of what helps a company attract and keep great people.

So this week, I've asked Skaidra Puodziunas, CCI's Senior Director of Policy & Advocacy — and a lifelong Torontonian — to be our tour guide. She's using five clusters of CCI members as our guide to Toronto: from Geary Avenue's old industrial strip to the towers around Bay Street, Bloor and Yorkville, the new neighbourhood taking shape around Front and Spadina, and the employment lands surrounding Pearson. If business brings you to one of them, here are a few reasons to stick around after the meeting. Also in this dispatch, you'll meet two of our fintech members from Toronto and find our favourite places in Toronto to meet an investor or toast to a deal.

Happy reading,

Patrick

Patrick Searle is CEO of the Council of Canadian Innovators, a national member-based organization reshaping how governments across Canada think about innovation policy and supporting homegrown scale-ups to drive prosperity. If you are interested in learning more about the Council or joining our cause, get in touch.

ON THE GROUND

I was born and raised in Toronto, which means I’m allowed to say two things about this city with equal conviction: Toronto can be frustrating, and there is nowhere else quite like it. Here are five neighbourhoods that are home to some of Toronto’s most ambitious companies, each choosing to build globally successful businesses from a different corner of the 416.

Geary Avenue

Running alongside the railway tracks east of Dufferin, Geary Avenue was built around warehouses, auto shops and light industry, and still retains much of that character. Today those businesses share the strip with recording studios, restaurants and breweries, alongside Able Innovations, which is building robotic patient-transfer technology here. If you’re visiting Able, stick around: Dark Horse Coffee just moved to a bright new spot and Mister Boiga is one of Toronto’s hottest burger spots this summer.

Front & Spadina

The railway and warehouse lands around Front and Spadina have become one of Toronto’s newest pieces of downtown, anchored by The Well, where offices rise above a three-level indoor-outdoor retail promenade covered by a huge glass canopy. Financeit, Security Compass and PointClickCare are among the technology companies nearby. If you’re meeting in the neighbourhood, leave time to explore The Well and its Wellington Market food hall, sampling some of Toronto’s best restaurants from across the city.

Bay Street

Around Bay Street, Think Research, Propel Holdings and GreenShield sit among the banks, investors, lawyers and customers that have made the Financial District Canada’s business centre. The local trick is learning the PATH, Toronto’s underground network connecting Union Station, subway stops and many of the surrounding office towers. Once you’ve figured it out, you can shuffle between meetings without going outside — particularly useful when Toronto is delivering its finest February weather.

Bloor – Yorkville

Head north to Bloor and Yonge and you’ll find MedMe, BorderPass, Klick Health and Environics, all within reach of the University of Toronto, Queen’s Park, Yorkville and some of the city’s major cultural institutions. If you have an hour between meetings, cross Bloor to the recently renovated Gardiner Museum, an intimate ceramics museum that’s manageable between appointments and a welcome change from staring at another screen.

Around YYZ

The employment lands around Pearson Airport are home to Baylis Medical Technologies, PointClickCare, Viral Nation, Vive Crop Protection and Tier1OSS, a reminder that plenty of Toronto technology gets built well beyond the downtown skyline. If your day has you moving between YYZ and the core, consider the Union Pearson Express: it gets you between Pearson and Union in about half an hour and lets you avoid rolling the dice on traffic along the 427 and Gardiner.

Great companies attract great talent, and great talent spills out into the cafés, patios and restaurants around their headquarters, bringing energy and vibrancy to the neighbourhoods where they choose to scale. Want to find Toronto’s next innovation hub? It might already be taking shape next door.

Skaidra Puodziunas is the Senior Director of Policy & Advocacy at the Council of Canadian Innovators. She can be reached at spuodziunas@canadianinnovators.org and on LinkedIn.

BUILT HERE

Float Financial

Canadian businesses often rely on disconnected tools to manage corporate cards, expenses, payments and cash flow. Toronto-based Float Financial brings those functions together in a single platform designed specifically for Canadian companies.

Led by Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Rob Khazzam, Float provides corporate cards in Canadian and U.S. dollars, automated expense management, bill payments, business accounts, working capital and cross-border payments. Its real-time tracking and spending controls help finance teams reduce manual work while giving companies greater visibility over their finances. CCI also uses Float to manage aspects of our own financial operations.

In June, Float announced a C$85-million Series C financing round led by Inovia Capital. Since its previous financing round, the company has doubled its active customer base to more than 7,500 Canadian businesses and increased revenue by more than 120 per cent. Float plans to use the new capital to expand across Western Canada and Quebec, hire across several teams and advance Float Intelligence, its proprietary artificial intelligence layer for automating financial workflows.

Learn more about Float Financial and explore other Toronto-based companies in the CCI Scale-Up Directory.

ONE TO WATCH

Andrew Lo, President & CEO of Embark

Andrew Lo has built his career at the intersection of financial technology, software and digital customer experience. At Toronto-based Embark, he is applying that experience to help more Canadian families plan and save for their children’s post-secondary education.

Embark’s primary tool is the Registered Education Savings Plan (RESP), which allows families to access government grants while saving for education. Recognizing that traditional RESPs can be complex and administratively demanding, Lo has helped Embark build a digital platform that allows families to open an account online, automate contributions and identify the grants available to them.

Embark is owned by the Embark Student Foundation, which directs funding toward scholarships and programs that improve access to post-secondary education. The company is also working to modernize the RESP system and make education savings more accessible to the many eligible Canadian families that do not currently participate.

Learn more about Andrew and other Toronto-based innovators through CCI’s CEO Directory

SEEN & HEARD

On July 14, CCI hosted the 2026 Innovation Governance Summit in Toronto, bringing together more than 130 business leaders and corporate directors for a full day of panel discussions, sector updates and interactive exercises. The summit explored how boards can help Canadian companies navigate technological change, economic uncertainty and increasingly complex business risks. The event was hosted in partnership with Deloitte, CPA Ontario and Artemis Canada. Read more here.

THE CCI DIRECTORY

Here are a few Toronto spots worth knowing for your next visit, from coffee meetings and board dinners to places to work or unwind.

Where to Take an Investor for Coffee

Downtown, Dineen Coffee has various locations downtown now, but we like the 200 King Street West location with its big patio atop St. Andrew's Station. Nearby, the blueberry lavender loaf at Maman inside First Canadian Place is a sweet treat worth devouring on the south facing outdoor terrace. 11:59 Bar:Café on Temperance Street is another option, while the lobby of the Ace Hotel Toronto provides a comfortable setting farther west.

Where to Host a Board Dinner

For a special occasion, the private rooms at REIGN inside the Fairmont Royal York, Mott 32 at the Shangri-La Toronto, Black+Blue on King Street West and Hy’s Steakhouse on Richmond Street West, all will leave a memorable impression. In recent years, the restaurant row of Harbord Street has been home to the hardest-to-get reservations in the city. Plan ahead to snag a seat at Dreyfus and Maven, or snag a patio spot at RASA to eat their famous chop salad as cyclists pass by.

Where to Work Between Meetings

The new Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus atop Queen's Park Station and across from MaRS is part of the University of Toronto, so there's no public wifi, but if you're looking for a new space with easy to grab seating, this will be your spot. We also like the main floor of the Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel for its open workspaces and soundproof booths that can be used for private telephone or video calls.

Where to Gather After the Event

Head to the roof. Aera, 38 storeys above The Well pairs cocktails and dinner with some of the best views in the city, while its warm-weather Open Aera rooftop sits one floor higher. A few blocks away, Evangeline, the Ace Hotel’s all-season rooftop lounge, is a good place to keep the conversation going over cocktails and small plates. Further north, the Writers Room Bar atop the Park Hyatt brings a little Toronto history to the mix. Long a gathering place for writers, journalists and TIFF crowds, it pairs cocktails with sweeping views south over Queen’s Park and the downtown skyline. And if you’d rather stay closer to Union Station, In Good Spirits at CIBC Square has a tucked-away rooftop patio overlooking Bay Street — particularly handy if someone in the group has a train to catch.

Where to Stay

The Drake Hotel on West Queen West will always be a special spot to us at CCI, for it's where a special dinner in 2015 took place that helped plant the seeds for the organization that CCI would become. Downtown, Hotel Ocho and the recently renovated Hilton Toronto places you in the core (and close to the Source Canada conference this October). For an East End stay, try The Broadview Hotel. And if you need to be near Queen’s Park, the renovated Park Hyatt Toronto might let you squeeze in a few extra zzz’s and still roll up to the Pink Palace on time.

Next week, we wrap up our summer field trip across the country in Halifax. Have a lovely weekend!