Boson AI raised $70M and placed half its team in Toronto

Boson AI is a US-registered AI lab building the foundation models that let software talk. BetaKit reports that 20 of its 40 staff now sit in a Toronto office. The other 20 are at its Silicon Valley headquarters.

Co-founder and CEO Alex Smola led AI at Amazon Web Services before starting Boson. He told BetaKit the Toronto side has "turned out to be a really good thing". He also said Canada has been "a lot more predictable" than the US.

What Boson sells

Boson's product is a stack of voice AI models called Higgs. The company sells them to other companies that want to put a voice agent in their product. The pitch is a voice that sounds like a person on the phone.

Boson's own site states that Higgs Realtime answers in about 0.7 seconds. It supports more than 100 languages. The site also claims the price is roughly 90 percent lower than the big labs. Nobody independent has audited that figure, so read it as the company's own claim.

That puts Boson next to OpenAI's voice mode and Meta's voice models.

The money and the headcount

BetaKit reports that Boson closed a $70 million USD round in July. That is about $98 million CAD. The article does not name the lead investor. The money pays for the next hires on both sides of the border.

The split of 20 Toronto and 20 Silicon Valley is BetaKit's own figure. The company was founded in the Bay Area. The Canadian office opened "quietly" and has grown from zero to half the company.

Why Toronto, in Smola's own words

Smola gave BetaKit three reasons. The first was hiring. He said the US immigration picture has made it harder to bring engineers in. He called the hiring problem in the US "a real issue". The Canada opening, he said, "will not last forever".

The second was the compute partner. Boson runs its Toronto training on servers in a data centre owned by eStruxture. The data centre is in Barrie, Ontario. eStruxture is a Montréal company. Smola said it is "just a lot nicer" to deal with than a US provider. That US provider, he said, had tried to add fees he never agreed to.

The third was the local talent pool. Boson has a partnership with the University of Toronto. The partnership is with its Master of Science in Applied Computing programme. The company also ran a hackathon with the programme.

What a founder picks up from this

A US AI lab with $70 million and a California address picked Toronto for half its hiring. The reasons it gave are not glamorous. A predictable visa for the next engineer. A data centre partner that does not surprise-bill. A university pipeline for new graduates. None of these needs a big-name city. Any country with those three can run the same play.

Source

• Why Boson AI's Toronto office is growing faster than its Silicon Valley HQ, BetaKit
• Boson AI, the company's own site