Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
AI | July 23, 2025

Image: Freepik AI
Lovable is now the fastest growing software company in history. In just eight months, it reached $100 million USD in annual recurring revenue and 2.3 million users and has hosted more than ten million projects. Based in Stockholm, the company raised $200 million USD series A led by Accel giving it a $1.8 billion USD valuation.
It's a very lean modern AI startup with fewer than 50 employees. The product is simple to use. A person types what they want, such as a subscription service, marketplace, or dashboard, and Lovable generates a working version of that software, complete with payment options, user accounts, and hosting. There is no need to write code or hire a developer to get started (Disclaimer: NCFA hasn't tested it out so try at your own risk).
Lovable pioneered what is now called vibe coding, a method of building software through natural language. It is not low code or no code. It is writing what you want and letting AI decide how to make it happen.
Lovable uses large language models to reason through structure, fix bugs, and update design. It handles back end and front end together, removing the usual friction between product and engineering. The experience feels like brainstorming and designing at the same time. Instead of wireframes, the output users receive is a live, working application.
Instead of submitting tickets and changes requests to engineers who prioritize, vibe coding users get instant revisions by AI, bringing the act of creation closer to the way people think and work.
Users have already launched working businesses. In Brazil, education company QConcursos used Lovable to create a premium app in two weeks. According to the Forbes article linked above, it earned over $3 million USD in its first 48 hours.
In Sweden, a film financing startup was built in ten days.
In the United States, solo creators have launched career services, restaurant tools, and job boards.
These apps are not static sites. They include working payment systems, data collection, and user flows. While NCFA hasn't verified the platform for production use in regulated financial services, it is already serving thousands of live projects across many sectors.
While fintechs cannot skip compliance and human review, platforms like Lovable can support real benefits if used in the right way. Founders can use it to build secure internal tools, demo customer interfaces, or iterate product development and user flows for future rollouts.
Instead of waiting months for a development sprint, they can validate ideas within a day. For new entrepreneurs, this model reduces early cost and lowers the barrier to entry. For accelerators, it means faster iterations and better pitch readiness. For investors, it reveals traction earlier, even before a technical team is hired.
It is an opportunity to apply the same tools and patterns where they fit. Sandboxed environments, staged deployment, and expert review can all be paired with AI created builds. With the right controls, teams can go from idea to working demo while staying aligned with Canadian regulatory frameworks.
NCFA members can explore these tools in workshops, demo days, or internal projects.
"This is not about rushing code into production. It is about speeding up learning and expanding who gets to build, and as a result what's built."
Software creation is changing and it's no longer reserved just for high paid developers. Now, innovation will start to emerge from people who actually know the problem, not just how to explain it. Canada has the talent and creativity, and now the tools are here to unleash the genie out of the bottle.
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, artificial intelligence, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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AI Research | July 22, 2025

Image: Freepik AI
According to a recent WORKBank audit, a major new study from Stanford's SALT Lab, 41% of Y Combinator-backed AI agent companies are
to tasks that workers have no desire for automation. These 'no go zones' represent tasks that are technically automatable but socially or emotionally rejected by workers. It's a growing disconnect that highlights a fundamental challenge for the future of work.
Should AI companies and investors automate tasks that people do not want or lead to no progress, no matter how advanced these systems are?
The WORKBank database is based on a comprehensive survey of data collected between January and May 2025 from 1,500 U.S. workers across 104 occupations and 844 occupational tasks. Each task is drawn from the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET database and evaluated by worker preferences and AI expert assessments. Responses were collected using an audio interface to reflect practical real world task experience.
This structured format asked workers whether they would want a task fully automated by an AI agent, and how much human collaboration they believe is needed to maintain task quality.
To assess the balance between automation and augmentation, the research team created the Human Agency Scale, a 5 level scale from H1 (no human involvement) to H5 (essential human involvement).
The most preferred response across the workforce was H3, an equal partnership between humans and AI agents. This level was dominant in 47 out of 104 occupations, however for 47.5% of tasks, workers wanted more human involvement than experts believed was technically necessary. It's a gap that could evolve into resistance points in high efficiency AI rollouts.
Despite concerns, 46.1% of tasks received a positive rating for automation. Workers were most supportive of AI when it freed up time for more important work (69.4%), reduced repetitive or tedious tasks (46.6%), or improved quality (46.6%).
On the other hand, resistance appeared from fear of losing trust, jobs, or creativity. Among those expressing concerns, 45% cited lack of trust, 23% named job loss, and 16.3% described the loss of a human touch. Arts, Design, and Media was the sector with the lowest interest in automation where only 17.1% of tasks received a positive score.
Researchers compared the WORKBank tasks with descriptions of companies backed by Y Combinator’s public portfolio. The results show a concentration of capital in areas workers are skeptical about.
41% of companies were mapped to tasks in the Low Priority Zone or Automation Red Light Zone, where worker demand is weak or negative, while many tasks in the Automation Green Light Zone and R&D Opportunity Zone where workers want automation remains underfunded (Read: ripe for AI task automation).
The research also looked at how AI is impacting the demand for certain job skills. Tasks that require higher levels of human agency usually involve interpersonal and decision making abilities rather than data analysis or technical information processing.
Comparing skill rankings based on wage data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics with human agency requirements revealed a trend away from solo technical execution toward organizational coordination, collaboration, and judgment. This suggests a shift in the kinds of competencies that AI will complement rather than replace.
Canada is investing heavily in AI innovation, fintech development, and reskilling strategies for the future economy. The WORKBank research shows that AI innovation must be aligned with worker needs and social context. If Canadian fintechs and investors focus only on technical feasibility without considering how workers feel about automation, they risk building tools that sit unused, untrusted, or even opposed. AI companies and investors must engage the people whose work is being transformed.
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, artificial intelligence, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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AI Competition | July 21, 2025

Image: Freepik/Rochak Shukla
On July 11, 2025, TechTarget reported that Alibaba-backed Chinese AI startup Moonshot released Kimi K2, a fully open source language model to compete toe to toe with top U.S. AI models, such as ChatGPT-4.1 and Claude Opus 4. Kimi K2 is open source, cheaper, widely accessible, and optimized for coding performance, putting pressure on Western artificial intelligence labs that are delaying their own open models.
Built using a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with 384 experts, Kimi K2 can process long technical documents and perform code automation. Moonshot trained the model using AI agent-style simulations and synthetic task scenarios. The model is open access with few restrictions and performs well on global developer benchmarks like SWE-Bench, GPQA, and AIME.
Unlike closed models like Claude and GPT-4.1, Kimi K2 can be used freely through its app or run locally by downloading the model files. Commercial use is allowed, with attribution required only for very large services.
| Model | Input Cost / 1M Tokens | Output Cost / 1M Tokens | Open Source | Coding Performance |
| Kimi K2 | $0.15 | $2.50 | ✅ Yes | Outperforms Claude Opus 4 on SWE-Bench, GPQA, AIME |
| GPT-4.1 | $2.00 | $8.00 | ❌ No | High general performance, strong reasoning |
| Claude Opus 4 | $15.00 | $75.00 | ❌ No | Strong general model, weaker in code |
| DeepSeek V3 | Free (GitHub) | Free | ✅ Yes | Former top open model; Kimi K2 exceeds on GPQA |
For Canadian fintech teams and AI builders, Kimi K2 is a cost-efficient way to automate development and build internal coding agents. It supports customized and secure deployments in regulated environments because files can be downloaded and can operate locally. There are team building tools like legal summarizers, compliance anlayzers, or custom service assistants that could be used to save costs at scale.
The pricing and accessibility of Kimi K2 shows that global leadership in open AI no longer belongs only to Silicon Valley. With more Chinese labs like Moonshot and DeepSeek producing high performance and competitively priced models, the AI infrastructure landscape is still jockeying for position with more powerful deployments inevitable.
This improvement in AI capabilities comes as Canada recently committed $240 million to fund local compute infrastructure via a new AI data centre with Cohere.
At just 15 cents per million input tokens, its cheaper than GPT-4.1 by more than 90% and Claude Opus by more than 99%. Combined with strong coding performance and open access, the Kimi K2 release is one of the most powerful free-to-use models available on the market today.
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, artificial intelligence, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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