Blue J raises US$176 million for AI tax research

Blue J, an AI tax-research firm that BetaKit describes as Toronto-based, said it has raised US$176 million in Series E capital led by JMI Equity, a growth equity investment firm. The company points to growth: it says its annual recurring revenue, the yearly income from customers who subscribe to its software, is up 165% since its previous funding round, the Series D.

The new round values Blue J at more than US$700 million, which the company says is more than C$1 billion. More than 6,500 organizations now use Blue J, including Big Four accounting firms and Fortune 100 companies, the company said.

Blue J will use the money to scale Workflows, its agentic AI, software that carries out tasks itself rather than only answering questions, and to expand in the UK. Chief executive Ben Alarie aims for Workflows to assist with nearly any routine work a tax professional does by the end of next year.

Blue J was co-founded in 2015 by Mr Alarie, Brett Janssen, Anthony Niblett and Albert Yoon. Mr Alarie came up with the idea for the company after being asked to judge an IBM Watson competition at the University of Toronto, the university said.

Sources: Blue J · BetaKit · University of Toronto News

Suncor seeks 39-storey rental tower at North York gas station

UrbanToronto reported that a Petro-Canada station at Bathurst Street and Sheppard Avenue West in North York could give way to a 39-storey rental tower for Suncor Energy Inc. The site is at a potential station on the Sheppard Line 4 Subway Extension, which Metrolinx is studying. But that station is far from certain. The extension has no funding and no projected date, and its Initial Business Case is still under review.

Colliers Development Services filed Official Plan and Zoning By-law Amendment applications with the City of Toronto for the developer. The Official Plan amendment would change the area’s planning policy, the Sheppard West / Dublin Secondary Plan, and the zoning amendment would grant permissions for this site alone.

The tower would rise 136.85 metres and hold 558 market-rate rental homes. The plan has 188 vehicle spaces, 152 of them for residents. For context, Statistics Canada said Toronto’s apartment starts fell 33% to 18,986 in 2025 from 28,162 in 2024.

Map: 4384 Bathurst Street, Toronto. © OpenStreetMap contributors

Sources: UrbanToronto · Statistics Canada

PSP agrees to buy half of Enercare for $1.6 billion

PSP Investments said on November 9 that it agreed to buy 50% of Enercare, a Markham company that rents and services water heaters, from Brookfield and its institutional partners for $1.6 billion. PSP manages money for the pensions of federal public servants, the Canadian Forces and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, with $320.6 billion in net assets at March 31, 2026. PSP’s Andrew Alley said the appeal lies in Enercare’s customer relationships and its recurring revenue model, which means income that repeats, like rent, rather than arriving once at a sale.

Renting is an Ontario habit: the Competition Bureau Canada said many homeowners there rent their water heaters, unlike elsewhere in Canada, where most own. Its information suggested Enercare held about 80% of the rental gas water heater market in Enbridge Gas’s Ontario territory in 2018.

PSP has invested in Enercare since 2018, when it joined Brookfield in taking the company private. Existing management will stay, and the deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, after regulatory approvals.

Sources: PSP Investments · Competition Bureau Canada

ROM sets May 2027 opening for Bloor Street entrance

UrbanToronto reported that the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) will open its Hennick Entrance and Court on Bloor Street in May 2027, restoring access after three years of construction. Inside, Hennick Court will put objects in the entrance foyer before visitors reach the exhibition galleries. Floor-to-ceiling glazing will let pedestrians see in, and the objects visible from the street will include a Ming Dynasty Temple Bell of Wei Bin and a 1.4-tonne amethyst geode.

Outside, a bronze canopy will project over the accessible entrance, extending the museum’s presence to the Bloor Street sidewalk. The reopened entrance will complement the historic Weston Entrance on Queen’s Park, which stays open.

The entrance, designed by Siamak Hariri of Hariri Pontarini Architects, is the next milestone in the ROM’s OpenROM project. That project will add 6,000 square feet of gallery and display space on the second and third floors, including the previously announced Gallery of Sikh Art & Culture.

ROM Director & CEO Nicholas R. Bell credited Jay and Barbara Hennick and the Hennick Family Foundation, longtime ROM supporters, for the entrance. The ROM will confirm the May 2027 opening date early next year.

Sources: UrbanToronto

Toronto team's organ chip shows why cancer rarely reaches the heart

The University of Toronto said its researchers have built a multi-organ-on-a-chip device to investigate why the heart is one of the least common sites of cancer metastasis, the spread of cancer to other organs. Metastasis causes more than 90% of cancer-related deaths.

The team’s device, the Multi-organ Invasion Device (MInD), connects several engineered tissues in one system under dynamic fluid flow. It belongs to organ-on-a-chip research, which recreates human physiology in the lab for drug testing and disease modeling.

In the team’s tests, aggressive breast cancer cells readily invaded engineered liver tissue but invaded cardiac tissue significantly less. Protein and gene-expression analysis then showed that cardiac tissue altered pathways tied to metastasis, immune responses and cell migration, suppressing metastasis to the heart.

The team also developed a new way to make PermeoTubes from a biodegradable elastic polymer using granular 3D printing, and believes the approach may apply more broadly in organ-on-a-chip research.

Sources: University of Toronto

More than US$700 million is the value Blue J’s Series E round puts on the Toronto AI tax-research firm; Blue J says that is over C$1 billion. The round raised US$176 million, 15 months after a US$122 million Series D.

5-year yield: 3.35% on November 9, 2026, up 0.60 points from 2.75% on November 10, 2025.

Source: Bank of Canada

Secondary sale: a deal in which existing shareholders are bought out, rather than the company issuing new shares. Blue J’s Series E round included one, buying out some existing holders; Blue J did not say how much.

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The storm that made the Island, 1858. Toronto Island was a peninsula, joined to the mainland at its eastern end, until a violent storm on April 13, 1858. The storm cut a channel about 150 metres wide, now the Eastern Gap, and left the islands cut off for good. The Gibraltar Point lighthouse, built in 1809, had already stood for half a century. At its peak in the 1950s the islands’ residential community had about 630 cottages and homes.

Sources: Wikipedia: Toronto Islands

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854). American writer and surveyor (1817-1862), who spent two years in a cabin he built at Walden Pond to test how little a person needs.

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