AXL, a Canadian venture studio transforming applied AI research into high-growth companies, has announced its inaugural cohort of Faculty Fellows, a group of nine distinguished researchers, all profes...
Autore: Business Wire
TORONTO: AXL, a Canadian venture studio transforming applied AI research into high-growth companies, has announced its inaugural cohort of Faculty Fellows, a group of nine distinguished researchers, all professors at the University of Toronto (U of T), whose work spans computer vision, machine learning, and beyond at some of the world’s leading organizations.
Fellows include current and former senior scientists and engineers from NVIDIA, Samsung, Adobe, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the University Health Network, who are joining AXL’s growing scientific advisory bench to bring decades of industry and academic expertise to the ventures emerging from the studio. They are building on the significant industry depth among AXL’s founding team, including those who have worked with Autodesk, Microsoft, Meta, Nortel, and Telus.
One of these fellows is Gennady Pekhimenko, who became a Senior Director of AI Software at NVIDIA after NVIDIA's 2025 acquisition of his company, CentML, which raised over $30 million to reduce deployment costs and improve the performance of machine learning models. Pekhimenko is also a former researcher at Microsoft and a faculty member at the Vector Institute.
AXL’s 2026 Fellows
Why scientific depth is becoming a competitive advantage in AI
From AXL’s vantage point, the next generation of transformative AI companies will be built not just by entrepreneurs, but also by researchers who have spent careers at the frontier of what’s possible. AXL is positioning scientific depth as a structural advantage for Canada to reclaim its global AI leadership, ensuring that Canada is where the next generation of world-class AI companies are born and built.
“Beyond capital and ambition, building great AI companies requires scientific credibility. These Fellows bring the kind of deep, hard-won expertise that helps industries get ahead of AI advancements to solve their problems,” said Daniel Wigdor, Co-Founder and CEO of AXL. “They’ve spent years at the frontier of AI research; they know what’s real, what’s scalable, and what’s ready to become a high-growth company.”
AXL’s Faculty Fellows will be directly involved with venture creation
The Fellows will provide scientific advisory support and mentorship to AXL’s emerging portfolio ventures and corporate partners, helping them navigate the unique challenges in scaling AI pilots to real-world deployment. Their involvement spans the full arc of venture creation: from validating technical foundations and identifying research advantages, to ensuring that AI innovations are developed with the safety and responsibility the market increasingly demands.
“Building an AI model is only the first step. The real challenge begins when companies try to deploy and scale those systems in production, where performance, cost, and reliability quickly become limiting factors. I’ve spent my career working on the infrastructure that makes large-scale AI practical. With AXL, the opportunity is to help founders make those technical decisions earlier, before architecture choices are locked in and become expensive to reverse,” said Gennady Pekhimenko, Faculty Fellow at AXL and Senior Director of AI Software at NVIDIA.
AXL’s leadership brings deep AI research and industry experience
The Fellows program builds on AXL’s deep research capabilities among its founding team.
AXL’s Co-Founder and CEO, Daniel Wigdor, is a researcher-turned-entrepreneur who led the design of Microsoft’s Surface technology and served as the director of Meta’s Reality Labs in Toronto, where he oversaw frontier work in AI systems, including those for virtual and augmented reality. He holds over 60 patents across AI systems, novel sensing technologies, manufacturing methods, and more, with these innovations being used in more than a billion devices worldwide.
Tovi Grossman, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at AXL, was a Distinguished Research Scientist at Autodesk, where he led scientific advisory and technology transfer activities at one of the world’s largest design software companies. He holds over 100 patents on human-computer interaction, and his work has led to many technologies that are now in commercial products used by millions of users.
Together with a founding team of industry leaders, Ray Sharma, Founder of Extreme Venture Partners; David Sharma, former President of TELUS Enterprise & Partner Solutions; and Aniket Patel, founder of driving routes app Sunday Drive, they have built AXL with the conviction that the best AI companies will be those that are underpinned by industry-academia collaboration.
About AXL
AXL is a Canadian venture studio transforming world-class research into high-growth companies that shape the future of applied AI. Led by seasoned tech entrepreneurs and applied AI experts, AXL’s mission is to ensure Canada’s top breakthroughs are built and scaled at home. By connecting academia with real market demand and full-stack venture creation, AXL helps Canada move from invention to impact, anchoring talent, intellectual property, and long-term economic value within the country. For more information, visit axl.vc and connect with us on LinkedIn.
Fonte: Business Wire