Recent data around the flood of tech talent moving to the U.S. has revived long-held concerns about Canadian 'brain drain'<\/p>\n
Canada\u2019s tech industry is warning that the country continues to lose its best and brightest entrepreneurs to the U.S., an issue that has taken on new urgency as tariff threats have prompted Ottawa to try to diversify away from the U.S. economy.<\/p>\n
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This week, various tech entrepreneurs, politicians and economists began to weigh in on data that show just how big the problem has become. According to recent figures, there are at least 517 U.S.-based tech firms with Canadian founders \u2014 or, entrepreneurs who were educated in Canada but later left for the U.S. \u2014 that have together raised more than US$400 billion.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe numbers make it clear that Canada\u2019s founders and entrepreneurs are leaving in droves \u2014 and they are taking the future value they will generate with them,\u201d said Lucy Hargreaves, co-founder of the business advocacy group Build Canada, who issued a call to action in the form of a LinkedIn essay that triggered an online conversation about the trend.<\/p>\n
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The data also show the pace of innovators leaving Canada for the U.S. has more than doubled since 2023, as U.S. tech giants have gone on a hiring spree to feed their AI ambitions. Before then, just over 20 founders had left for the U.S. per year, according to the data. In 2023, that figure leapt to 60 people, and to 93 people in 2024.<\/p>\n
Of those founders, 88 per cent were educated at Canadian universities, including the University of Waterloo, University of Toronto and McGill University. Among the most prominent Canadian entrepreneurs to decamp to the U.S. are OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who attended University of Toronto, and Uber founder Garrett Camp, who grew up in Calgary. Others include SpaceX\u2019s Elon Musk, who still retains Canadian citizenship, Anthropic\u2019s Chris Olah and eBay\u2019s Jeff Skoll.<\/p>\n
Canada has for decades struggled to stop its most innovative people and ideas from moving to the U.S., where entrepreneurs can take advantage of the country\u2019s much larger capital investment pool and generally more pro-business policies. In a May 2026 blog post, Waterloo, Ont.-based tech investor Jesse Rodgers \u2014 drawing from the Dominion List, a database of U.S.-based companies with founders who were born or educated in Canada \u2014 crunched the latest numbers showing how many founders had left for U.S. cities.<\/p>\n
The figures in that post began to resurface this week, as numerous Canadian voices began to weigh in on social media. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre sought to place the blame for Canada\u2019s loss of talent to the U.S. on Prime Minister Mark Carney, saying he is \u201cdriving entrepreneurs out of Canada with taxes, red tape, and inflation\u201d while simultaneously giving \u201chandouts, bailouts, and carveouts to the club of corporate insiders.\u201d<\/p>\n
this should be a five alarm fire for policymakers in canada 517 american companies started by canadians. $414 billion raised. almost 9 in 10 of them went to school in canada incredibly, 216 of these founders went to waterloo\u2026. and half of these companies were started in the\u2026 https:\/\/t.co\/tWnOR1izhK pic.twitter.com\/Odjgh7W6GA<\/p>\n
On LinkedIn and X, Hargreaves called the issue a \u201cfive alarm fire,\u201d saying it threatens to undermine Canada\u2019s future economic growth at a time when the country is grappling with a systemic productivity crisis.<\/p>\n