Calgary startup Ultimarii ‘right company at the right time’ as it helps speed up infrastructure projects

When Doug Schweitzer was Alberta’s minister of justice in 2019 and 2020 he launched legal challenges to the constitutionality of the federal carbon tax and the Impact Assessment Act brought in by Justin Trudeau’s government. He and others in the Jason Kenney-led Alberta government felt Ottawa got in the way of building major projects.

Mr. Schweitzer now leads a thriving AI-powered startup that has found common cause with Prime Minister Mark Carney. He is chief executive officer of Calgary-based Ultimarii Ltd., a software company whose platform helps speed up the complex, drawn-out regulatory and permitting process for big infrastructure projects.

Mr. Carney has promised to accelerate the building of such projects. “I lived the problem set during my time in government, and political will and policy plays an important role” in solving it, Mr. Schweitzer said in an interview.

Less than three years after its founding, Ultimarii now has 25 customers, including government regulators, two law firms and 18 corporate customers in utilities, power generation, mining, and oil and gas. Ultimarii’s top-paying customer is the federal government, and it is advised by former regulatory leaders including Gitane De Silva, ex-CEO of the Canada Energy Regulator.

Ultimarii has now raised fresh financing to expand in Canada and globally. On Thursday, it will announce it has raised more than $13-million, led by the Business Development Bank of Canada’s Industrial Innovation Venture Fund, and backed by Mistral Venture Partners, plus early company funders Staircase Ventures and Alpaca VC. The financing includes some debt and support from the National Research Council of Canada’s Industrial Research Assistance Program.

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“They are building the right company at the right time for Canada,” said Staircase managing partner Janet Bannister in an interview. “It is aligned with Canada’s mandate and the government’s mission to accelerate critical infrastructure projects.”

Ms. Bannister and Raif Barbaros, a partner with Mistral in Toronto, both said Ultimarii benefits from founders with relevant expertise and a chosen AI use case that would be hard for others, including large language model giants, to easily copy. “We believe that vertical-specific AI solutions will win in highly regulated, specific industries that require specialized expertise,” Ms. Bannister said.

Mr. Schweitzer is a lawyer and long-time Conservative political operative. Ultimarii co-founder and president Josh Malate is a civil engineer-turned-entrepreneur whose past ventures ranged from real estate to roofing. In 2017, Mr. Malate co-founded Athennian, a Calgary legal technology company that raised venture capital and expanded globally.

The pair met when Mr. Schweitzer was Alberta’s minister of jobs, economy and innovation in the early 2020s. Mr. Schweitzer left politics in 2022 and joined Deloitte before deciding to try his hand at entrepreneurship. Mr. Malate departed Athennian soon after.

They both shared the frustrations of seeing complex infrastructure projects get bogged down by delays. They spent months talking to project developers, regulators and ex-politicians “to make sure we truly understood the problem set and what we were building,” said Mr. Schweitzer.

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The goal, said Mr. Malate, was to use generative AI to “increase the capacity of the entire system” and speed things up. They zeroed in on building tools that could “tackle the challenge of regulatory complexity,” Mr. Schweitzer said.

Their tool has ingested millions of publicly disclosed reports and documents, sometimes tens of thousands of pages long, from 36 regulatory bodies across Canada. Using AI agents on Ultimarii’s assembled libraries, customers can generate answers in hours that might otherwise take days doing traditional Boolean searches of legal libraries as they prepare regulatory submissions on infrastructure projects.

Mr. Barbaros said the company has designed the tool to be “a lot more deterministic” than typical generative AI programs, ensuring it doesn’t conjure up incorrect information.

The tool lets applicants check answers in their submissions against earlier applications to ensure consistency. It even enables applicants to run their draft documents through a simulator that predicts what a regulator might ask as a follow-up, to minimize the back-and-forth of questions and answers that can delay projects.

“If you can knock off just a few months of a project timeline, that is massive for the impact on Canada’s GDP,” said Matt Peters, a partner with law firm McCarthy Tétrault, an early and satisfied Ultimarii customer.