Athel AI wins the Clinical Excellence Award at BVX 2026

Athel AI has been named winner of the Clinical Excellence Award at the inaugural Mitacs Health Innovation Showcase, held on September 10, 2026 at the Brampton Venture Expo (BVX) 2026 and hosted by the Brampton Venture Zone (BVZ) at Toronto Metropolitan University.

The award carries $35,000 in non-dilutive funding.

The showcase

The Mitacs Health Innovation Showcase brought together the ten startups of the BVZ Launch health-focused cohort. Five advanced to the final round at BVX 2026: Athel AI, NewGen Health, DIA Labs Canada, LOCVM and LBx Bio.

The five finalists pitched live before investors, industry leaders and members of Brampton's innovation ecosystem. On the night, the total award value was raised by surprise to $80,000, ten thousand above the amount originally announced.

Three startups took awards recognising strength across clinical innovation, deep-tech commercialization and scale-up potential:

• Athel AI — Clinical Excellence Award, $35,000

• LBx Bio — Pegmatis Deep Tech Award, $30,000

• LOCVM — Scale-Up Innovator Award, $15,000

The Clinical Excellence Award was presented to founder Alex Arrazaghi by Denise McClure of the City of Brampton and Wilson Luo of Mitacs.

Why this award, for this work

The Clinical Excellence Award recognises clinical innovation specifically, and that distinction matters to us. Athel is not a general-purpose automation tool pointed at healthcare. It conducts clinical interviews — adaptive, specialty-aware, built with practising specialists — and structures the resulting history for the physician's review.

Being judged on clinical merit, by a panel that included a practising vitreoretinal surgeon alongside commercialization and investment expertise, is the kind of validation that matters more to us than a general startup prize would.

What the funding supports

The $35,000 is non-dilutive, which means it funds the work without changing our ownership. It goes toward the same thing our early-access programme is built around: getting Athel into more clinics, with more specialties covered, and more evidence of what pre-visit intake does to a physician's day.

About Brampton Venture Zone

The Brampton Venture Zone launched in autumn 2020 as part of Toronto Metropolitan University's Zone Learning network. It is an incubator for early-stage technology startups in Brampton, and its support is non-equity — founders keep full ownership of their equity and IP.

BVZ has been sharpening its focus on health and wellness innovation alongside the launch of TMU's School of Medicine in the city, working at the intersection of clinical research, digital health and entrepreneurship.

The Showcase was delivered with support from Mitacs as Health Innovation Showcase Partner, Pegmatis as Deep-Tech Commercialization Partner, Prosh Marketing as Marketing Advisory Partner, and Invest Brampton as Economic Development Partner.

Our thanks to the BVZ team, the judging panel, and the four other finalists. Brampton's health innovation ecosystem is a genuinely good place to be building this.