Therness Selected for the Italy–Canada Soft-Landing Program 2026: Toronto and Montréal

Canada is the second stop of our September: after IMTS in Chicago and in the same days as InnoTrans in Berlin. This post explains what the programme is, why Therness applied, and what we are looking for in Ontario and Québec.

The programme

The Italy–Canada Soft-Landing Program is a structured market-entry runway for Italian start-ups, delivered by DMZ, the incubator of Toronto Metropolitan University, and Centech, the deep-tech accelerator of ÉTS in Montréal, in partnership with the Italian Trade Agency (ITA/ICE). The 2026 edition began in July with live virtual sessions on the Ontario and Québec innovation ecosystems, on the legal and practical realities of entering the Canadian market, and on pitch preparation with DMZ’s coaches. It culminates in an in-market week in September:

• Toronto, 21–23 September 2026 — ecosystem immersion at DMZ, meetings with corporates and investors, and the pitch session on the main stage of the Elevate Festival on the afternoon of 23 September. Elevate brings together around ten thousand delegates from ninety countries, including hundreds of venture investors, and the founders on stage have access to a B2B platform to request meetings with them.
• Montréal, 24–25 September 2026 — immersion in the Québec deep-tech ecosystem with Centech, meetings with manufacturers, research institutions and clusters, and a second pitch session.

Therness’s participation is confirmed; our colleague Pietro Paolo De Crescenzo will present on the Elevate stage, with Luca Santoro, CEO and CTO, joining the delegation for the meetings in both cities.

Why Canada

Our in-process weld monitoring technology grew up with European automotive, rail and heavy-fabrication customers, and its next natural markets are the ones with the same mix of automated welding, demanding codes and pressure on inspection capacity. Ontario and Québec have exactly that profile:

• Automotive and EV supply chain in Ontario, with body-in-white, chassis and battery-enclosure welding that must satisfy OEM audits such as AIAG CQI-15 and CQI-11.
• Aerospace in Québec, where welded titanium, nickel and aluminium structures need per-joint evidence and where additive manufacturing of flight parts is moving from research to production.
• Rail vehicle and transit manufacturing in both provinces, working to EN 15085-equivalent requirements and to customer specifications that call for documented weld quality.
• Heavy equipment, energy and structural steel, welded to CSA W59 and CSA W47.1 under the certification of the Canadian Welding Bureau, with the same need for traceable evidence as in the European codes we already serve.
• A research ecosystem in thermography, artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing that matches our own origin as a Politecnico di Torino spin-off.

What we bring to the stage

Three minutes on the Elevate main stage is enough for one message: weld quality control can move from reactive sampling to 100% process monitoring. HeatCore AI watches every weld with an infrared camera mounted on the torch or in the cell, scores it in real time against the qualified reference signature, and stores a digital record per joint — thermal video, features, score and verdict — against the part, the WPS and the robot program. Defects such as porosity, lack of fusion, burn-through and heat-input drift are flagged while the part is still in the fixture, and the record is the evidence a customer audit or a certification body expects.

Around the pitch, we are looking for three kinds of conversations:

1. Pilot customers in Ontario and Québec with robotic welding cells who want to run HeatCore on one line and measure the effect on scrap, rework and inspection time.
2. Integration partners — welding automation integrators and robot system houses — who want to offer in-process inspection as part of a cell.
3. Ecosystem partners — research centres, clusters and investors — interested in the industrial application of thermographic AI to manufacturing quality.

Meet us in Toronto or Montréal

If you manufacture, integrate or invest in automated welding in Canada and want to see the system on your own joints, write to us with the process, the material and the standard you work to. We will confirm a meeting in Toronto between 21 and 23 September or in Montréal on 24 or 25 September, and prepare a demonstration on comparable footage before we arrive.

We thank the Italian Trade Agency, DMZ and Centech for the selection and for the preparation work of the past months. See you in Canada.

Written by Luca Santoro , founder