It’s been an eventful quarter (when has it not?), and somehow we’ve already crossed the halfway mark of 2025. We wanted to take a moment to highlight just a few of the wins, milestones, and momentum we’ve seen this past quarter. As always, there’s a whole lot happening behind the scenes that can’t be shared just yet. 

Here’s a quick look at some of the Q2 action:

Coinbase now makes it simple and easy to accept and adopt USDC for merchant payments, without blockchain complexity. Coinbase Payments is a stablecoin payment stack designed for commerce platforms. It’s built on Base and is already live with Shopify. 

Jam for iOS is now live! Download the app. 

Optimotive, who manufactures autonomous wheeled and tracked robots for use in the construction, mining and oil and gas industries, was featured in the June 2025 issue of Maclean’s. The piece reflects on where they’re building, the challenges along the way, and best of all, why they’re optimistic.

Digital collectibles are unlocking new ways for brands to engage fans at scale, and Disney is doubling down on Flow. The Disney community will work together to unlock exclusive 1-of-1 pins. You can learn more about it here. 

Ada is hosting Interact, its flagship AI customer service conference in Toronto from Sept 15-16.  

Defined added many new game-changing features: Launchpads (to discover and buy newly launched memecoins); Discover Traders (to find and track best wallets across chains); wallet tracking web feed and more. 

NiaHealth raised its pre-seed (led by yours truly) and is set to launch new health tools and expand across Canada. If you missed it, you can read our post on why we’re so excited about Nia. 

GroupThink launched private desktop audio recording so MacOS users have an invisible AI assistant to take notes during calls. You can learn more and get started with a free trial here. 

Dinari announced its $12.7M Series A to bring US equities on-chain and make them accessible to anyone, anywhere.  

Replay is building Nut.new. You can prompt Nut to build full stack applications. And since Nut is an agent, it continues developing the app over time. It QAs its work, writing tests and running and debugging them to get you a working app from the first prompt. Learn more and give it a try! 

Bolt.Earth launched Blaze DC, India’s first-ever universally compatible fast charger for 2- and 3-wheelers. 

Patch launched their end-to-end platform for climate action to address the three main problems keeping the voluntary carbon market (VCM) from reaching its full potential: market fragmentation, lack of trust, and process inefficiencies. You can read about the new Patch Platform on their blog.

Congratulations to Neo Financial on winning the Consumer Finance Award at the 2025 Canadian Finance Summit!

And Pickle Robot was named the 2025 winner for container unloading by The Robot Report. 

On a side note, we welcomed four incredible new startups to the V1 family in Q2. We can’t wait to tell you more in the coming months… plus, stay tuned for some exciting fund-level updates we’ll be sharing soon!

You can stay up to date with news as it happens by following us on [X] and LinkedIn.

And finally, Happy Canada Day and 4th of July to those of you who celebrate. Have a wonderful summer!