Weekly Regional Business Intelligence | | | Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc. | | | Lake.com raises $2.6M in pre-seed round London-founded, Toronto-based vacation-rental marketplace Lake.com, brainchild of Voices.com founders David and Stephanie Ciccarelli (pictured), has raised $2.6 million in a pre-seed funding round, the company announced this week. The platform is a bespoke vacation rentals marketplace aimed at lakefront and lake-adjacent properties. According to the company, the platform is “already scaling rapidly, with 40,000 properties across 7,000 destinations in North America and Europe.” The funding round was led by the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC). The upshot: It’s a tech company, so there’s an AI angle here, obviously. David Ciccarelli understands that one of the first reactions you might have to hearing Lake.com’s pitch is to think that it’s just AirBnb or VRBO, but he wants people to think about it differently. “On the surface, it looks like we’re building a vacation rental platform for properties by the water,” Ciccarelli said. “While that’s true, below the surface, we’re creating a new category called the AI travel agency, one that better meets the needs of the family traveler as well as creating the future of online bookings, made autonomously by AI agents.” To this end, he says Lake.com’s competitive advantage is in being optimized for Answer-Engine Optimization, a new version of SEO principles that optimizes Lake’s listings for ChatGPT and other AI tools. Read more: Business Wire | London Inc. | | | Forest City Film Festival marks 10 years with 100-film lineup With four weeks to go until showtime, the Forest City Film Festival has announced its 10th anniversary lineup, featuring 100 films, including 14 that just screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. “It’s wonderful to see that we’ve matured to the stage that we have 100 films now and bringing in the calibre of guests that we’re able to bring in,” executive director Dorothy Downs (pictured) told The London Free Press. Some of the headlining films are No Other Choice, which won the TIFF people’s choice award, runner up Sentimental Value, and (as always) some highly anticipated CanCon in Nirvanna: The Band, the Show, the Movie. “It’s wonderful. I’m very excited for it, I think it’s maybe needless to say,” Downs said. The upshot: We wrote last year about Dorothy Downs’ success in turning the FCFF into a valued stop on the industry circuit, and the year before that we wrote about the curatorial direction it’s taken with her son Matthew Downs’ involvement, so with a record 14 films from TIFF screening, we feel confident in saying that the FCFF is quietly growing into a mature little film festival. The festival is again playing host to the Ontario Screen Creators Conference, a three-day industry conference that aims to get more energy and attention on the film and television industry outside of Toronto. “I’m just, you know, so grateful to see the arts community come together and the film community growing the way that it’s growing,” Downs said. Read more: FCFF | London Free Press | | | TechAlliance celebrates first TechStars Startup Weekend It was a busy couple of days for tech entrepreneurs in London last weekend, with the first TechStars Startup Weekend being put on by TechAlliance of Southwestern Ontario. The event saw more than 100 entrepreneurs coming together for a 54-hour incubator, where they formed new business concepts with a pitch contest at the end. “The idea of having this weekend sprint, where we can go from start to finish on something and get a lot of face-to-face time talking to industry leaders and mentors was a really amazing opportunity,” said Sasha Kosic, a Western student who was part of the third-place winning team. Christina Fox, CEO of TechAlliance, described the weekend as a “sprint” that would see potential companies go through the whole cycle of birthing a business into the world, just over one weekend. “Companies will pivot, they will find there are personality differences, they will exhibit and practice leadership in working through challenges, and they will get excited for one another on breakthroughs they have individually and as a team,” she said. The upshot: The winner of the $26,000 prize was a pitch for a company called NestKinnect, a platform enabling healthcare workers to manage schedules (you can view their pitch deck out here); second went to Synthia, an AI research platform, while third went to Varnish (pictured with Christina Fox), a business that would help artists protect the copyright on their work from being scraped by AI. Some of these hypothetical companies may even become a reality — of NestKinnect, Fox said, “We have every expectation with the support of TechAlliance … that they’ll have every opportunity to foster the company and turn it into something that’s profitable and made in Canada.” For many of the participants, though, the weekend was all about taking lessons back to their own startup businesses. “There’s so much magic in seeing other perspectives and the ways people think differently,” said participant Reagan Michiels. “I can bring that home to my business but also to my own personal development.” Read more: CTV News London | TechAlliance | | | Fanshawe receives Transport Canada approval for enhanced pilot training Fanshawe College has received approval from Transport Canada to begin offering Integrated Airline Transport Pilot Licence (IATPL) training, the school said this week. The approval means that Fanshawe, working in collaboration with Diamond Flight Centre (DFC), will now be one of few flight schools in Canada to offer IATPL training, a form of flight education that emphasizes multi-crew coordination and real-world scenarios; it also means that graduates are able to write their pilot’s license exams immediately after graduation, rather than after they’ve accumulated 750 flight hours. “By adding the airline transport pilot’s license we’re essentially training them to at least be familiar with operating in a crewed environment, which most airlines are,” said Jay Burt, associate dean of Fanshawe’s aviation and aerospace department. The upshot: Burt cast the addition of IATPL training as a major leg up for graduates entering the workforce. “Airlines operate in multi-crew environments, so having our graduates enter the workforce with airline-ready skills from day one will give them a significant edge in the hiring pool,” he said. “By choosing a Fanshawe-trained pilot, airlines will benefit from lower training costs and will have greater confidence in candidate readiness.” Burt said that the new flight simulation work will make use of Diamond Flight Centre’s simulators. “At DFC they have two simulators as well so that was always part of it. It’s really mainly the use of those [DFC] simulators,” said Burt. According to Fanshawe, it hopes to grow its flight school program to 400 students in coming years. Read more: Education News Canada | 106.9 The X | | | Western leads largest and longest study of commercial fitness apps Western researchers are hoping to answer the big question that hangs over the plethora of fitness apps available out there today: do they work? A new study by Western kinesiology professor Marc Mitchell and graduate student Lisa Nguyen, published this week in the British Journal of Sports and Medicine, looked at data from more than 500,000 Canadians and determined that overall, fitness apps have at least a modest impact on overall health. “Users showed increases in daily step counts at 12 months, and these gains were sustained at 24 months,” Nguyen told Western News. “It was really encouraging that improvements were there. People were still moving more than when they started, which is a very exciting outcome for a digital health app. They weren’t downloading the app and then deleting it.” The upshot: The fitness and exercise sector is one into which people are pouring a ton of money and innovation right now; the popular platform Strava is planning a major IPO, for instance, with some estimates putting its value as high as $3 billion. There is also lots of interest in how AI can play a role in this. (To use Strava as an example again, one of their major recent acquisitions was an AI-powered app called Runna.) Mitchell and Nguyen’s research will validate the notion that applying tech this way can have an actual real-world impact. “Even if the increases were modest, the fact that they were sustained tells us these tools can serve as a long-term support system,” Mitchell said. “I hope there’s a greater focus on behavioral science as the digital fitness space grows — ultimately helping people move more — because the benefits of movement are wide-ranging.” Read more: Western News | British Journal of Sports and Medicine | | | Job vacancies slide There were nearly 1,300 fewer job vacancies than there were a year ago in the London area during the second quarter, according to new figures from StatsCan. The number of vacancies dropped from around 11,000 to just over 9,700, meaning it’s getting tougher and tougher for jobseekers in the area to find open positions. “The fact is vacancies are going down, not because the positions are being filled, but due to the fact that businesses are just not posting jobs right now,” an analyst with StatsCan, Jonathan Bridekirk, told The London Free Press. “There’s fewer vacancies in London and there are more people looking for work. That’s why it’s going up.” The upshot: You can spin this a few ways. The first is this is probably reflective of the regional impact of tariffs, with London’s drop in vacancies predominantly coming from the manufacturing and construction sectors. Others have theorized that we’re now starting to see the real effects of AI on the job market, with increased unemployment. But others are attempting to put a positive spin on things, suggesting that London is still faring better than other areas. “We’re not seeing as much impact as we’re seeing in other regions,” said Petrusia Hontar, executive director of the Elgin Middlesex Oxford Workforce Planning and Development Board. “Originally, everyone was bracing for the worst, but we have absolutely maintained that resiliency.” She told the Free Press that of the new postings the board is tracking, there’s been an uptick in full-time jobs. “Even if we have a slowdown, but there are more full-time opportunities, then people may actually be getting more hours, which might mean a healthier economy.” Read more: London Free Press | | | Dispatch: September 26, 2025 A summary of recent business appointments and announcements, plus event listings for the upcoming week. View listings here | | | | |