The announcement cements AHOY's lead in Physical AI, bringing new opportunity to Quebec's engineering and consulting firms. 

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AHOY, the deep-tech frontier lab building the operational layer for Physical AI, today announced it is relocating its research and development to Montréal and deepening its partnership with Mila, the Quebec AI Institute founded by Yoshua Bengio. The announcement was made at Startupfest Montreal, where AHOY's CEO, Jamil Shinawi, presented alongside Chantal Gagnon, Executive Committee member responsible for economic development of Montreal, underscoring the city's engagement with AHOY's growing presence and job creation. 

Beyond being a commercial expansion, the news comes as a research and engineering commitment to Montreal and Quebec. AHOY is establishing a world-first open Physical AI Lab in the city. The lab serves as the applied research center for groundbreaking rollouts in Physical AI and how to bring real-world AI components to production, and the proving ground for new capabilities before deployment. Research from AHOY's frontier AI and ML lab, Trouvé Labs, feeds directly into the Mila collaboration.  

To build the lab out, AHOY plans to hire approximately 200 people in Montreal, resulting in 500 immediate new jobs across the ecosystem and many indirect job opportunities across research, engineering, and go-to-market roles. 

"Montréal is where the next phase of our growth is taking shape," said Jamil Shinawi, CEO and founder of AHOY. "Quebec, through research and world-class talent attraction and education, has built one of the deepest pools of AI research talent in the world. From here, we advance Physical AI from research into deployment, building intelligence that perceives, decides and acts in the real world, on infrastructure operators own and control, and expanding the team here in Montreal to grow it." 

Open for business: economic opportunity for Quebec 

AHOY does not deploy alone. It works through a partner-led model, selling its capabilities by handing consulting, engineering, and implementation firms ready-to-deliver opportunities, a beacon of interest for any firm looking to do work in the physical AI space.  

With a few billions in delivery pipeline and Montreal now home to its research base, AHOY is actively looking for partners to help bring that work to life, work that flows through Quebec's engineering and consulting sector as it does. 

"We're open for business, and we have deals for firms to go deliver," said Shinawi. "If you're a consulting, engineering, or implementation firm, this is your invitation for an evergreen, win-win partnership." 

Firms interested in partnering with AHOY can reach out at ahoy technology, mail us on partnerships@mailahoy.com,  or meet the team in person at Startupfest Montreal, July 8 to 10, at the Grand Quai du Port de Montréal. 

The operational leader in Physical AI 

While much of the industry concentrates on large language models (LLMs) in the cloud, AHOY has focused on deploying AI where it matters physically: on-chip, at the edge, on-prem, in fully air-gapped environments, and in hybrid settings if clients wanted spanning agility over cloud and beyond. The technology is operational today, not experimental, and the results bear it out.  

AHOY has achieved 330x growth over the past five years with positive operating margins, surpassing $100 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of the last fiscal year 2025, and now runs in production across North America, Europe, the GCC, and other emerging markets. 

"The market is separating into systems that can only describe the world and systems that can reliably act in it," said Shinawi. "AHOY builds the infrastructure for the latter." 

A frontier lab for the physical world 

Behind the platform is a frontier lab. AHOY conducts applied AI research that reaches into the physical world, across four areas: 

• Hybrid data synthesis. Machine-level processing of video, audio, and sensor data that reduces terabytes to kilobytes, with no cloud dependency and in a multi-modal fashion. 

  
  

• Graph-based reasoning with near-infinite context. Making sense of that synthesized data through GraphRAG and a near-infinite context window. 

  
  

• Orchestration. Acting on real-world systems, from traffic lights to fleets to factory controls and agentic use-cases, based on that understanding. 

  
  

• Edge deployment and federated, continuous learning. Running all of it without cloud reliance, on nodes that learn from one another. 

This research is the foundation beneath AHOY's production platform, and what makes the rest credible. 

AHOY Machine Studio: real-world perception, now for LLM operators 

AHOY's full Physical AI stack is AHOY Machine Studio, which spans perception, reasoning, decisioning, and orchestration in a single auditable layer. The Perception Suite is its sovereign-deployable core: the part of AHOY Machine Studio that operators can run independently on their own infrastructure. It combines AHOY's vision, audio, and data intelligence into one platform, closing the trade-off that forces today's tools to depend on the cloud, sacrifice auditability, or ship as fragmented point solutions. 

Its perception layer, AVML (AHOY's audio-video machine learning), processes live video and audio streams at the edge, extracting structured data from the physical world in real time. A proprietary pixel-to-embedding conversion makes this far more efficient and lightweight than routing everything through a large language model, with sub-second latency on constrained hardware. 

That opens a new capability for the companies running large language models. With AHOY's perception layer, LLM operators can go multimodal, acting not just on text, but on what cameras see and microphones hear, in real time, at the edge. AHOY provides the infrastructure that transforms multimodal sensor streams into auditable action. 

Beyond language: AI for the real world 

AHOY's deeper differentiator is the kind of intelligence it builds. Most AI companies build language models: chatbots, text, conversation. AHOY builds models that use no language at all, relying on vision, audio, sensor data, and physical-world signals to perceive, reason, and act. Traffic systems, airport operations, water networks, logistics, and live sports analysis don't need language. They need perception, reasoning, and orchestration. 

"The next frontier of AI isn't a better chatbot," said Shinawi. "It's intelligence that understands the physical world and makes decisions in it. We're bringing inanimate objects to life, giving them the ability to perceive, reason, and act." 

Secure by design 

The same architecture that makes AHOY sovereign makes it secure. By running on-prem and air-gapped, with zero data egress and a zero-knowledge approach, AHOY's Physical AI is inherently protected, and the data never leaves the client's control. It positions AHOY at the intersection of cybersecurity and Physical AI: not as a security product, but as enablement for systems that must be secure by construction. 

"We are building sovereign AI in the truest sense," said Shinawi. "Owned by those who deploy it, accountable to them alone, and politically neutral by design, at a moment when AI is becoming anything but." 

About AHOY 

AHOY is a deep-tech frontier lab and infrastructure company delivering Physical AI for the real world: infrastructure that perceives, decides, and acts in the physical environment, rather than operating on digitized representations alone. Its modular Physical AI stack, AHOY Machine Studio, spans perception, reasoning, decisioning, and orchestration, and is available for sovereign deployment as the Perception Suite. 

It runs on-chip, at the edge, on-prem, and in hybrid cloud configurations to provide auditable action for cities, transportation networks, utilities, sovereign sites, and other complex environments. Founded by Jamil Shinawi in 2018, AHOY operates from hubs in Montréal, Dubai, and more, with 40+ operating arms across 30+ countries and with a partner-led model that has reach to 100+ geographies. Its research, conducted through its frontier lab Trouvé Labs, feeds directly into platform development. 

Media contact: press@mailahoy.com 

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