AHOY, the deep‑tech infrastructure company building the operational layer for Physical AI, today announced from Web Summit Vancouver the establishment of Montreal as its North American headquarters, entering into an agreement to acquire Wrk.com in a landmark nine‑figure acquisition, a strategic partnership with Mila, Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, an investment to launch Canada's first Physical AI Lab, and the release of its Perception Suite spanning vision, audio, and data intelligence.

[For more news, click here]

The company also confirmed two senior leadership appointments, Dr. Hood Khizer as Chief Scientific Officer and Dr. Benoit Julien as Chief Technologist, to lead research, development, and tooling across its expanding North American footprint.  

The decision to anchor AHOY's North American operations in Montreal positions Canada at the center of the company's next phase of global growth. As AI enters a new era shaped by sovereignty, real‑world deployment, and advanced infrastructure, AHOY selected Montreal for its exceptional research ecosystem, world‑class talent base, and growing importance as a global hub for frontier technology.

The Montreal headquarters will serve as the operational and research nucleus for AHOY's commercial, product, and engineering activities across the Americas, and will host the company's deepening engagement with the Quebec and broader Canadian research community. 

AHOY also announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Wrk.com in a landmark nine‑figure acquisition, strengthening AHOY’s ability to design, deploy, and operate decentralized, sovereignty‑grade AI systems. Wrk Technologies is a developer‑first automation and execution platform whose mature execution layer, built for APIs, legacy systems, AI models, and human‑in‑the‑loop workflows, integrates with AHOY’s orchestration and perception stack to form a unified platform that translates intent into auditable action at scale. 

“Wrk is a force multiplier for our mission,” said Jamil Shinawi, CEO of AHOY. “Combining Wrk’s execution engine with AHOY’s orchestration, operational research and sovereign tooling lets customers move from design to production faster, more reliably, and without vendor lock‑in.” 

Mohannad El‑Barachi, CEO of Wrk Technologies, said: “Our plans to join AHOY are largely tied to a shared philosophy: decentralized, sovereign‑first AI built for real systems. Together we accelerate a future where intelligence is distributed, locally governed, and operationally reliable.” 

Alongside the headquarters announcement, AHOY confirmed a strategic partnership with Mila Labs; Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, one of the largest and most respected AI research institutes in the world, founded by Professor Yoshua Bengio, widely regarded as a godfather of AI.

The collaboration will see AHOY and Mila Labs launch joint research initiatives across edge AI, sovereign AI and physical AI, with a dedicated cohort of PhD researchers focusing on the architectural challenges AHOY is solving in production. Dr. Hood Khizer and Dr. Benoit Julien will co‑lead AHOY's ongoing engagement with Mila's faculty and student community on behalf of the company. 

As part of the same commitment, AHOY will fund the launch of Canada's first Physical AI Lab, focused on physical, sovereign, and edge AI systems that operate in the physical environment rather than only inside cloud data centers.

Photo (Left to Right): Darshan Thakkar, Chief Financial Officer, Jamil Shinawi, CEO, and Mohannad El‑Barachi, Chief Strategy Officer

For AHOY, Physical AI is the discipline of building intelligence that perceives, decides, and acts on the physical world under real‑world latency, compliance, and resilience constraints, a frontier the company has been operationalizing since 2018 and is now opening to the broader research community through the Lab. 

AHOY also unveiled its Perception Suite, a release that brings together the company's vision, audio, and data intelligence capabilities into a single toolkit.

The suite is designed to give operators, governments, and enterprises a complete perception stack that runs on‑chip, at the edge, on‑prem, and in air‑gapped environments, reflecting AHOY's position as the only group in the world that has done the underlying research and packaged it as tooling customers can deploy independently, on their own infrastructure, under their own sovereignty. The release democratizes access to the operational layer of the next phase of AI. 

"The market is separating into systems that can only describe and systems that can reliably act, and Physical AI lives on the second side of that line," said Jamil Shinawi, CEO of AHOY.

"Today's announcements are how that thesis becomes a global rollout. Montreal anchors our North American base. The partnership with Mila compounds the research. Canada's first Physical AI Lab opens that research to the broader community. And the Perception Suite puts the tooling directly in the hands of operators, governments, and enterprises. Each step extends sovereign infrastructure into a new region, a new layer of the stack, and a new set of builders who need to deploy it." 

To anchor the next phase of growth, AHOY confirmed two senior appointments: 

• Dr. Hood Khizer, Chief Scientific Officer - leading R&D across AHOY's frontier research roadmap, including the company's work in Trouve Labs and its expanded engagement with Mila. 

• Dr. Benoit Julien, Chief Technologist - leading tooling, the developer and operator surface through which AHOY's Physical AI stack is configured, deployed, and operated in the field. 

The two appointments deepen AHOY's commercial, product, and research capabilities across North America and bring senior scientific and engineering leadership directly into the Montreal headquarters. 

"AHOY is the only company in the world that has done the research and is shipping the tools that let customers build their own sovereign version of Physical AI," added Shinawi. "That is what democratizing the next phase of AI actually looks like. Montreal, Mila, the Physical AI Lab, and the Perception Suite are how we accelerate it." 

The announcement is being made during AHOY's press conference at Web Summit Vancouver (May 11–14), where the company is appearing as Platinum Partner across the 2026 Web Summit series.  

Members of the press and analysts who wish to arrange interviews or on‑site demos with AHOY at Web Summit Vancouver should contact press@mailahoy.com. Partners, developers, and investors seeking collaboration discussions or technical deep dives can reach out to partnerships@mailahoy.com or investors@mailahoy.com to schedule meetings in Vancouver, Montreal, or any other AHOY hub. 

About AHOY 

AHOY is a deep‑tech infrastructure company delivering Physical AI: infrastructure that perceives, decides, and operates the physical world. The company's modular stack runs on‑chip, on‑prem, and in hybrid cloud configurations to provide auditable action for cities, transportation networks, utilities, sovereign sites, and other complex operational environments. Founded by Jamil Shinawi in 2018, AHOY operates from offices in Canada, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the U.K. and others. 

Media contact: press@mailahoy.com

Partnerships: partnerships@mailahoy.com

Investor inquiries: investors@mailahoy.com