Our founder and CEO, Dr. Soodeh Farokhi, attended Elevate Festival 2026 in Toronto, representing NexScale. Elevate ran September 22 to 24 at the Design Exchange on Bay Street and brought together founders, investors, operators and researchers from across Canadian tech. NexScale™ builds retention intelligence for multi-location wellness and fitness operators, working on top of the CRM each location already runs.
We are going with one topic we want to talk about, and one kind of conversation we are hoping to have.
Why we are there
NexScale is an AI-native company built for a single industry. We help multi-location wellness and fitness operators keep their members, so that retention runs on a system rather than on someone remembering to follow up.
That makes us a vertical AI company, and vertical AI is exactly what Elevate is full of this year. Almost every serious Canadian AI company now sits in a specific industry rather than above all of them. The interesting question is no longer whether to build with AI. It is what you are actually building.
The question we want to ask
Here is the one we think every AI company has to answer right now.
Are you building a real product that solves a real problem, or a technology you are fitting into a product because AI made it fast to ship?
Speed of development is not the same as depth of value. It has never been easier to ship something that demos well. It is just as hard as it has always been to build something an operator opens on a Tuesday morning and trusts.
We think the honest test is boring and specific. Does the software change what happens next? Not what it displays, not what it summarizes, but what actually happens in the business after it runs.
Vertical AI is an operating system, not a trend
The phrase we keep coming back to is that vertical AI is not a trend to watch. It is the operating system for the next generation of business.
For a multi-location operator, that means something concrete. The CRM holds the records. The payment processor holds the money. The scheduling tool holds the classes. None of them decide what matters today, and none of them act. That gap is where the owner has been standing for years, and it is the gap NexScale was built to close.
NexScale watches member behaviour across the systems each location already runs, decides what deserves attention, drafts the follow-ups for a person on the team to approve, and reports back in plain language: a briefing in the morning, a wrap at night, and the work in between.
We are not adding AI to old software. We are building what AI-native operations look like from the ground up, for one industry, properly.
Who we want to meet at Elevate
If any of these describe you, we would like to talk:
You are building vertical AI, in FitTech or anywhere else in B2B SaaS, and you are past the demo stage
You run a platform in fitness, wellness or recreation and you are thinking about what an AI layer on top of your API should actually do
You own or operate studios and you are tired of dashboards that tell you what already went wrong
You invest in vertical AI and you want to hear how the unit economics work in an SMB market
We are equally happy to hear where you think we are wrong. The most useful conversations we have had this year started that way.
Keep the conversation going
If we met at the festival, or you would like to pick up the conversation, the fastest route is a short call.
Book a discovery call with NexScale
Scaling fitness and wellness businesses today. Powering human longevity tomorrow.
