Deep technology needs a market and a mandate.
Knowgic Technology is a Waterloo, Ontario advisory firm. We find the market — taking Canadian technology into Japanese industry, and Japanese companies into the Canadian innovation economy. And we build the mandate — the case that puts a technology on a government agenda and into the institutions that deploy it at scale.
What we do
Cross-border strategy
Market entry that survives contact with reality. We define the thesis, find the counterpart, and stay in the room through the proof-of-concept, the contract, and the first commercial outcome.
Policy positioning
Deep tech does not scale on private demand alone. Public funding, university capacity and industrial policy decide which technologies get built at scale. We make the case that puts a specific capability inside a stated national priority — written for the deputy-minister-level reader who has to act on it.
Program design and delivery
Funding schemes, curriculum, pilot programs, go-to-market plans. We write the documents that get decisions made, not summaries of what everyone already knows.
Physical AI is where our work is concentrated right now.
Physical AI is the AI that runs on real machines — robots, autonomous equipment, production lines — rather than only in software. Canada has named advanced manufacturing and robotics a national priority but has not funded the engineering talent pipeline behind it. Japan has the industrial base and the demographic urgency. Knowgic works on both sides of that gap, and advises Quanser, the Markham company whose platform universities worldwide use to train these engineers.
Proof of "trust" and work
The pattern behind our work is not introductions. It is seeing why a technical capability matters before the market has organized around it, making the institutional case for it, and staying with the transaction until it becomes real.
Before Knowgic, Tetsu worked at Wolfram Research and Cybernet Systems, then identified Maplesoft as a Canadian engineering software company worth bringing into a Japanese industrial group. At Cybernet, he proposed the acquisition and helped carry it through to completion; at Maplesoft, he later served as Executive Vice-President & Board Member and built the Japan business across universities & national institutions, automotive industries, and machinery companies.
Since founding Knowgic, that same work has continued from Waterloo: supporting Acerta Analytics as its Japan business lead, serving as the trusted local advisor when Japan's Consulate-General in Toronto and Embassy in Ottawa bring senior visitors to the Kitchener-Waterloo region, and working through strong institutional pipes with JETRO, Invest Ottawa, and Waterloo EDC. The current version of that work is Physical AI, funding schemes, and the institutional partnerships that turn a technical capability into a program.