RSM partners with Toronto-based venture studio AXL
RSM, a mid-market accounting and consulting firm, has entered a strategic collaboration with AXL, a Toronto-based venture studio focused on building homegrown, AI-powered companies.
As part of the collaboration, RSM will serve as exclusive provider of accounting, tax, and consulting services to AXL – delivering strategic guidance, compliance expertise, and growth planning support. The firm will also act as preferred provider of professional services to AXL’s portfolio of startups.
“We’re seeing incredible momentum around AI and the value it can unlock,” said Harry Blum, national managing partner at RSM Canada. “With AXL as a strategic collaborator, we’re accelerating innovation—helping businesses move beyond legacy models and positioning them to grow, compete and thrive in a future-ready economy, while embedding AI across our own solution sets.”
AXL was founded last year and has closed an initial venture fund of $15 million. Daniel Wigdor, AXL co-founder and CEO, is lead investor of the fund.
Wigdor sold his company Chatham Labs to Meta in 2020 and afterwards served as founding director of Meta’s reality labs in Toronto. A professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, Wigdor has founded several companies and holds more than 60 patents.
AXL aims to build 50 AI-powered companies over the next five years to fuel Canada’s research-to-commercialization pipeline.
“Canada doesn’t have an innovation gap, it has a commercialization gap,” said Wigdor. “With RSM, we’re taking demand signals from the market and moving fast to turn that into scalable, enterprise-ready solutions. This is execution over hype. This is how Canada leads—not just in ideas, but in outcomes.”
Although Canada is a leading force in AI academic research, much of its advancements are commercialized abroad. Like a country that simply exports its raw materials to its neighbour for processing and manufacturing, Canada is losing out on most of the value-added benefits in the AI supply chain.
Nearly 75% of AI patents from Canada’s top institutes are acquired by international tech companies, with only 7% remaining in the country, according to the UN. Canadian companies, lacking the scale and capital intensity of its southern counterparts, lag on AI adoption – only 20% of mid-size Canadian firms have begun integrating AI, according to the OECD.
