Internet Backyard Mai Trinh receives preliminary seed capital of US$4.5 million for data center financing platform.
Mai Trinh and her team wanted to create a community for the city's Gen Z tech scene that could rival communities in Silicon Valley. But when it came time to create her own artificial intelligence startup, she fled to San Francisco instead.
“The US allows us to test, deliver and scale faster before properly bringing these capabilities back to Canada.”
Trinh, a graduate of Simon Fraser University, says she had an easier path to citizenship and fewer barriers to starting a company in the United States. So this fall, she closed Red Thread Club and moved to San Francisco to work on her startup, Internet Backyard. She and Internet Backyard co-founder Gabriel Ravacci have now raised US$4.5 million ($6.2 million CAD) in a simple future equity agreement (SAFE) with a valuation of US$25 million ($34.5 million CAD).
The preliminary round was led by American firm Basis Set with participation from Crucible Capital, Breakers, Operation Collective and Maple VC. Angel checks came from entrepreneurs Ian Crosby (co-founder of Bench Accounting), Jay Adelson (co-founder of Equinix) and Jordy Rose (co-founder of D-Wave and former CEO of Sanctuary AI).
Trinh told BetaKit in an interview last month that she originally came to Vancouver from Vietnam to get her bachelor's degree and ended up working at robotics startup Sanctuary AI. Hoping for greater integration into the tech community, Trinh attended the event. Vancouver Summit website in the spring, which she told BetaKit was “the most boring tech event” she's ever been to.
She took her frustrations out to the Red Thread Club, which held its own events for the tech community over the summer. But she said Red Thread has become a labor-intensive project.
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Meanwhile, Trinh was also preparing to apply for permanent residency in Canada. She even planned to learn French to improve her admission scores. But working on a startup instead of a safer job that would better meet PR requirements made things more difficult.
“I worked from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. every night,” Trinh told BetaKit.
Trinh says her lawyer told her and her co-founder that the best solution was to leave Canada. After raising venture capital, Treen said it was relatively easy to qualify for a U.S. visa.
A fresh approach to the “dinosaur industry”
Along the way, Trinh also worked on creating Gnomos, Internet Backyard's first product. Gnomos is a data center financing platform that uses artificial intelligence agents to provide operators with dynamic snapshots of key metrics such as utilization, energy consumption and cost. Trinh says the product will help young startups gain more visibility into how their computing resources are being used, which can become incredibly expensive once they run out of free credits from hyperscalers or large cloud computing centers, she said.
Trinh says Internet Backyard aims to offer a new, artificial intelligence-driven approach to the “dinosaur industry” of data center financing. Trinh told BetaKit that the data center operators she spoke with managed finances using spreadsheets, email and other outdated software that is ill-suited to a fast-growing economy. demand for computing.
“No one knows the performance of their building, its use, heat, liquids, capital investments. [capital expenditure]- said Trin. “So we’re building it.”
Gnomos also aims to automate quotes, invoices, payments and dispute resolution. Trinh targets customers such as mid-sized data center operators and those entering the space for the first time. Despite the US move, one of Internet Backyard's first customers was Canadian data center operator AxiNorth, based in Vancouver.
The path of least resistance ends in the USA
Trinh says she had hoped to stay in Canada. But it wasn't just her immigration status that influenced her decision: She was looking for the path of least resistance to what she was building. For example, she said Canada's fragmented financial regulatory landscape is more difficult to navigate than U.S. regulations.
“U.S. customers are more comfortable piloting. In Canada, procurement cycles are slower and people are waiting for certainty from regulators,” Trinh told BetaKit. “So the US allows us to test, deliver and scale faster before properly bringing these capabilities back to Canada.”
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Trinh is far from the only Canadian technology leader who has decided to build a technology company in the United States. According to the Toronto-based firm Leaders FoundationJust 32.4 percent of Canadian “high potential” startups (companies that raised more than $1 million) created in 2024 were headquartered in Canada, while nearly half were headquartered in the United States.
After her trip to the Red Thread Club was first shown in LogicsTrinh says she's received an influx of messages from young Canadian founders facing a similar immigration situation: They want to stay in Canada, but are worried about clearing the PR points system.
While Trinh maintains strong ties to the Vancouver startup scene, her focus right now is on building the Internet Backyard—wherever that takes her. “I don’t care if I’m the founder,” Trinh told BetaKit with a smile. “I just care about solving the problem.”
Artistic image courtesy of Internet Backyard.
