Cognitiv's First Office Outside the US Is in Vancouver, and It's All Engineering
Cognitiv is opening its first office outside the United States, and it's not a sales office.
The New York-based ad-tech company, known for its deep learning platform and tools like ContextGPT and AudienceGPT, launches an engineering and data hub in Vancouver on September 1. The team is built around big data, web data collection, attribution, and machine learning operations, the infrastructure work that sits underneath the models Cognitiv sells to clients.
Vancouver puts the new team in the same time zone as Cognitiv's Seattle and San Francisco offices. Eifphriame Angeles, Senior Director of Engineering, will lead the team locally and report to SVP of Engineering Stephen Curial, who runs those two offices.
It's a well-worn playbook by now. Amazon, Microsoft, and Shopify all built serious engineering presences in Vancouver for close to the same reasons Cognitiv is citing: proximity to Pacific coast headquarters, a deep graduate pipeline out of UBC and SFU, and Canada's comparatively fast path to a work visa for skilled hires who can't clear the US system. What's newer is which companies are running that playbook. A wave of mid-size US tech firms, BuildOps and Zip and OpenTable among them, opened or expanded dedicated Canadian engineering offices this year, explicitly framing them as more than sales outposts. Most of that activity has landed in Toronto. Cognitiv choosing Vancouver, and choosing engineering over sales as the entry point, puts it in a smaller group.
There's a compliance angle too. Cognitiv says the Vancouver team will help it navigate global data privacy regulation as its footprint grows internationally, Canada's regulatory regime included. For a company running machine learning models on advertising data, having engineers who build inside Canadian jurisdiction is a different proposition for marketers weighing where their data actually lives than a logo on a conference floor would be.
Curial frames the move around infrastructure, not headcount: it's “the chance to build a team from the ground up dedicated to responsible data stewardship," and, in his words, “that foundation matters as much as the models we build on top of it."
Cognitiv arrives with momentum behind it. The company reports ContextGPT adoption grew 388 percent last year and new client counts rose 67 percent, and CEO Jeremy Fain is a finalist for EY's 2026 Entrepreneur of the Year award in New York. None of that happened in Canada yet. Vancouver is the first indication the company plans to build something here beyond a client list.
