Canada - A Canadian AI team built for US buyers.
ESARC is headquartered in Vancouver. Most of our clients are in New York, San Francisco, and Boston. The Canadian piece is structural, not a marketing line. It changes cost, talent, residency, and how fast we can move.
The structural advantage
Six reasons US enterprises hire Canadian AI teams.
01
CAD cost base, USD invoice
We pay our team in Canadian dollars. You pay us in USD. The currency gap is the simplest wedge in the deal. Same caliber of senior engineer, lower all-in burn, no offshore handoffs.
02
SR&ED-backed R&D
When the work is R&D-shaped, our Canadian engineering hours qualify for the SR&ED tax credit at up to 35%. We do the paperwork. The effect for you: roughly 65 cents on the dollar for novel AI work that would otherwise cost full freight in California.
03
Vector, Waterloo, UofT, McGill, UBC
The Canadian AI talent funnel runs straight through Vector Institute (Toronto), Waterloo CS, the University of Toronto, McGill, and UBC. Same researchers your favourite frontier lab tries to hire. We hire from the same pool, in the same country, with no visa overhead.
04
Your timezone, both coasts
EST in Toronto, PT in Vancouver. One country, two time zones, full overlap with US business hours from open to close. Standups happen in real time. No 12-hour async lag.
05
Data residency tailwinds
For US enterprises with Canadian customers, data residency is going from nice-to-have to procurement-blocker. Building with a Canadian team that already runs in Canadian regions gets PIPEDA, Quebec Law 25, and provincial residency questions out of the way before legal asks them.
06
Hire-friendly, not hire-blocking
Cross-border consulting is the cleanest legal structure. Standard MSA, no immigration, no PE risk if we run it right. Most US enterprises we work with have a Canadian vendor template already.
The boring details
What procurement asks before they sign.
Working with US teams
If you have an AI roadmap and a US procurement process, we already know the dance.
We bill in USD, sign your MSA, and join your Slack. The Canadian piece is a structural advantage on the back end. The engineering looks the same as any senior US team. Better, in most cases.
Tell us what you’re trying to ship.
A principal engineer reads every inbound. We reply same day on weekdays, with an honest read of whether we’re the right team for the work.