Co-founders from Sentry, Cohere back Toronto startup’s AI product management platform.
Before AI, software developers already had to contend with a flood of information. As large-language models (LLMs) have sped up the pace of development, keeping all the context in one place and arranging it in order of importance remains a persistent challenge.
Ben Vinegar, founder of Toronto-based Modem, knows this firsthand. As a former VP of engineering at Silicon Valley unicorn Sentry, he has a unique insight into the bottlenecks faced by developer teams.
His new startup, which launched last May, has attracted the attention of former colleagues and other veteran tech angels. Modem closed a $4.4-million USD ($6 million CAD) equity pre-seed round led by Silicon Valley firm Accel, with participation from Montréal’s Inovia Capital and several angel investors, including Cohere co-founder Ivan Zhang and Sentry co-founders David Cramer and Chris Jennings. Sentry has also become a client, using Modem in its workflows.
Getting user feedback to developers is like a “game of telephone,” Vinegar said in an interview with BetaKit. “By the time it reaches you, you’re already getting a mutated version of what’s true.”
Vinegar explained that Modem integrates into software teams’ existing platforms to manage its product workflow by proactively flagging bugs, curating support tickets, and even following up with customers after software updates. Like other agentic AI products, Modem can take action on a user’s behalf and respond to natural-language questions like: “What are the biggest issues my customers are facing?”
Investors are looking to companies like Modem as startups building with AI eat up a larger share of the software space in Canada.
“We’ve seen firsthand how AI-powered coding tools have transformed developer productivity,” Taha Mubashir, Inovia Capital partner, told BetaKit in an email. “Ben had a similar insight—an AI that does for product teams what coding agents do for engineers.”
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Vinegar said that, in addition to Sentry, Modem has seen success selling to small developer teams building software with AI. It sells through a subscription model inspired by some of the leading AI products, which can fluctuate depending on data usage.
While developers are shipping software faster with the help of AI, the productivity gains have been uneven. A January study by the Complexity Science Hub, which looked at the work of more than 160,000 users on GitHub, found that generative AI tools increased programmers’ productivity by four percent on average—but that increase was concentrated among senior developers. A July 2025 study by research nonprofit METR found that experienced developers took 19 percent longer to complete tasks when they used AI tools, despite thinking they were working more quickly.
Despite living in California during his time at Sentry and for a few years after, Vinegar returned to Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic and decided to build Modem from home. Though San Francisco is undoubtedly the “centre of the universe” for building in tech, Vinegar said that doesn’t mean Toronto, and Canada at large, doesn’t have its own benefits. Talent is one of them, Vinegar said, as he remembers Sentry participating in the “brain drain” by hiring Canadian talent down south.
Location has been a point of conversation in Canadian tech this month, after famed accelerator Y Combinator briefly took Canada off its list of investable sites (only to reinstate it a week later).
To Vinegar, the key takeaway for Canada was how it could better emulate the sense of community created by the accelerator’s cohort companies.
“Even though some are competing, they are kind of on the same team,” Vinegar said. If Canadian companies get better about buying each other’s products, “that can exist right now in Canada.”
Feature image Image courtesy Ben Vinegar via LinkedIn.