Boast recently joined the League of Innovators for a live workshop with their Labs Batch 16 founders, which are a group of pre-PMF builders tackling some genuinely hard problems. The session covered the fundamentals of SR&ED, the most common mistakes founders make when claiming it, and what a real SR&ED journey looks like from a founder who’s been through it.
Here are a few of the highlights form a fantastic session that featured both Boast’s own in-house experts as well as our customer Jeremy Levett, MD, who is co-founder and CEO of Quebec-based Stenoa.
The full recording is available on demand and worth watching for anyone tackling challenging R&D in Canada today.
The core idea: SR&ED rewards risk, not results
Boast SR&ED expert Mat Rutishauser opened with a framing that resets how most founders think about the program. Claiming SR&ED doesn’t hinge on your organization “research company.” Instead, SR&ED qualification is aimed at determining whether you’re taking on genuine technological uncertainty to solve a problem, and documenting what you learned along the way.
Mat’s 80/20 rule is a useful gut check: If existing technology gets you 80% of the way to your goal, and you’re doing the work to close that remaining 20% gap, you’re likely in SR&ED territory. Just as importantly, you don’t need to succeed, as the SR&ED program is designed to help fund the attempt (because that’s what innovation actually looks like in practice).
The CCPC advantage: it's cash, not just a credit
One of the session's most clarifying moments came when Mat addressed the founders in the room who are pre-revenue or burning cash. The question behind the question: Why would I care about a tax credit if I'm not paying taxes?
The answer is that as a Canadian-controlled private company (CCPC), SR&ED isn't a deduction, but a refundable credit. That is, money the government puts directly back into your bank account. CCPCs also receive a 35% credit rate, which more than double the 15% available to larger corporations. The government's rationale, as Mat put it, is simple: Early-stage Canadian founders are the backbone of the economy, and the program is designed to back them accordingly.
The documentation mistake almost everyone makes
The single most actionable takeaway from the session may have been Mat's point on contemporaneous documentation. The CRA wants evidence that captures what you were doing at the time you were doing it, not a reconstruction at year-end.
The good news is that you probably already have most of what you need if you're following even standard best practices for R&D. Weekly standups, task tracking tools, and project management systems can all serve as SR&ED-eligible documentation with the right setup. As Mat recommends, if you have an AI notetaker on your team calls, for instance, configure it to capture the pain points your team hit, the approaches you tried, and the outcomes. That record becomes the backbone of a defensible claim.
From the founder's seat: Jeremy Levett, Stenoa
The second half of the session featured Jeremy Levett, MD, who is the founder and CEO of Stenoa, a Montreal-based company replacing pagers and paper in cardiac care with a fully integrated platform for mission-critical care coordination. Jeremy filed his first SR&ED claim this past year while simultaneously running a growing company and completing his cardiac surgery residency.
His experience cut through a lot of the complexity. Stenoa used their existing task tracking tools, synced them with Boast's platform, and let Boast's client delivery team map the qualifying work and build the narrative. Total time commitment across scoping and the full first-year claim was less than 20 hours.
The framing that landed most for the LOI founders in the room was that SR&ED doesn't just reimburse the work you've done. It gives you permission to take on the hard problems you might otherwise avoid because the government is sharing the downside risk of genuine technological uncertainty.
The Q&A
The session closed with questions from the LOI community that ranged from CPG supplement formulation (yes, it can qualify) to grant stacking with IRAP (yes, there are rules, so get advice before structuring your payroll), to the Quebec CDAE-IA program and what’s changed for Montreal-based founders in 2026.
The full Q&A is in the full webinar recording linked below. If any of those scenarios above sound like your situation, it’s the part of our workshop most worth watching.
Watch the full session
The complete webinar (including Mat’s full SR&ED eligibility walkthrough, Jeremy’s founder story, and the live Q&A) is available on demand.
Not sure if your company qualifies? Our team will give you an honest read with no obligation.
