Cameron Bergen did not learn this business in a classroom. He learned it on the floor, over more than 20 years running operations inside one of Canada’s largest food processors, a company acquired in 2018 for more than a billion dollars. He and his team, including Tracy Gromniski, helped generate more than $300 million in annual operational value from the operations they ran themselves. They did not study the problem. They lived it.
What that work taught him had less to do with machines than with knowledge. Every organization runs on it, and almost none of it is safe. It sits locked inside systems that were never built to talk to each other, and inside the heads of the people who know how the place really works. When those people walk out the door, the knowledge walks with them.
Bergen started mode40 to change that. The idea was simple and enormous: take everything a great operator knows and everything an organization’s systems hold, and turn it into something that lasts. Not a report. Not another dashboard. An intelligence that understands how the business actually works, remembers what its people know, and helps it act.
He didn’t build it alone. Tracy Gromniski, mode40’s chief product officer, had spent the better part of two decades building machine-learning systems, long before it was fashionable to call it AI. Where Bergen knew the operations, she knew how to make that knowledge repeatable, how to turn what a team had done by instinct into something that could live in software and travel far beyond a single company.
mode40 calls it the Singularity, and it runs quietly today across manufacturing, food and beverage, aerospace and defence, healthcare, and education. One customer runs 19 facilities as a single connected operation. Another cut unplanned downtime by 86 percent across seven facilities. Another turned 50 monthly shortages into 12 within six months. The results behind the scenes are dramatic, and most of them mode40 isn’t free to share. That’s on purpose. The company has never been interested in talking about the work. It’s interested in doing it.
None of it begins with technology. The technology is the instrument, not the objective. mode40 starts with the question most projects skip: what is the real problem we’re trying to solve? Answer that, and the systems, the data, and the outcomes follow.
That reach across industries is deliberate, and it’s where the idea gets exciting. A problem that looks unsolvable in one sector has often already been solved in another. mode40 once took capabilities born on a factory floor, reshaped them for one of North America’s largest healthcare providers, and built something the organization never knew was possible.
“We don’t need to get better at busywork,” Bergen says. “We need to stop doing it.”
Underneath all of it sits one conviction, and it’s bigger than any single customer. Whatever country an organization operates in, its data, its knowledge, and its future should belong to it. Too many companies modernized by handing the intelligence that makes them valuable to someone else’s platform, in someone else’s country, under someone else’s rules. Bergen doesn’t believe a company, or a country, should have to rent its future.
That’s why mode40 builds in Manitoba, for Canada, and calls it a Canadian standard. Recognition has followed quietly: a 2026 Manitoba Champion Award, a Canadian Food Innovation Network Rising Star, a finalist spot in North Forge’s DARE Innovation Awards. But the awards aren’t the point. The point is what they signal, that the infrastructure for the next economy can be built here, and owned here.
“This isn’t really about software,” Bergen says. “It’s about whether a country gets to understand its own industries, keep what its people know, and decide its own future. We’re proving that can be built in Canada. The only question left is how far we take it.”
