We have some news we have been waiting to share. AdMagic has been selected as a semi-finalist in the Promising Student Entrepreneur category of the CIBC Biz Pitch Competition™, presented by CIBC Business Banking and the Women’s Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub (WEKH) at the Diversity Institute, Toronto Metropolitan University.

Out of all the applications received, only 10 were selected to advance in our category. AdMagic is one of them.

For a startup still in active MVP development, that is a meaningful signal. Not a finish line, but proof that the problem we are solving makes sense to people outside our own spreadsheets.

What the CIBC Biz Pitch Competition Is

The CIBC Biz Pitch Competition™ is a national pitch competition built to celebrate and accelerate Canadian entrepreneurship. It is open to ventures at every stage, from early-concept student businesses to established, high-growth companies.

• Three competitive categories plus one audience choice award
• $45,000 CAD in total cash prizes
• $10,000 for the Promising Student Entrepreneur of the Year
• October 20, 2026: finalists pitch live at a virtual pitch event

WEKH is a national network focused on research and support for women entrepreneurs and inclusive entrepreneurship in Canada. Having our vision reviewed and advanced by a program backed by CIBC and WEKH means a lot to a team that started out as operators, not software builders.

The Problem That Got Us Here

AdMagic exists because of a gap we kept running into during our agency years. Ad platforms report ROAS. Finance teams care about net profit. Almost nobody connects the two, so brands keep scaling campaigns that look great in a dashboard and quietly lose money once product costs, shipping, returns, and fees hit the books.

Creative testing makes it worse. The industry default is weeks of testing and $10,000 to $20,000 in spend before you learn that a creative was never going to work.

AdMagic tackles both sides of that problem:

• Profit, not just ROAS: we tie ad spend back to true net profit and contribution margin, so marketing and finance finally look at the same number.
• Score before you spend: UNisal, our proprietary neuro-creative scoring model built on AdMagic’s own benchmarking and baselines, rates a creative before a single dollar goes behind it.
• Humans stay in control: the AI proposes a recommendation with a reason and an audit trail. A person approves before anything executes.

The Founders Behind the Application

AdMagic is co-founded by Deepan Mohan and Anmol Pandita. Between them, they have managed more than $4M in ad spend and helped generate $2.1M+ in revenue for past clients, and they are now building the tool they wished they had back then.

We are building AdMagic inside Toronto Metropolitan University’s startup ecosystem, and you can read more about that in how we built AdMagic inside TMU’s startup ecosystem. Being recognized by a competition hosted through TMU’s Diversity Institute feels like a natural next chapter of that story.

What Happens Next

Semi-finalist is a stage, not a result, and we want to be clear about that. The next step is finalist selection, and finalists will pitch live on October 20, 2026 for a share of the prize pool. We will share the outcome here, whatever it is.

In the meantime, the work does not change. We are still heads down on the MVP and still focused on landing our first 10 design partners: DTC and ecommerce brands who want to help shape a product that connects every ad dollar to real profit.

Thank You

A sincere thank you to CIBC Business Banking, the Women’s Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub, and the Diversity Institute at Toronto Metropolitan University for creating this platform for early-stage founders. And thank you to our mentors, advisors, and everyone on our waitlist who has backed this idea since it was just a spreadsheet.

If you run paid social for an ecommerce brand and want to see what your ads are really doing to your profit, join the AdMagic waitlist and follow along as we head toward October 20.