Alberta startup identifies unique need in Canada’s immigrant community
Speaking French in Canada can open doors. Fluency might help you land a job or boost your mobility, upwardly or across the country. But for immigrants, French skills can mean being able to make your home here. Hems Joshi (Bachelor of Technology in Management ’20) is trying to help, using an AI-powered language learning system.
“I had diplomas in French before I came to Canada,” says Joshi, who has a Bachelor of Science from Integral University in India, where he was born. “I realized it can give you an advantage in immigration. I’m a citizen now.”
The assistance French can provide to would-be Canadians can be quantified. If you can pass the Canadian Language Benchmark level seven (CLB-7) test for French, it’s worth 50 points in the federal government’s system for assessing immigrants for permanent residence programs. This is more than you score for having a sibling in Canada or completing a university degree here.
But if you’re not a native French speaker, passing the test is easier said than done.
“I was teaching French when I took it and it was horrendous,” says Joshi. “The exam is almost five hours long. You’re tested on reading, writing, speaking, listening. If you fail any one of these, you fail the whole thing.”
Fluent in French, Joshi passed the test. But the memory stuck with him, and when he left his project management job in the fall of 2024, he decided to try to solve the problem. The result is Simple French With Hems, an online language learning platform that prepares students to pass the CLB-7 with the help of artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
The big innovation
The federal and provincial governments both want more French-speaking immigrants in Canada. In November 2025, the Government of Canada announced a $3.6-million investment in projects supporting Francophone immigrants outside Quebec. In February 2026, the Alberta government updated its immigrant support scoring to give more weight to French language ability.
But immigrants who may want to stay in Canada and are on student or work visas are poor fits for most French education resources.
“If I’m coming here from Singapore, India, China, Nepal, I’m here for a limited time. Most courses run for three or four years. They won’t admit me; it’s too long,” says Joshi. “Plus, I have my job and my school. I can’t do a third thing on top of that.”
Simple French, which Joshi launched in spring 2024, may change that. Built entirely by his company, it features more than 400 lessons, upwards of 5,000 quizzes, books, animations and more. Its big innovation is its use of natural language processing, which is AI that allows computers to respond to human language. Siri and Alexa use it.
Joshi’s program uses the technology in a few different ways, including for exam practise. AI “agents” can assess a user’s written or spoken French and offer tips for improvement. Using a computer or smartphone, the learner responds to a question. The system grades their answer on criteria like complexity of sentence structure and vocabulary range. It also corrects grammatical mistakes and provides an overall fluency score.
But the application that Joshi is probably most proud of is the virtual reality. In collaboration with some friends abroad, he built an AI-powered VR program that can listen and talk to users, who will be able to use the technology at Simple French With Hems events.
“It gives feedback in under two seconds,” Joshi says. “When we started, it took 25 seconds.”
Taken together, all that work is starting to get people talking.
All in the name
Joshi’s elaborate learning system is more than a gimmick, according to Paula Canas.
“The VR is a very engaging way of learning,” says Canas, a language teacher by training. “It’s very fun.”
Canas is an entrepreneurial coach. She met Joshi through Edmonton Unlimited, a startup accelerator, where she coached him because of their shared interest in language learning.
“I really see Hems as ahead of the game, in comparison to other founders,” she says.
“He is very motivated to learn new things and he’s always on top of the latest technology.”
Canas says the biggest problem she saw Joshi solve during his time in the program was refining his target market.
“It took him maybe a year to find who he was selling to,” she says. “He was approaching everybody and it was getting a little messy.”
With help from Canas and lots of market research, Joshi targeted immigration consultants.
“There are millions of immigrants in this country who could be helped by this platform,” says Joshi. “The challenge is how we reach them. If I run ads on Reddit or Facebook, it does nothing. There’s no pain point.”
An immigrant who’s a few points short on the federal ranking system, however, has an immediate need. Simple French is designed to help that person.
Joshi’s immediate business goal is to partner with more immigration consultants. He’s reaching out to potential clients across Canada, and has secured deals with a few in Ontario and is in talks with more in Edmonton, Calgary and Surrey. He’s also taken Simple French into local elementary schools and run workshops at seniors' centres, where he says the VR tech is a hit.
His ultimate plan for Simple French With Hems is right there in the name.
“People are scared of learning French,” he says. “I want to show that it’s simple. Can you understand English? Then you can speak French.”
