Startups win financial backing at Velocity pitch event

Two startup companies with strong connections to Waterloo Engineering won financial backing at a recent Velocity Fund Pitch Competition.

The big winner of a $100,000 investment through the Velocity Fund and Velocity Health Tech Fund portfolios was PiAndPower, which is developing technology to identify viral structures through their waveform characteristics.

The company has partnered with engineering professors Safieddin Safavi-Naeini and George Shaker, along with their team at the Centre for Intelligent Antenna and Radio Systems (CIARS) at Waterloo, on work to detect viruses like the one that causes COVID-19 using wireless signals.

Ribbit, which was co-founded by Waterloo doctoral student Jeremy Wang, was one of three companies to win $50,000 investments.

It is working to tackle food scarcity in northern communities by retrofitting small planes with hardware and software to enable more frequent flights to underserviced areas.