Two of the country's biggest student-led tech events landed in Waterloo this September, attracting students, alumni, business founders and investors from around the world, reinforcing the region's status as the place for startups and tech talent in Canada.
Hack the North, now in its 13th year, welcomed more than 1,000 participants for a 36-hour hacking sprint that produced 353 projects. Waterloo Tech Week — in only its second year — connected founders, talent scouts and venture capitalists across the startup community.
Waterloo Engineering students and alumni were at the centre of both. Michael Litt (BASc '10, systems design engineering), who launched Vidyard as a fourth-year capstone project and now co-founds Garage Capital, pointed to the Faculty's co-op advantage: "You get access to real-world problems on a consistent basis through co-op and get to work with people you can potentially found and build companies with." Megan Chun, a computer engineering student and Hack the North co-director, said the campus "gathers such a large concentration of people who are really excited to build something."
The momentum is backed by data. In PitchBook's 2026 university rankings, Waterloo placed first among Canadian universities for producing undergraduate entrepreneurs and seventh globally. Chris Albinson, managing partner at True North Fund, called Waterloo "the most diverse campus doing the most interesting things on the planet with the most ambition."
For alumni like Jocelyne Murphy (BASc '25, systems design engineering), who co-founded Wygo and has raised more than $1.5 million from Canadian investors, the ecosystem is also a community. "The people in Canada really want to see other Canadians win," she said, "and they'll reach down and pull you up."
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