A University of Waterloo alumnus who is a successful venture capitalist and part owner of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors has donated $25 million towards Engineering 7, the University’s newest building that officially opened today.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau brought equal amounts of enthusiasm and inspiration Friday as he helped kick off Hack the North with a brief but rousing speech to a packed house at Hagey Hall.
Trudeau admitted he once “sort of dropped out” of an engineering program, but said he envied about 1,000 students from top universities in 22 countries who gathered in Waterloo for the weekend hackathon.
Thalmic Labs, a company founded by three Waterloo Engineering graduates, announced a series B raise of US $120 million today.
Leading the future of human-computer interaction with its Myo gesture control armband, the company has plans to further build out its workforce in Kitchener-Waterloo and San Francisco, and accelerate development of new technologies and products.
The investment was led by Intel Capital, the Amazon Alexa Fund and Fidelity Investments Canada.
A tight timeline was only fitting when engineers at the University of Waterloo took on a special project for the Canadian track cycling team headed to the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
Lending their expertise in a world where winners and losers are typically decided by tiny fractions of a second, Professor John McPhee and research engineer Carin Yeghiazarian had just one week in June to produce a small but technically complex piece of hardware.
Jay Shah - a former startup co-founder and University of Waterloo alumnus - is the new director of Velocity, Waterloo’s flagship entrepreneurship program. Shah joins Velocity from Google, where he worked since the tech-giant acquired BufferBox, the company he co-founded in 2012.
With only three minutes to pitch their company to a panel of judges, contestants at the Velocity Fund Finals (VFF) must be articulate and engaging, condensing complex ideas into understandable information.
And stakes are high.
A device that harvests ambient emissions from smartphones and converts them into power to run smart contact lenses has earned a team of Waterloo Engineering students a third-place finish and a $4,500 US prize in an international design competition.
Fifty student teams vied for honours at the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Symposium in Puerto Rico after being challenged to design and build power-harvesting devices capable of turning radio-frequency emissions into useful DC power.
Waterloo Engineering and Spectrum 28, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, are collaborating on an entrepreneurship program that will see senior students and faculty receive early-stage venture support through pop up classes, mentorship and access to a $2 million venture capital fund.
Three of the top research-intensive and industrially collaborative universities in Ontario – McMaster University, University of Waterloo and Western University – received $35 million in funding over five years from the Government of Ontario today as part of a $50 million project aimed at combining existing strengths in the heart of Ontario’s manufacturing region to create an Advanced Manufacturing Consortium.