For over three decades, co-op students like Smita Basak have helped drive innovation at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada.
Every year, students across engineering, including those in MME, culminate their program with a Capstone Design project to develop innovative ideas to advance an area of interest. Students also have the opportunity to take part in the Norman Esch Entrepreneurship Awards for Capstone Design, open to a broad audience, with the chance to win their share of $100,000 in prize money.
Cristiano Da Silva, a current mechanical engineering undergraduate, was part of the group Dreaming Objects, which won $50,000 at HARD MODE, an invite-only hardware and artificial intelligence hackathon hosted by the MIT Media Lab.
Rotostitch, founded in 2025, is striving to make a sustainable impact on the apparel industry with garment construction. The company was co-founded by Waterloo Engineering alum Leah McClure (BASc ’24, mechanical engineering) and Anson Tsang.
Vena Medical, a company born out of a fourth-year Capstone Design project and now a Velocity Health company, just became one of the first recipients of Ontario’s new Life Sciences Scale-Up Fund (LSSUF). The LSSUF is part of the Government of Ontario’s larger efforts to support medical-based companies within the province. The fund’s goal is to help advance innovation and attract more interest and investment into the field.
Dr. Yimin Wu and PhD student Wei Wei, in mechanical and mechatronics engineering, are turning plastic waste into acetic acid, a main ingredient of vinegar, using sunlight as a natural resource.
Co-founded by mechatronics alum, Sam Dugan (BASc ‘22), Upside Robotics is transforming agriculture through sustainable automation. The company has invented robots that apply fertilizers precisely where crops need them and allow farmers to monitor fields and track crop health, remotely and efficiently.
Kitchener-based health-technology company Vena Medical started as a fourth-year design project by Michael Phillips and Phillip Cooper (both BASc ‘18, mechanical engineering) in Waterloo Engineering and has only continued to grow since then.
Toronto-based construction company, Brickeye, was founded in 2014 by Waterloo MME alumni Richard Liang (BASc ’12, MASc ’14), Hamid Alemohammad (PhD ’10), Amir Azhari (PhD ’17), and Alex Fuentes (BASc ’00).
Three mechatronics engineering graduates have been aiming big since graduation. Stephen Lake, Matthew Bailey, and Aaron Grant, who all graduated from mechatronics engineering at Waterloo in 2012, founded Thalmic Labs, a startup that was rooted in their Capstone Design project.