Entrepreneurship

Robotics company Cobionix has raised a $2.8 million seed round to deploy its commercial robotics system Codi, an industry-first tele-robotic medical imaging tool.

The company, which is part of the University of Waterloo’s Velocity incubator, hopes that Codi will increase access to diagnostic imaging services and save healthcare costs by reducing procedure time, ultimately improving patient care.

Anna Liebenberg ( BASc ’22) and Shreshth Mehra ( BASc ’22) bonded over a mutual love of fitness.

Both, however, experienced moments of isolation in their athletic pursuits. For Mehra, it was when he was training for Iron Man, a long-distance triathlon event. For Liebenberg, it was when she was lifting weights at the gym without help from a personal trainer.

Grand River Hospital Foundation’s Care Never Stops Week (from May 23 to May 28) featured a Health Innovation Challenge in partnership with the University of Waterloo’s Velocity Incubator, a free public talk with Tomi Poutanen, CEO and Co-founder of artificial intelligence-driven health company Signal 1, and a grand finale Rally for Health, with a free public concert. 

Waterloo student-founded company Safi – from the Swahili word for “pure” or “safe” – is a startup with an ambitious mission. They want to empower East African farmers to pasteurize milk cheaply and easily, with the ultimate goal of ending milk-transmitted disease. Today, Safi’s founders are working with governments, presenting at international conferences and preparing for a 300-unit test rollout in Rwanda. Two years ago, however, Safi was just an idea.

On May 16, Velocity kicked-off a partnership with the Grand River Hospital Foundation (GRHF) as part of their Care Never Stops campaign by presenting the Health Innovation Challenge.  The student hack-a-thon with a twist provides an opportunity for University of Waterloo students to take part in designing solutions to health care challenges being experienced within our local c

When COVID-19 restrictions started rolling out in March 2020, workplaces were forced to quickly adapt from in-person operations to virtual.  

This meant big changes for Velocity and the companies operating out of the downtown Kitchener and University of Waterloo locations. 

Ribbit and 1Mentor are among the 88 companies that have joined Velocity since the start of the pandemic.  

Despite ramping up operations amidst pandemic restrictions, their drive to innovate and scale their business remained limitless. 

It’s that moment that every entrepreneur dreams of the realization that you’ve not only created a product that would help solve a genuine problem but that it’s unique in the marketplace. For nanotechnology engineering alums Khanjan Desai (BASc '13) and Chong Shen (BASc '13), that inkling happened in their fourth-year capstone course, as they were tackling the challenge of keeping windshields frost-free.

Kelly Zheng has a lot on her plate. She’s an engineering doctoral student at the University of Waterloo who is building a startup while also working towards a graduate business degree. It can be a balancing act, but she’s tackling it all.

Her PhD research in quantum machine learning for spatial temporal modeling can be difficult for many to wrap their heads around. This emerging, quantum-based branch of AI and machine learning allows large data sets to be analyzed in a fraction of the time that a regular computer can manage.

Nicholas Cheng (MSc in Pharmacy in progress) won the Winter 2023 Social Impact Fund Grand Prize for his project Entomatia, which uses food waste as feed for mealworms to extract a serum to replace fetal bovine serum (FBS).

The $10,000 prize from the GreenHouse Social Impact Fund will be used for infrastructure costs and to generate a prototype serum for further scale-up.

The new Diploma in Indigenous Entrepreneurshipwill be delivered in partnership with post-secondary institutions across Canada and will focus on the unique needs and priorities of Indigenous entrepreneurs.