Entrepreneurship

The University of Waterloo has a long history of supporting corporate innovation through talent and partnerships, like the Rogers 5G partnership, and through support systems such as the Velocity incubator.

While 74 per cent of Velocity startups have one or more founders that studied or worked at the University of Waterloo, Velocity also attracts global startups. In 2021, the incubator, which can accommodate up to 20 new companies per year, received more than 200 qualified applications.

The pandemic has forced employers and employees alike to rethink the world of work. Whether the rapid shift to remote work to challenges recruiting top talent, evolving workplace expectations to critical calls for diversity, equity and inclusion – employers and employees are embracing new concepts and approaches. 

Prepped for elective surgery and just minutes away from being wheeled into an operating room, Eric Blondeel suddenly realized he wasn’t insured if the unthinkable were to happen. 

Lying on a hospital gurney, Blondeel used the cell phone he still had with him to google where he could purchase some type of last-minute life insurance.

A former Waterloo Engineering student is giving up his 2022 salary and bonus at the multi-billion-dollar autonomous trucking company he co-founded to support youth robotics and STEM education.

Alex Rodrigues, who left the mechatronics engineering program at Waterloo to pursue his passion for self-driving vehicles in Silicon Valley, is CEO of Embark Trucks, which went public last year with an approximate valuation of US $5 billion.

Emily Mills says she was looking for a peer-community of diverse women leading on their own terms when she founded How She Hustles in 2010.

“When we hosted our first event, the issues of equity, diversity and inclusion weren’t top priority in the world the way they are now,” Mills says. “That’s why so many diverse women joined us in person to feel reflected and included — they also wanted to feel informed and part of a community.”

It has been a long but rewarding journey since Sebastian Fischmeister first hit on the concept of using involuntary emissions such as power consumption as a window into the workings of computer systems.

Early work on the idea as a means of debugging programs without shutting them down earned the electrical and computer engineering professor a best paper award soon after he came to the University of Waterloo.

A company headed by a graduate of Waterloo Engineering will also have its moment in the spotlight when the Los Angeles Rams and Cincinnati Bengals meet Sunday in Super Bowl LVI.

Ross Video is providing the state-of-the-art technology to power a gigantic, 360-degree screen hovering over the playing field in the new, $5-billion SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles.

Perseverance is paying off for two Waterloo Engineering graduates who co-founded an ambitious medical hardware company.

Five years after launching Vena Medical to commercialize their fourth-year design project, Michael Phillips and Phil Cooper announced their first government approval this week for a device to remove blood clots from the brains of stroke patients.