Entrepreneurship

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.

Named fastest growing tech company in Canada on Deloitte’s 2021 Technology Fast 50, Snapcommerce was co-founded by University of Waterloo alumni Henry Shi (BCS ’14) and Hussein Fazal (BMath ’05). The company has more than 20 million users, $1 billion in sales, and grew by more than 32,000 per cent between 2017 and 2021.

How can we create a fun, immersive viewing experience for NHL fans using 5G technology? That was the question 50 University of Waterloo students were looking to answer during a week-long hackathon hosted by Sportsnet and Rogers.

A startup company co-founded by a Waterloo Engineering alumnus to help people manage their cryptocurrency investments has joined the ranks of unicorns.

CoinTracker, an online service based in San Francisco, recently announced a US $100-million funding round that gives it a valuation of US $1.3 billion.

Company co-founder and chief executive officer Jon Lerner, who was born in Russia and grew up in Ottawa, graduated from Waterloo in 2010 with a degree in computer engineering.

Startups supported by the University of Waterloo’s flagship incubator, Velocity, along with others founded by alumni and students are well represented on the FoundersBeta Top 100 Tech Companies to Watch for in 2022. FoundersBeta is a global network of more than 5,000 founders, students and professionals interested in connecting around and building startups. The 2022 list profiles over 100 companies, and about a third of them have connections to the University of Waterloo.