Entrepreneurship

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.

Jeremy Hartmann 
PhD, Cheriton School of Computer Science 
> Founder, MTION.tv 
> Researcher in human computer interaction 

Jeremy Hartmann successfully defended his dissertation in December 2021 and launched an entrepreneurial venture that took his academic research to the next level.

More than four decades before marking a recent milestone as co-founder of a billion-dollar software startup, a teenaged Andrew Waitman designed and built himself a personal computer.

A company that was co-founded by two Waterloo Engineering professors has been recognized by an agency of the United Nations (UN) for its contributions to a state-of-the-art facility to farm crickets as a source of protein.

DarwinAI and the Aspire Food Group, which is leading the initiative, were named to a list of the top 10 projects using artificial intelligence (AI) to advance the UN’s sustainability goals.

A startup company that was co-founded by an alumnus of Waterloo Engineering achieved unicorn status this week with the announcement of US $350 million in new funding.

The deal gives Assent Compliance, a software-as-a-service company based in Ottawa, a market valuation of more than $1 billion as it aims to grow to over 1,000 employees by the end of 2022.

Assent was co-founded by Andrew Waitman (BASc ’87, electrical engineering), who has served as chief executive officer since 2014.

Richard Xie, an enterprising undergraduate student at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, is changing the way we interact with today’s housing market. A fifth-year student, Xie has brought artificial intelligence to real estate through his company Manorlead and is actively working on a metaverse for preconstruction real estate. 

While Manorlead was developed during his university years, the concept began in elementary school.

From about the age of 10, Andrew D’Souza (BASc ’08) began to think of inventive ways to earn money. An early entrepreneur, whose family immigrated to Canada from India, D’Souza started providing his neighbours with services such as paper-delivery, lawn mowing and dog walking. Later, he took on part-time jobs to save for university because he wanted to avoid debt.