Entrepreneurship

Seeing recycling boxes and garbage cans overflowing with restaurant and fast-food containers while walking to and from Waterloo’s campus
motivated two alumni to launch a zero-waste business.

Kayli Dale and Jacquie Hutchings, who both graduated from chemical engineering in 2020, co-founded Friendlier, formerly known as A Friendlier Company, last year to help keep food packaging from ending up in landfill.

As the world continues to change and everyone rethinks their business, the digital divide could further divide those who have access to technology and those that do not — but we’ll see a new gap in digital skills.

“There’s a new digital divide that’s going to come upon us — it’s going to be those that have the skills to thrive in a digital world and those who don’t,” said Vivek Goel, University of Waterloo president.

An online learning company that was started by a Waterloo Engineering student who challenged himself to think big is now poised to go public.

D2L Corp., which was founded in 1999 while John Baker (BASc '00) was still an undergraduate student in systems design engineering, filed a prospectus with regulators this week to list on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol DTOL.

Despite breakthrough diabetes research over the past century, people with diabetes still need to rely on obtaining blood samples to monitor their sugar levels. Daily glucose monitoring by tracking blood sugar levels is essential for managing both types 1 and 2 diabetes, however the current method – finger pricking – is invasive and can become burdensome with how often it needs to be done.

A flame-retardant product inspired by seaweed has earned two recent Waterloo Engineering graduates a spot in the finals of a prestigious international design competition.

Anneke van Heuven (BASc ’21) and Elias Trouyet (BASc ’21), two of the three founders of startup company AlgoBio, were named today to the global top 20 for the 2021 James Dyson Award, an annual showcase for student inventors.

A company that is co-owned by former classmates at Waterloo Engineering has hit pay dirt with the sale of its cardiology business for US $1.75 billion.

Baylis Medical Company Inc., which is co-owned by Frank Baylis (BASc ’86, electrical engineering) and Kris Shah (BASc ’86, electrical engineering), announced this week that it has reached a deal with Boston Scientific Corp. that is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022.

The Toronto-Waterloo startup ecosystem has risen four spots in the recently released 2021 Global Startup Ecosystem Report (GSER) by Startup Genome. The report ranks 140 ecosystems around the world and highlights Toronto-Waterloo as one of the year’s biggest movers, moving up in the rankings from 18th in 2020 to 14th in 2021. The University of Waterloo, along with the Region, MaRS Discovery District and Communitech, worked closely with Startup Genome to highlight Toronto-Waterloo’s strengths.  

Investors looking for higher returns might be wiser to look to Waterloo companies than ventures started by alumni at Stanford, MIT and Harvard.

A new report from a U.S. platform for investors and startups has found that ventures founded by Waterloo alumni produce a higher-than-expected return on investment than their counterparts at the three American institutions.

Ryan Tennant is interested in bridging health care and engineering. From co-op terms and research projects at Sunnybrook and Sick Kids hospitals to developing a medical device at a company in Switzerland, he’s always looking to use his biomedical engineering education to improve the world around him. 

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