Entrepreneurship

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. 

> Ryan Tennant
> PhD Student

The University of Waterloo is building out a pipeline for health innovation in Southwestern Ontario thanks to a $10-million investment from FedDev Ontario. 

Companies at the University of Waterloo’s flagship entrepreneurial incubator have broken through a major funding milestone.

The total amount of funding raised by Velocity companies surpassed $2.4 billion in recent weeks, less than two years after the program announced it had reached the $1 billion mark over the previous decade.

For more than three decades, BlackBerry and the University of Waterloo have shared a strong relationship. Spanning research collaborations and offering co-operative education opportunities, Waterloo students past and present have benefitted from starting and maturing their careers at the multi-billion-dollar company.

A serious passion for physics was what drew Parshant Utam to study Mathematical Physics at the University of Waterloo. Little did he realize that the University’s entrepreneurial atmosphere would lead him to become a co-founder of viral smartphone app that is pure fun.

Parshant came to Waterloo as an international student from Pakistan, fascinated by theoretical physics. He was drawn by the presence of both the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum computing and the nearby Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.