Talent

The University of Waterloo’s Pearl Sullivan Engineering IDEAs Clinic has built an impressive reputation over the past 10 years as the leading provider of student-focused, hands-on learning experiences aligned with industrial and societal needs.  

Launched in 2015, this unique facility in the Faculty of Engineering has hosted more than 60,000 students from across campus and challenged them to work in teams and apply their classroom theory to solve real-world problems.

Carta is transforming how private markets operate by digitizing equity ownership and investment infrastructure previously managed through manual spreadsheets and paper trails. The company’s software enables founders, investors and employees to manage cap tables (records of company ownership), fund administration and valuations all in one place.

The University of Waterloo continues to be recognized among the top universities in Canada and globally for a variety of disciplines from engineering and math to hospitality and tourism management according to the 2025 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) subject rankings by Shanghai Ranking Consultancy.

Five startups have been awarded $10,000 Velocity Momentum Grants to help them take the next step in their entrepreneurial journey. The no-strings attached funding is intended to allow founders to focus on their business full-time after graduation.

Velocity is the University of Waterloo’s centre of entrepreneurship and offers mentorship, funding and Canada’s largest tech-corridor network to help founders move ideas from the lab to market. Since 2008, Velocity has helped launch more than 500 startups that together exceed $40 billion in enterprise value.

As Global Entrepreneurship Week 2025 begins, we’re spotlighting 10 standout entrepreneurs from the University of Waterloo — students and alumni who are challenging norms, redefining industries and building a better future. These innovators are not only making waves in their respective fields but are also setting the pace for what’s next for society, health, technology, the economy and sustainability. 

Swish Solar, a cleantech company based at Velocity, the University of Waterloo’s startup incubator, has closed an oversubscribed US$1.5 million pre-seed round. The new financing will accelerate market adoption of its self-cleaning solar technology that helps make renewable energy more efficient and sustainable.

“Solar panels can lose up to 60 per cent of their efficiency due to sand and snow buildup, costing the cleantech energy industry billions in lost revenue each year,” said Miswar Syed (MASc '25), CEO of Swish Solar.

The iron ring is small, sized to fit the little finger of an engineer’s working hand. Today it is more often made from stainless steel than iron. Though it doesn’t weigh much physically, it carries enormous symbolic weight, acting as a reminder to Canadian-trained professional engineers of the oath they took to do good, safe work that advances society.

Friendlier, a local startup tackling Canada’s single-use plastic problem head-on, recently closed a $4.5 million dollar funding round. The company, founded in 2019 by University of Waterloo alumni Jacqueline Hanton (BASc ’20) and Kayli Smith (BASc ’20), has raised a total of $10 million and kept almost 3.7 million food and beverage containers out of landfills.  

“For too long, we’ve looked at energy as an infrastructure issue, but we have to think about how it drives society” Chris Henderson said, opening his keynote at Waterloo’s inaugural Energy Transitions Networking Forum.