General Business Updates and News

[robdrimmie]

Someone could correct me if I'm wrong, but I've had the impression that startup activity in K-W has slowed considerably in the last year or two.  Or at least things have seemed quieter than they used to be.

This may be the case for early stage companies, though Velocity is still helping a great many. For the tech community in general though, things are really active still.

In August there was:
- $150 million to eSentire
- $40 million to Tulip Retail (offices in Kitchener and Toronto, so the Corridor gets some credit here)
- $15 million to Auvik Networks

Over the summer several really important executive hires have brought very skilled people to Waterloo at Thalmic, Sortable and a few others.

MappedIn's internal mapping technology was an important part of Apple's iOS 11 presentation at the start of summer, the official release of which will be happening soon. Catalyst 137 and Grand Innovations (two major tech community sites) are opening over the next few months.

There's plenty more stories like that, from big money, to big hires, to big deals. It may be that there's now so much of it that we don't recognize it as much any more because it's just general business news instead of fancy startup news. We're an established tech community now.