WATERLOO REGION, Ont. — In the tech hub of Kitchener-Waterloo, university students have spent part of the week racing around town, hunting down geocaches for prize money between workshops on vibe coding and panels on non-dilutive funding. The twin-cities-wide scavenger hunt—and the other, less frenetic activities—were among the 60 or so events taking place as part of the first Waterloo Tech Week.

The student-organized event is the little sister to Tech Week bonanzas in bigger cities such as Toronto, New York and London, bringing together local entrepreneurs, investors and organizations supporting the tech community. 

Organizers Jasmine Jiang, a fourth-year University of Waterloo student, and third-year student Ian Korovinsky, had modest ambitions to start. They thought they’d host 10 or 15 events as a prelude to Hack the North, an annual gathering of some 1,000 tinkerers from around the world who will descend on Kitchener-Waterloo this weekend for two sleepless days of programming. “Then we got some advice from the community [saying] if you’re gonna do this, you should do it big,” says Korovinsky. 

The event adds to the entrepreneurial buzz in town, cutting through what’s been a quiet period in many tech hubs.

For many startups and scaleups, the last few years have been marked by failed funding rounds, declining sales and layoffs, as interest rates soared and economic uncertainty prompted consumers and investors to hold their cash. 

Waterloo—one of Canada’s most globally recognized startup regions—hasn’t been immune. Since 2023, Kitchener-Waterloo has slipped from leading the country in scaleups to ranking second-last among 10 cities, according to recent data from the Narwhal Project, which tracks scaling Canadian tech firms. The report gives cities a scaleup score based on companies’ employee growth and capital raised relative to their years in business. 

Employment growth at scaleups in the region has dropped 12 per cent in the past two years, the report shows, making it the only tech city in Canada whose overall scaleup workforce has shrunk in that period. 

Earlier-stage entrepreneurs—the target audience for Tech Week—don’t appear to have slowed down, however. Velocity, the startup incubator at the University of Waterloo, is teeming with new ventures. The number of student-led startups at Velocity grew from 157 in 2023 to 395 last year. Between 2024 and 2025, more than 300 hopeful founders applied to join the incubator. The organization accepted 41 of them. Velocity Fund II, an early-stage venture capital fund backed by the University of Waterloo, has made 10 investments, eight of them in local companies, since announcing its first close in May. That’s a staggering pace in what’s been a slow investment environment across the country for seed-stage and pre-seed companies. 

“Deal flow has been really strong,” Benton Leong, general partner at Kitchener-based investment firm Archangel, which backs pre-seed Canadian companies, says of the local investment opportunities. 

Still, he and other local entrepreneurs and investors say too many of the region’s top companies continue to leave once they reach a certain size. Jordan Jocius, a local investor and founder, says Waterloo’s outsized decline in scaleup creation isn’t a sign of dwindling entrepreneurship, but a symptom of its success churning out tech talent. “The best of the best are more inclined to leave Canada because they have more opportunity, and they can,” says Jocius. 

For Jiang and Korovinsky, they hope to see Tech Week in Waterloo for years to come. “There’s been a lot of signal that this is something that people want,” says Korovinsky, “so we want to make sure that it continues happening.”