Waterloo Tech Highlights for July 2026
Our goal is to provide you with a monthly primer on significant news events from private Waterloo-based technology companies in 5 minutes or less.
Alchemy has run a successful IPO and is not listed on the TSX Venture Exchange. They raised $13.7M via the IPO and another $1M from a prior placement.
MyStoria raised $1.65M from Graphite Ventures, Conexus, Adrenaline Fund and Phoneix Fire Fund.
RideCo has won transit deals in Houston, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Atlanta and San Antonio in the past few months. Houston claims a 10% reduction in operating costs per trip and a 20% reduction in call center volume.
BinSentry has grown from monitoring 4500 bins 4 years ago to over 65,000 bins today. They grew over 100% last year and hired a great new engineering grad as a product manager.
Intellijoint officially launched in its 9th market and first in Latin America – Chile.
Smile was recognized by Shopify as one of the three best apps of 2026.
Vena had a customer release a paper showing 96% technical success with 58% of surgeons confirming their original plan based on the images Vena helped generate and 38% changing their plans as a result of real-time imagery.
OWL signed an exclusive distribution agreement with Axtel, one of Mexico’s largest telecommunications companies.
Photon-IV got a great profile write-up from Velocity highlighting its founder Sanal Kamal and the dual-use technology he’s building to enable better satellite communications hand-offs.
Canadian Strategic Missions Corporation got a $4.5m FedDev loan to further their technology to build micro-nuclear reactors for the Arctic.
Qorsa also received a $4.5M FedDev loan to build out their Quantum grade cyber-security tools.
VueReal also received $750k from FedDev to add production capabilities to their Waterloo facility.
ENVGO’s crew used the boat to demonstrate waterskiing with pretty much zero wake (fun video).
Chris’ Thoughts
For many, August brings some form of vacation. With that in mind here’s a list of some good books / shows I’ve consumed in the past year.
There’s a new Audible version released and narrated by author Michael Lewis. He recently did a podcast series on it as well which remains a great primer for the book and maybe more interesting than the book itself, looking at the lessons we learn from 2008 in hindsight.
The story remains timeless on two fronts. First and mainly, when future historians record the moment when the American dream came unhinged and the middle class dream irrevocably darkened, they will point to the perpetrators of the 2008 financial crisis and the lack of accountability that followed. It does a great job of outlining the tendency of perpetrators of a rigged system to exploit that system to the point of catastrophic failure. The film Margin Call should be required viewing as well because it’s so well done and explores the same topic.
Terminator 1-3
I remember watching these movies thinking that while robotic advances could someday allow for something as complex as a T-800, the AI and compute required for Skynet to exist remained unrealistic. Boy was I wrong. As many groups race to try and contain AI and put the genie back in the bottle, think about giving this another viewing. There’s still tons of science-fiction, but a surprising amount of it has now becoming science-science.
Author Alex Hutchinson does a great job of exploring the limits of human endurance. He mixes story with science in a compelling way that kept me reading and amazed at some of the limits that humans can attain.
Available both in book form and now a movie. If you haven’t read/seen it know that it’s best consumed with no knowledge of what happens. I appreciate the story because it’s surprisingly about relationships and underlines that our main motives and sense of accomplishment come from the relationships we value the most and those closest to us. As I (and everybody else) spend more time talking to machines and less talking with people, deteriorating our human connection, I wonder what effect this will have on society.
If you’re not familiar, Acquired is a podcast series that looks at companies in a really engaging long format. The episode is four hours. I’m not a F1 guy and really didn’t know much about Ferrari yet found the episode totally compelling. I thought I’d learn about a car company but it’s as much about the art collectors who buy Ferraris and the insane economics of the business that had me rewinding segments a few different times.
Have a great vacation and enjoy summer while it lasts.
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Chris Wormald @cwormald