Waterloo Tech Highlights for April 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.
Plum has been acquired by Phenom, an AI-oriented HR company. The whole Plum team is joining Phenom and will remain in Waterloo region.
Vena Medical announced their first US Commercial cases following their FDA approval announced a couple months ago.
Swap Robotics will perform their first paid work in the US to install solar modules in the field with one of the 3 largest utility-scale solar builders.
Intellijoint completed its fourth sale to a hospital in Canada – Mount Sinai.
Canadian Strategic Missions Corporation received $1.2M in federal funding to build manufacturing capacity for its nuclear microreactor.
QuantumCore, a spin out from UW’s Institute for Quantum Computing received $10.7M in funding. $9M was equity from private placements and from PowerOne Capital Markets and $1.7M in grant funds from NSERC.
Chris’ Thoughts
Today’s column comes from Katelyn MacGillivray, my fearless colleague who has been spending time with our portfolio working on marketing and rev-ops related challenges in a post-AI age.
I’m working through two questions about how AI tools change the world of work.
First, do AI tools make dumb people smart, or smart people fast? As a university graduate of the last pre-AI era class, I took part in a competition where our team spent six months crafting a marketing plan. Today, with a couple more years of experience, I could create something better in less than a week. I’m genuinely unsure how much of that acceleration comes from my own learning and how much from AI tools. While stories abound of untrained people unlocking new levels of output with AI, not all these stories survive scrutiny. Importantly, the untrained miracles always involve people who possess a critical mixture of curiosity, fearlessness and an innate ability to learn quickly. This isn’t an “anybody can do it” world, but one where screening for attributes in young hires becomes even more critical.
Second, how do companies cope when some systems accelerate, and some remain the same, pushing a tsunami through drinking straw gates? The last mile problem remains. Market awareness is not instant. Customers don’t buy faster. Relationship building takes just as much time. Budgets get set annually. The clutch between AI-enabled, high-quality work and the front-office grind is experiencing tremendous stress under the weight of unrealistic expectations that everything should accelerate. AI accentuates how slow the buying process remains; in fact, it becomes relatively slower.
These questions create tricky investment and resource allocation dilemmas. How should we optimally recruit and organize a 30-person enterprise software company so the team can both lean into instant gratification while building mental and go-to-market resilience and processes?
Here are two top-of-mind questions for me right now:
1. How do we identify people who are fearless and resourceful to take full advantage of acceleration where possible and how do we set them up to succeed?
2. How do we coach teams through the tension between AI acceleration, and the parts of life that must stay at human pace?
Waterloo Tech Highlights is a communication initiative run by a group of experienced investors and strategists who would like to receive and share real news about the vibrant Waterloo, Ontario tech community.
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Chris Wormald @cwormald