An open-sourced short guide for entrepreneurs, builders, and tech people interested in exploring Waterloo.
- Founders and mentors often share advice generously, with less focus on status or transactions.
- The community is tight and practical — if you’re good at something, it’s easier to team up and start building without spending too much time proving yourself.
- Waterloo Region has approximately 1,100 startups (in 2020) for a population of ~623,930 — giving it the second-highest start-up density in the world after Silicon Valley
- "an amazing town ... the energy we saw very early on parallels a lot of what we see in Silicon Valley ... there's an openness and there's a desire." — Jack Dorsey, Co-Founder of Twitter
If you’re planning a trip, here are the two best times of year:
- March → during the week of Socratica Symposium, known as “the world’s greatest demo day”, brings together thousands of builders from all over the world to share projects and passion from art to tech
- September → during the week before Hack the North, Canada's largest hackathon, with builders coming from all over the world to come to hack
- lu.ma/Waterloo_ca Event List (auto generated)
- lu.ma/WaterlooEvents Event List (curated list that anyone can add an event to)
- wat2do.ca (curated list of all Waterloo events posted on Instagram)
Best Communities for Builders
- Socratica — weekly Sunday co-working for young makers, a global movement born in Waterloo
Hacker Houses
- Akatos Hacker House — a living room & build space where Waterloo and global founders & VCs hang out, like AGI House SF
Communities + Spaces to Work with Builders
- Paid spaces:
- Builders Club — a co-working hub for very early-stage entrepreneurial builders (like SF South Park Commons' "-1 to 0" mode builders).
- Den 1880 & Catalyst 137 — co-working offices connecting the broader community and scale-up companies
- Campus-based builders spaces open to all: Velocity Digital, Velocity Dungeon, and WLU StartUp Lab
- In-person nonprofit incubators:
- Velocity Incubator: Largest free startup incubator in North America. Pre-seed tech startups (for UWaterloo-affiliated founders only) who can commit full-time, willing to work from Velocity 1+ days/week, solving large problems.
- Accelerator Centre: Ideal for early-stage tech founders with verified traction (users/customers or pilots), ready to scale product and revenue. Open to anyone.
- Communitech: For founders at any stage—student or non-student. Free “Connect” tier is open; paid tiers (Ignite, Thrive) offer deeper support for startups with product or revenue.
- Where to get help for your startup in Waterloo Region (BitBakery): Great read for locations in the city
- Student’s Startup Guide to the University of Waterloo (Jonny Hsu): Great read for funding programs and student communities
- Waterloo Startup Resource List (Founder Institute): Everything in Waterloo Startup Ecosystem, except a bit outdated
- Brenda Li: Co-founder of Waterloo Akatos House
- Jesse Rodgers: Founder of Builders Club
- Jerry Jiang: Co-founder of Waterloo Akatos House
- Ti Guo: Tech Community builder & Engineer, working between Waterloo, SF, and Toronto. Cofounder of initiatives like Effective Altruism Waterloo, and Waterloo Mr. Beast–inspired co-working experiment.
This guide is open-source and community-driven.
If you have:
- Suggestions for improvement
- Additional resources or places to add
- Corrections or updates
Please feel free to open an issue, submit a pull request if you want to contribute.
Waterloo is built on collaboration — this guide should be too.