Ascent, AI employees and where the jobs are.

Four stories, and one of them is Ascent.

I wrote four stories this week. The newest one, about Ascent, came out this morning.

Shahzeb Atif and Dea Sokoli Think Job Seekers Deserve Better: Shahzeb found Builderloo by asking Perplexity for events, then wrote me through the contact form, and a few days later I was having coffee with him and Dea at Balzac's. They met in Porto, found out back home that they had been in the same Laurier class without ever meeting, and built Ascent, hiring software that tells each job applicant which interview stage they're at and how many people are ahead of them. I sent about 150 applications this fall, so I could really relate to this one. Ascent is also the Startup of the week, below.

Why Waterloo Region Startups Move to Toronto, Move to the Valley, or Stay: I followed 30 companies that started here. Most of them are still here, and their founders give a lot of the credit to the people around them. If your company moved, I'd love to hear the story behind it.

Where the Startup Jobs in Waterloo Region Are: Builderloo has been collecting job postings from local startups since June, so I went through all of them to see who's hiring, for what, and how much experience they want.

Building Your First AI Employees at Communitech's Power Hour: On Wednesday night Heather Gawel and Babajide Okusanya of Momentum Product Co. showed a room of founders how to set up a small team of AI agents, and how much to let them touch. Really practical night!

Startup of the week.

Ascent
Ascent is an applicant tracking system built around one thesis: candidates should never be left in the dark. Browse open jobs, or hire with 
ascentapplications.com
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This week's pick is Ascent, and after an hour with Shahzeb and Dea it was an easy one. Their site opens with the line "Every applicant should know exactly where they stand." On Ascent, each role is drawn as a mountain with a camp for every interview stage, and a candidate sees their own climber and how many people are ahead of them, beside them and behind them.

The demo on the site lets you try both sides. You can build the interview stages as a recruiter, drag a candidate from one camp to the next, and then switch over and see the same role the way an applicant sees it. The two founders are the sample candidates, which made me laugh.

Ascent is an applicant tracking system built for candidates first. Shahzeb Atif and Dea Sokoli started it at Laurier after meeting at the European Innovation Academy in Porto, and it's part of Laurier's StartUp Lab and Velocity. They want to reach small businesses, clubs and nonprofits hiring their first few people, and the free plan covers one open role and 25 candidates. Dea did the design, and it shows. Great design taste!

Who's hiring.

127 roles were posted this week, against a usual 62. 41 closed. 723 are open at 111 companies, and 227 of them are in the region or remote in Canada.

Verda
29
CustomersAI
6
Movellus
6
Pontosense
6
SchoolRoof
5
Squint Cognition
5
HeadFirst
4
Infinite Harvest Technologies
4
Kubex
4
Presto
4
softwareQ
4
Limosa
3
Phaze
3
Rodan Energy Solutions
3
ValiDeck
3
Audesse
2
BriteBase
2
Finite Robotics
2
Lakes Software
2
Patient Pro
2

softwareQ, which designs quantum software, posted roles for the first time: a Quantum Software Engineer, a Research Scientist and a co-op in Waterloo, and a Frontend Developer who can work remotely.

HeadFirst is building a saliva test for concussions. It wants a Biotech Engineer and a Research Scientist in Waterloo, and a Data Analyst and a Marketing Strategist who can work remotely.

Finite Robotics builds orchard robots for apple growers, and is hiring a Hardware Design Engineer and a Hardware Operations Lead in Kitchener-Waterloo.

Lakes Software makes environmental modelling software and wants a C# ASP.NET Developer and a Delphi developer in Waterloo.

Pontosense posted a Product Engineer, Mobile & UX role in Kitchener, and marketing, community and content roles in Toronto for Pontosense and its Silvie product.

Every open role

New on the list.

Halo Eye guides a car dealer's staff through taking listing photos on a phone, and makes eight matching exterior shots of each vehicle.
DrozLegal is software for law firms that covers intake, matters, documents, drafting, calendars, billing and bookkeeping, and connects to Outlook or Google.

3 companies joined the list this week. See them all.

What to do.

MondayMoving Beyond Prompts to Reusable Agentic WorkflowsMondayHard Tech Happy Hour @ Waterloo BrewingTuesdayAC Innovation ShowcaseTuesdayRevenue Tuesdays

Monday, November 9

Communitech's Moving Beyond Prompts to Reusable Agentic Workflows is a hands-on hour at the Hub from 9 to 10 am, on building agent systems that finish multi-step work without a person checking every step. Free.

BSIA screens A Chip Odyssey, a documentary on how Taiwan's semiconductor industry grew, at the CIGI Auditorium from 5:30 to 8:30 pm.

Hard Tech Happy Hour is at the Waterloo Brewing Taphouse from 6 to 9 pm, for people working in hardware, robotics, quantum, biotech, energy and manufacturing.

Tuesday, November 10

The Accelerator Centre's AC Innovation Showcase brings 40 startups and 400 attendees to 300 Hagey Blvd from 12 to 4 pm. Free.

Revenue Tuesdays at Builders Club is an hour on sales, positioning and pricing at 12 pm. Free.

Pillars Network's Engineering inference with ihsan. looks at how AI models work underneath, and what that says about the decisions people make, from 5 to 8:30 pm in Waterloo.

Wednesday, November 11

Founder Institute's Product-Market Fit Journey is online from 12 to 2 pm, on market signals, product analytics and infrastructure decisions.

At Technical Wednesday, people demo what they are working on at Builders Club at 12 pm and get feedback. Free.

The weekly CivicTechWR Hacknight is at Builders Club from 6 to 8 pm. Free.

Thursday, November 12

Founder Institute's Venture Trailblazers talks with Mac Conwell of RareBreed Ventures, a pre-seed investor, online from 11 am to 1 pm.

Conestoga's Sales Lab Panel has Sales Lab graduates talking about careers in tech sales, at the Doon campus from 4 to 5:30 pm. Free.

CIRA brings Canadians Connected to Catalyst Commons from 6 to 9 pm, with a fireside chat on privacy, scams and home devices. Free.

Friday, November 13

The Pancake Social at Builders Club starts at 9 am with all-you-can-eat pancakes. Free.

The PEO Grand River Chapter runs a plant tour of Teledyne DALSA in Waterloo from 9:30 am to 12 pm. Free.

Sunday, November 15

THEMUSEUM's da Vinci in the Age of AI is a panel at 1:30 pm on whether Leonardo would use AI. Tickets are $19 to $22.

Full calendar

Heard from the companies.

Bridgit signed the general contractor Swinerton Builders, which will plan its people and projects across its offices on Bridgit's workforce planning platform.
RinkNet in St. Jacobs launched LeagueCenter, a web platform where junior hockey league offices track rosters, eligibility, contracts and waivers.
Magnet Forensics released Graykey 2, a full hardware refresh of its mobile forensics device, with up to 5x faster extractions.
Transformer Lab hired Ethan Thompson, a theoretical physicist who worked on quantum field theory at the Perimeter Institute, as its Lead Research Scientist, Quantum Science.
Applied Brain Research made its speech AI SDK generally available for Zephyr RTOS on Alif's Ensemble processors.
myStoria partnered with Migraine Canada, so people living with migraine can have trained staff retrieve their health records and help them advocate.
FlashApply launched. It takes a plain-words request for a job, finds current postings, tailors a resume to each one and keeps looking.
GrowWise Partners co-founder Lauren Valliere was named one of FoundersBeta's Top Female Founders of 2026.
Kubex was included in Forrester's Cloud Cost Management and Optimization Solutions Landscape for Q3 2026.

New on Builderloo.

A lot changed on the site this week too, and all of it is live now.

Companies is a new list for the bigger employers with tech roles in the Region, like Google, D2L, OpenText, BlackBerry, Arctic Wolf, Geotab, Faire, Manulife and Sun Life. Their tech roles and co-ops here are on Jobs too, and a Company type filter there lets you pick startups or the bigger employers.

The jobs crawl reads more kinds of job boards now, Workday's among them, so more roles show up. A job board that fails to load no longer closes the roles it listed either.

Events come from more places: the Luma calendars of local hosts, Luma's events around Waterloo, and Eventbrite organizers. SPUR's events also show the right times now.

Every event, role, story, issue and forum post has a Copy page button. It copies the page's text with a link back to it, so it's easy to paste into a chat or a doc.

Stories and issues of The Weekly show their photo whole beside the title now. And the footer has a new street print, made from the header pictures of two of last week's stories, with a train whose sign scrolls. Scroll down and check it out!

Updates to the site also no longer take it down while they install. If you leave a tab open, it moves to the new version on your next click.