October 19, 2026
Two days at the Tannery.
Your Weekly for October 12 to October 18.
Techtoberfest, written up.
I spent last week at Techtoberfest and wrote up three nights of it.
Techtoberfest 2026, Day One: Communitech's 29th Techtoberfest at the Tannery opened with Vass Bednar's keynote on how Canadian companies can start here and stay here. By her numbers, 47% of last year's foreign investment in Canada went to buying Canadian companies. Then investors from Quantacet, Garage Capital, Two Small Fish, IRV Fund, Radical Ventures and Inovia took founders' questions on quantum, physical AI and digital AI.
Techtoberfest 2026, Day Two: Eight local founders showed what they build instead of pitching for money: Finite Robotics, Poppy, Upside Robotics, CSMC, Qubic, UpScale Quantum, AllMind and Ground News. Finite thins apple trees. It worked 13 orchards this year and wants to grow from 3 acres to 200 next year.
Personal AI and Always-On Agents at Builders Club: Waterloo Agentic's night at Builders Club ran on questions people sent when they signed up, with the mic passed to whoever had an answer. Bilal Shaukat showed AI cutting a month of door-to-door fundraising maps in 30 minutes, work that took his old boss two hours a day.
New on Builderloo.
Stories: Builderloo now publishes its own articles, with photos and galleries. The Builders Club night above is the first.
Profiles: every member has a public page at builderloo.ca/u/ and their handle, with a bio, links, forum posts and the stories they are in.
Hubs, funds and services: the directory now lists the region's spaces and programs, the investors that back its startups, and 23 firms that sell startups legal, accounting, IP, banking, insurance and hiring help. A startup's page shows which listed funds back it.
Owners: a founder who claims a listing can now edit every field on it, upload a logo, and hide a role or a story from the page.
Search: a search on /startups puts an exact name or domain first, and finds near spellings.
Contact: a form that reaches the Builderloo inbox.
Who's hiring.
48 roles were posted this week, against a usual 32. 53 closed. 357 are open at 71 companies, and 120 of them are in the region or remote in Canada.
iGUIDE posted five roles in Waterloo: Senior Systems Test Engineer, Senior Mobile Developer, Technical Lead for 3D Visualization, Algorithm Developer for 3D Reconstruction and Enterprise Account Manager.
Nulogy is hiring a Global Support Representative, a Solution Architect, a Senior Consultant for systems integration and a Technical Talent Acquisition Partner.
VueReal wants a Semiconductor Manufacturing Process Engineer in Waterloo.
Smarter Alloys is hiring a Materials Science Engineer in Cambridge.
Smile.io posted a Junior Product Designer role in Ontario.
Miovision wants a Senior Product Marketing Manager, remote in Canada, and a Senior Field Solutions Engineer in the US Northeast.
Flipp is hiring an Account Executive for new business and a Manager of Business Development in Canada.
Float wants an Acquisition (Sales) Operations Manager in Toronto.
New on the list.
Mycionics builds AI robots that handle fragile, irregular produce. Its robots and Crop Scout already work on commercial mushroom farms.
Finite Robotics makes orchard robots for commercial apple growers.
CSMC, the Canadian Strategic Missions Corporation, builds space infrastructure and technology aimed at problems on Earth.
AllMind is an AI research platform for institutional equity teams. It links signals across more than 6,800 data sources and a firm's own data.
Poppy makes Wi-Fi voice messaging and calling so children can reach friends and family.
Crypto4A makes quantum-first, FIPS-validated hardware security modules.
Cavelo is a cyber risk platform for MSPs. It combines data security, data exposure management and attack surface visibility in one place.
RunQL is a free, open-source SQL IDE and VS Code extension. It runs queries, documents schemas, draws ERDs and charts, and saves everything as files ready for Git.
11 companies joined the list this week. See them all.
What to do.
Monday, October 19
Barn Sprint F26 starts at Builders Club, 165 King St W in Kitchener, at 2 pm. It is two weeks of work toward a one-minute YC founder video.
KWLUG's dinner meetup is at Yo Sushi, 103 King St W in Kitchener, at 7 pm.
KWIPS, the Kitchener-Waterloo Infosec and Privacy Salon, meets at Kwartzlab at 7 pm. A guest speaker presents the paper Grid Shock, on coordinated attacks that swing load on power grids. Free, and masks are required.
Tuesday, October 20
Founder Institute's How to Use AI to Position Your Startup to Buyers is online from 12 to 2 pm.
Wednesday, October 21
SIGNAL hosts Surviving the Media UpsideDown, a free talk on bots and violent vitriol online, at UW's Dana Porter Library from 11:30 am to 1 pm.
Builders Club's Non-Technical Wednesday is at 12 pm. Free.
Communitech's free AI Power Hours: AI, your data and your IP is at the Communitech Hub from 5:30 to 6:30 pm.
The weekly CivicTechWR Hacknight at Builders Club has guest speaker Renjie Butalid. Free.
Women in Communications and Technology runs The Myth of Merit, on building visibility at work, at the Accelerator Centre from 6:30 to 9 pm. Free.
Thursday, October 22
The Accelerator Centre Open House: Meet the Mentors runs from 1 to 4 pm at 295 Hagey Blvd.
DisruptHR-KW 8.0 is at Maxwell's in Waterloo from 4:30 to 8:30 pm. The theme is The End of HR: As We Know It. Tickets are $54.58 to $65.23.
AI Agents × Company OS is in Kitchener from 5:30 to 8:30 pm.
Friday, October 23
Southwestern Ontario Drupal Camp fills the Kitchener Public Library's central branch from 9 am to 5 pm.
Saturday, October 24
ROBOHAX 2026 is a day of robot competition at the SPUR Innovation Centre from 8:30 am. Robots must be built and coded by Friday, with no build time on the day. Tickets are $5 to $100.
Drupal in a Day at Conestoga College's Waterloo campus has anyone curious build a Drupal site from 9 am to 5 pm.
Black Boys Code runs Build the Web, a free coding workshop for boys 8 to 17, at the University of Waterloo at 11 am.
Sunday, October 25
The Computer Heritage Group meets at Kwartzlab, 145 Bedford Rd in Kitchener, at 2 pm.
Heard from the companies.
QuantumCore started work on its fourth technology: chip-scale magnetless circulators, made to replace the bulky magnetic ones in superconducting quantum computers.
Voyis imaged targets underwater for mine countermeasure work at REPMUS 2026 and built 3D models of them in real time.
Arctic Wolf introduced a new endpoint security product at its 2026 Security Operations Summit.
Tulip added a shared inbox, a unified inbox and WhatsApp Business to its clienteling app, so any store associate can pick up a customer conversation.
Euna Solutions shipped its Fall 2026 release across Euna Budget, Grants, Payments and Procurement for public sector teams.
What to read.
Oct 18–25: Robots, agents and a sprint (Jesse Rodgers, Startup Barn)
How Agentic Activity Changes the Risk Equation (Ebin Tomy, Radical Ventures)
The Weekly
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