November 2, 2026
Cursors on the grid.
Your Weekly for October 26 to November 1.
Two stories, and one from Alex.
I sat down for my first full interview this week, and finished the funding map I started at Techtoberfest.
Steve Hanov and Noah Deskin Are Building Dispatch for the Solo Realtor: Two Builders Club founders in the YC sprint want to take the laptop work off real estate agents, and they do most of it from inside a brokerage. That's them up top. It was my first sit-down with the full camera kit. One mic wouldn't turn on and a chair broke in the next room, and they were very patient about all of it.
The quantum panel at Techtoberfest
Where Waterloo Region Startups Get Their Money: After the investor panels at Techtoberfest I realized I couldn't say which funds back which companies here. So I looked at 24 funds and angel groups and the 25 Region companies they funded since 2024. Who writes the first cheque, who leads the big rounds, and what they look for.
Alex Kinsella wrote up Hard Tech Happy Hour for BitBakery. Cole Van Vlack moved here from Kingston and went to local meetups looking for hardware founders, but kept finding AI and SaaS people instead. "Where the heck are the hardware people?" he told Alex. So he started his own at Arabella Park, and it has grown into trail hikes and brunches. If you build things with atoms, go!
Startup of the week.
This week's pick is Voltra, and it's mostly for the website. The home page is a line drawing of a street (a house, chargers, a factory, a data centre) with little coloured cursors at work between them. It's worth opening on a laptop.
Voltra's home page: a street of buildings and chargers, with cursors moving between them
On its other pages, a wireframe model of a data centre builds itself as you scroll, with live numbers on the solar panels, the cooling, the servers and the batteries.
Voltra's wireframe data centre, with live numbers on its solar, cooling, servers and batteries
The company connects energy hardware and software from every vendor into one system: EV chargers, batteries, solar, data centre power and the grid. Alexander Stratmoen and Aryan Afrouzi started it after meeting at the University of Waterloo, and it came through Velocity. Its $1.8 million USD pre-seed in May 2025 was led by Contrary, with Hanover and Velocity Fund.
Now on with the week:
Who's hiring.
34 new roles were posted this week, about the usual. 300 are open at 52 companies, and 133 of them are in the region or remote in Canada.
Quo, the company that was OpenPhone, posted ten roles for the first time. Most are remote in the US and Canada: a Senior Backend Engineer (Canada), a Frontend Engineer, a Senior Product Designer for mobile and a Senior Product Manager based in Toronto.
BinSentry wants a Mechanical Design Engineer and an Electronics Engineer in Kitchener.
Impossible Metals is hiring in Collingwood: an Electrical Engineer, a Shop Operations Manager, an Engineering Project Manager and a Field Technician.
Voltera wants a Technical Sales Representative in Waterloo.
VueReal is hiring a Project Manager for engineering applications in Waterloo.
eleven-x wants an Embedded Software Engineer in Waterloo.
Tempo is hiring a Senior Backend Developer and a Staff Software Developer in Canada.
TitanFile posted its first roles on the list, a DevOps Engineer and a Security Engineer in Toronto.
New on the list.
9 companies joined the list this week. See them all.
Money.
Page, the Kitchener-Waterloo company that sells AI software for tracking new legislation and regulations, was bought by the Burnaby legaltech firm Clio. Clio announced it at ClioCon in Boston.
Evercloak is getting advisory services and up to nearly $2 million from NRC IRAP's Clean Technology initiative. It makes membranes for EverDROP, a dehumidifier that cuts the energy HVAC systems use.
What to do.
Monday, November 2
KWLUG meets at the Davis Centre at 7 pm and online. Sumedh Mahajan demos LearnBot, AI chatbots inside learning management systems, and Spencer Hughes covers Authentik, a self-hosted sign-on server. Free.
Tuesday, November 3
BDC, Communitech and WaterlooEDC run a Defence Sector Awareness and Supply Chain Workshop at the Tannery from 8 am to 1 pm, on how local companies get into the defence supply chain. Free.
Founder Institute's From Founder to Funded is an online Q&A with investor Brian Bell at 12 pm.
The WICI Talk on Energy Efficient AI is in Roy Coutts Hall at UW from 2 to 4 pm, on why brains use so much less power than GPUs.
Startup Drinks KW is at Abe Erb in downtown Kitchener from 5:30 to 8:30 pm. No agenda and no pitches. Free.
Wednesday, November 4
Non-Technical Wednesday at Builders Club is an hour on pricing, marketing and the other builder problems at 12 pm. The room sets the agenda. Free.
Communitech's AI Power Hours: Hiring your first 5 AI employees sets up a small team of AI agents, each with one job, and watches them pass work along. 5:30 pm at the Hub. Free.
The weekly CivicTechWR Hacknight is at Builders Club from 6 to 8 pm. Free.
Saturday, November 7
Waterloo.Dev Fest fills SPUR Innovation Centre from 9 am to 8 pm with workshops and talks on AI and software, and local companies hiring. Tickets are $15 to $25.
CommuniHacks starts at Builders Club at 9:30 am, a 24-hour hackathon where students build software for problems local nonprofits bring in.
Heard from the companies.
Applied Brain Research says its four open Niagara speech recognition models, from 9M to 84M parameters, are the most accurate at their size on the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard below 100M parameters.
Magnet Forensics started the Magnet AI Research Lab. Its first study, in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, had an AI expert system score 22 percentage points above trained examiners at reading media authentication results.
Axonify launched Rollout: describe a frontline initiative and it builds the training, messages and tasks, then shows which teams are ready.
Euna Solutions moved Franklin University in Ohio from about 100 separate vendor accounts onto Euna Marketplace.
Arctic Wolf was named a Leader in the QKS SPARK Matrix for AI SOC Automation.
What to read.
October Update: Techtoberfest, Two Dinners, and Money for Builders (Jesse Rodgers, Startup Barn)
Nov 1–8: YC prep, a hackathon for nonprofits, and AI employees (Jesse Rodgers, Startup Barn)
Kitchener man trades 20-year warehouse career to found tech startup using AI (CTV News Kitchener)
VCCI exposes the bottleneck in Canadian VC (Alex Riehl, BetaKit (National))
Waterloo researchers advancing cybersecurity in the age of AI (University of Waterloo News (Tech))
New on Builderloo.
A lot changed on the site this week, and all of it is live now.
Medical Innovation Xchange, the medtech hub on Wellington Street in Kitchener that Intellijoint's founders started, has its own page now. It lists the 19 MIX members on Builderloo, from Hyivy and Vena Medical to FluidAI and myStoria, and each of their pages links back to MIX. Biomiq and Bloom Care came onto the list with it.
The homepage is new. Signed out, it's one board with this week's events, roles, new startups and forum posts. Signed in, it's your own page: a For you feed in your fields, the events you saved, and what the companies you follow did this week.
Search covers everything now, with the best match first: startups, hubs, funds, events, roles, people, stories, The Weekly and the forum. Every list on the site is that search with its tab picked.
Every event, role and company page now has the same layout, and ends with everything it's linked to: its people, roles, events, stories and forum posts. Event pages also show the nearest GRT or ION stop and how long the walk is.
Every account has a profile now, and People lists everyone. You can also sign in with Google.
Stories can hold charts, like the bars in the funding story. And How we use AI says where AI is used on the site and where it isn't.
In this issue
Startups
Archaive
ARCHAIVE turns decades of drawings and shop-floor know-how into data every engineer can find. Built with Japanese manufacturers by STAR UP of Kyoto, and brought to North America by SPIN UX of Ontario.
Accelerator Centre · 1-10 employees · since 2026
The Weekly
One email every Monday from weekly@builderloo.ca: new startups, funding, events and roles. Unsubscribe anytime.