Every company in Toronto seems to think it’s a start-up. Offices are outfitted with foosball tables, bosses are hell-bent on disrupting their industries, and R&D managers aren’t employees—they’re Chief Vision Gurus. Less than a decade ago, ambitious entrepreneurs who wanted to bat in the big leagues moved to Silicon Valley. Then, suddenly, the exodus stopped. Our brightest students stayed put after graduation, while megafirms like Google, Uber and Amazon chose Toronto for their newest outposts. There are good reasons for the phenomenon: Canadian schools are pumping out digital whiz kids, the continent’s richest venture capitalists are flooding local companies with cash, and, crucially, our country isn’t run by a bombastic oaf. Here, the brilliant innovators, deep-pocketed investors and amazing inventions that are turning Toronto into the world’s next great tech superpower.
Toronto’s top entrepreneurs on start-up stereotypes, wild investor stories and who they admire most
A Q&A with Tanmay Bakshi, a 13-year-old techy YouTube star who has built apps for the App Store and written a coding textbook
Figure 1, OpenCare and other apps that are taking telehealth into the future
At U of T’s Creative Destruction Lab, tech wizards are banking on the quantum future
A Q&A with Julielynn Wong, a doctor who 3-D prints medical supplies in remote rural areas, in war zones and even in space
Inside the Deloitte Greenhouse, featuring an adorable AI robot, VR headsets and 3D printers
Five ex–RIM staffers turned tech tycoons
HackerYou, Lighthouse Labs and Bitmaker are pumping out tech geniuses
Five deep-pocketed American venture capitalists that are pouring millions into Toronto start-ups
These companies are building Matrix-like virtual smartphone adventures
Guess which of the Big Five banks has a neon-lit bowling alley and a speakeasy bar
Inside Thalmic Labs’s secret wearables warehouse
Everything you need to know about neuroinformatics
Huda Idrees, Candice Faktor and three other women rocking the tech sector
How Stratford, a town known for staging Shakespeare, became a hub for self-driving cars
Geoffrey Hinton and the Vector Institute are helping to make Toronto the AI capital of the world
Uber’s Raquel Urtasun is revolutionizing the automobile at U of T
The lowdown on Okta, Slack, Amazon and Thomson Reuters’s new digs
A Q&A with Toronto’s chief innovation advocate Michelle Holland
Why a bunch of Scandinavian start-up founders spent a week touring Toronto
Getting from Toronto to Waterloo is about to get much easier
Everything you need to know about Wealthsimple, Hubba and League
Glasses that help the blind see, a device that lets the disabled use smartphones and 3D-printed prosthetics
In the last year, Toronto created some 22,500 tech jobs—twice the number of new gigs as in New York City
“We have amazing talent here, and nobody knows it”
Jimoh Ovbiagele on Ross, his company’s AI assistant that helps lawyers find legal precedents for their cases
Including MaRS, the Ryerson DMZ, OneEleven and more