Speed has a new home at the University of Waterloo’s Innovation Arena in downtown Kitchener. The university-linked incubator will occupy half of the 90,000-square-foot Innovation Arena, which includes 20,000 square feet of purpose-built lab space for computer hardware and health technology equipment.

The Innovation Arena was announced in November 2020 as part of a collaboration between the City of Kitchener and the University of Waterloo to expand the university’s health sciences campus. The City of Kitchener contributed C$8.5 million towards the renovation of the building, with additional funding from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario), the Government of Ontario and of philanthropic partners, including local entrepreneur and angel investor Mike Stork.

The Innovation Arena is the latest addition to Kitchener’s growing health technology scene. McMaster University’s Waterloo Regional Campus and MACcelerate Lab, University of Waterloo School of Pharmacy, and Communitech MedTech Accelerator are on the same block as the Innovation Arena and Medical Innovation Xchange ( MIX) is a short drive from the space. According to the university, more than 100 health technology companies operate in the region.

Move on

Velocity began as an on-campus startup incubator and expanded to the Velocity Garage inside the Lang Tannery Building in 2012. The Velocity Garage opened with 8,000 square feet of startup space and grew expanded to 37,000 square feet in 2016. The Velocity Garage space was previously home to Google’s Waterloo office and was located in the same building as the Communitech Hub.

While the previous space served its founders and their teams, the Tannery Building space was not designed to accommodate the university’s growing number of health and medtech startups. Adrien Côté, Velocity’s chief executive officer, said the university began thinking about a purpose-built space in 2018, but real momentum picked up in 2021.

“The City of Kitchener wanted to launch its Make It Kitchener 2.0 plan. Part of the reason is that the city was wondering how it could support the life sciences, deep tech and health tech startups that spun out of Velocity,” Côté said. “Then, in 2021, the university asked our team to design it, which was a truly remarkable opportunity.”

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Côté and the Velocity team began the design process by looking at 400 Velocity companies over the incubator’s history and asking what the new facility would need to help similar companies go further, faster . The result was a two-part design philosophy that framed the design of the Innovation Arena.

“The first is that the space should support Velocity’s origin story to foster a learning community around entrepreneurship and business. The second was that we needed to create resources that help people turn prototypes into products,” Côté said. “In this region, people can make a prototype, without problem. There are creative spaces. There is everything on campus. But converting a prototype into something someone sells requires a different set of resources.

Côté noted that about 50 percent of startups in the innovation arena are business productivity or software technology companies, with the remainder being a mix of health technology, biotechnology, electronics and robotics. .

“Our goal is that at any given time, the cumulative value of startups working in this space, as we scale over the next year, will be valued at over $1 billion,” he said. declared Côté.

From prototype to product

Velocity will occupy the second floor of the Innovation Arena, at 280 Joseph Street, on the University of Waterloo Health Sciences campus. In addition to dedicated hardware and health technology lab space, it includes a multipurpose kitchen, meeting space and office space for Velocity startups. The main corridor of the space, Velocity Main Street, runs the length of the Innovation Arena from front to back and separates the office space from the laboratory space.

“The space across the street, I loved it because it was disjointed. But the evolution was such that we had the impression of being bursting at the seams. Having something custom built would help a lot,” Côté said.

One of the benefits of the new lab space is having the space and equipment to turn a prototype into a market-ready product. The other is the validation and confidence that comes from being associated with the university. Côté gave the example of building a wearable device that connects to a hospital’s electronic medical records (EMR) system.

“If you’re building a medical device that’s going to go into preclinical testing, you need to assemble it under a quality management system. We have rooms that support this. So now if a hospital asks if it was built under a QMS, the startup can say they built it under a QMS at Velocity at the University of Waterloo, and the hospital will say, “Oh, OK , let’s go.” It’s huge,” said Côté.

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One of the startups taking advantage of the Innovation Arena’s dedicated hardware lab space is Finished trusses. The company designs solutions for regenerative organic growing practices focused on tree health and nutrition. Its first product is an autonomous robot capable of carrying out “thinning” in commercial orchards. Thinning involves selectively removing fruit, flowers or young buds from trees to ensure that the remaining fruit can grow larger for sale to consumers.

Matt Stevens, founder of Finite Farms, is no stranger to the Waterloo region startup community. Stevens founded FleetCarma, an electric vehicle telematics startup acquired by GeoTab in 2018. After leaving GeoTab, Stevens wanted to work on solutions to address water shortages linked to climate change and reduce the cost of natural and organic foods. Finite Farms has a two and a half acre farm in Waterloo with 200 varieties of fruit and nut trees and a 60 acre farm in Simcoe, Ontario.

Stevens and Finite Farm robotics manager Michael Giannikouris work on the production robot in the Innovation Arena hardware space and use the farm for testing.

“We were really lucky to participate in Velocity in March. I saw all the benefits of being part of Velocity. The awesome things with the community, the coaching, and then having the space is awesome for us in the offseason,” Stevens said.

Working in the innovation arena is also an opportunity for Stevens and Giannikouris to give back to the next generation of founders and discover new approaches and technologies.

“The team next to us is building agricultural robots. It’s in a different scenario than us, but they have a team with great experience in robotics. We share potential suppliers and technical expertise, which is valuable. It’s been a few years since I’ve been doing this kind of thing and things are changing,” Giannikouris said.

As for the most recent graduates, Christy Lee and Ethan Alvizo are working on their startup, PatientCompanion. The platform streamlines communication between patients and nurses in hospitals and senior care centers. Instead of ringing the bell to call a nurse and waiting to make a request, patients can use a tablet to request help.

“We allow patients to specify exactly what they need, whether it is water, whether they are in pain or whether they need to go to the toilet. This way, nurses will know in advance, before entering the room, exactly what they need. We want to help reduce stress on both sides,” said co-founder Christy Lee.

PatientCompanion recently completed a pilot at a hospital in Fergus, Ontario, and will soon be rolled out to three other hospitals.

Real roboticswhich recently deployed its autonomous robotics platform at the Toronto Zoo, is another startup taking advantage of the Innovation Arena’s space and programming. Co-founder Sharif Virani said the companies selected to be part of Velocity and the Innovation Arena are the type of companies Canada needs right now.

“The current time in our country is a perfect storm. We send all our dollars. We send all our talents. It’s really important that we start to go around the world and redefine what it means to be a Canadian-made brand,” Virani said. “If you look at the Velocity companies, they all answered that call. This is an opportunity for us to be at the forefront of all these technologies – Blockchain, quantum computing, LLM and AI – in all the areas we need to be in. It’s a great ecosystem. Being here is part of this journey for us.

Featured image courtesy of the University of Waterloo.