Waterloo Tech Highlights for March 2025
Our goal is to provide you with a monthly primer on significant news events from private Waterloo-based technology companies in 5 minutes or less.
Axelar Network raised $30M in a Coin Offering from Arrington Capital and Electric Capital and five other investors.
TextGenetic won a share of a $100k challenge to deploy their fleet vehicle monitoring solution to the City of Kitchener.
Vidyard is now generating over $1M of annual revenue from their Video Sales Agent.
Intellijont completed a sale to Grand River Hospital. It only took 10 years from Health Canada approval.
KA Imaging is going to space. The next manned SpaceX missions will image astronauts in space using their x-ray detector and to measure bone density. They also reported a 44% revenue increase in 2024 and a 16% staff increase. Their 2024 recap is here.
Evalyze raised a $100k angel round from an undisclosed investor.
eleven-x won a deal with Clemson University to install sensors in over 10,000 stalls.
Chris’ Thoughts
Happy April Fools Day. Getting in the spirit of the morning, we present a version of Two Truths and a Lie. I’ve been told that sarcasm never works while writing and I try to keep that rule – except today. See if you can spy the lie.
Bottom-Up Innovation
For those who attended the Socratica Symposium in Waterloo this month you probably came away with a much worse feeling about the innovation pipeline in Waterloo than before you came. If you didn’t make it, give it a watch here. It’s an amateur take and departure from the rich and vibrant government sponsored programs you usually see. The demos start at about the 1h20min mark. It’s not worth your time, but you should watch it anyway.
AI as Accelerant
Crunchbase has turned the AI dogs loose on their database to amazing effect – turning a source of factual information into a speculative cup of swamp water. In addition to a now unusable interface, many stories got flagged this month that I couldn’t verify. One example: Profound Impact (a Waterloo company) got co-mingled with Profound Medical Corp (an American public company) to note that Profound Impact has been accused of securities violations (which they haven’t). I haven’t really thought of AI as an accelerant of the misinformation that plagues the internet, but if Crunchbase says it’s true then it must be.
Accountability
I’ve been thinking about accountability lately and how to effectively create it in my life.
I have a friend who’s former British Army. This fall he took to sending me a note every Friday night that he would be at a cold plunge I occasionally attend on Saturday mornings. He eventually explained that he uses the act of telling me that he’s coming as a means of accountability, forcing him to get there the next day.
Like many, I use an app called Strava. The app serves two purposes: it records all my swims, skis, bikes, runs, and hikes and puts it in one place for me. It also acts as a social network and tells me all the activities that the people I follow have done. Used well it helps me know how many kms I ran this March vs. last year or reminds me about how a friend who did the 30k Around The Bay race so I can congratulate him. I tell myself it’s for implicit accountability. But there’s a part that’s like Instagram. Scrolling through others’ activities, I see who has been lazy (so I feel better about myself) and who has been working hard (harder than me) leaving me “motivated” to get going. That’s not accountability, that’s comparison.
I had a friend confide that he wasn’t recording on Strava because he took a couple months off and was doing base running and was too slow to record his activities. That really got me thinking about how I lack effective accountability systems in my life that aren’t rooted in comparison or guilt.
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Chris Wormald @cwormald