Waterloo Tech Highlights for January 2026
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.
We didn’t publish a newsletter on Jan 1, so some stories here from December, 2025.
Assetflo raised US$2M from GreenSky Ventures, Geotab and Mega Innovation. The company uses less infrastructure to monitor parcels, goods and equipment, helping companies reduce losses.
Nfinite (formerly Nfinite Nanotech) received $3.8M of grant funding from NRC to work with Amcor, Unilever and Pepsi.
ENVGO held their public launch of the NV1 electric boat at the Toronto Boat Show.
Shinydocs won a deal with a major US bank, selecting them to modernize their records and search.
Vena Medical crossed 100 commercial cases performed as a company.
eleven-x won a significant deal with the City of Virginia Beach, starting with 1000 parking spaces.
Alchemy was selected to be part of the NATO DIANA 2026 cohort. They’ll focus on finishing development and starting commercialization of their Crypsis thermal signature management technology.
Miovision announced a deal with TomTom to bring TomTom’s global traffic data into Miovision’s platform.
Intellijoint made a second shipment to India and signed new agreements with distributors in Mexico and Brazil, setting up more international expansion in 2026.
Chris’ Thoughts
Like you, I’ve witnessed many things in life that I’ve struggled to convey to others with a fraction of the awe that the experience garnered. Just last week I drove from a sunny blue sky into a dark grey land with a 10 second transition and could not convey to my family how eerie the experience felt.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve witnessed three separate miracles of software development from credible people I know well enough that it just can’t be faked, nor in each case would there be a reason to do so.
In one case, a couple people were able to re-create the entire software stack that they had built along with 10-15 additional capable developers over the past 5-8 years in a matter of a couple months of part-time work. The new stack is more advanced, more secure, and further along than the original. They estimate that they’ve achieved a 100-500x reduction in the amount of time invested in the original stack.
To break that down, achieving a 10x improvement in just about anything is totally amazing. A 100x improvement is unfathomable. We often get lost with big numbers and think they’re interchangeable so for reference, 1 million seconds is 12 days, and 1 billion seconds is 32 years. 100x is a lot.
I’m still digesting all this but can think of a few potential implications of this new world order.
1. Software moats built over time have largely disappeared and most incumbents don’t know it. Think Rogue One (best Star Wars movie) when the Empire acts like their invincible planetary shield can’t fail and nobody is aware until the Rebels fly a ship through it. Companies who have put 10+ years into building something have an unfortunate reality to recon with. Note that proprietary data, IP and unique domain knowledge don’t apply to the above. These things become the only moat left.
2. Just because you can build fast, doesn’t mean everything else speeds up. Imagine the Ukrainians suddenly get the ability to make 10 billion bullets a day. But their capacity to acquire more guns and people to fire them doesn’t change. So how do they play out, the advantage? Companies still need to build distribution networks, sign customers to contracts, create brand awareness, integrate with hardware and a host of other things that don’t factor in here. Making the gears and flywheels mesh will become a real challenge now that one gear spins 100x faster.
3. Does legacy and maintenance disappear? I’m not smart enough to understand when it makes sense to just give up life cycle management altogether and build from scratch every single time.
4. Acquisitions and build vs. buy decisions by incumbents will take a new dimension. Buying somebody to get a new feature to market sooner doesn’t wash and a ton of VC-backed unicorns could be really stuck. On the other hand, replacing a large old-school dev culture with a small team that has domain knowledge can pay for itself in months just with payroll savings. If I’m a legacy-oriented software company like SAP, or ServiceNow or Workday, I’m not sure my legacy team and policies will transition fast enough.
5. Imagine you love to hunt but in the first ten minutes of hunting season you kill enough to feed your family and everybody you can think of for the next two years. Now all that’s left to do are the things you don’t like, butchering, packaging, freezing, etc. And there’s no hunting to do for at least two years. I think a lot of good software people are going to face this existential issue and CTOs will have to work out how to keep them productively busy.
6. Successful Product Management at software companies fundamentally changes. As the clutch between the builders and the rest of the organization, old ways of doing things won’t work and the new best-practices have yet to be invented. I’d expect to see many young people emerge as leaders here as they figure out how to accelerate the uptake of change into the organization. PMs who manage roadmaps will find everything they conceive for the next year done by next week.
Some of this will turn out laughably wrong. As a caveat, not all software remains subject to a 100x compression but lots of vertical industry SaaS products and dev tools remain vulnerable. I’ve seen enough to believe that the changes aren’t just false promoters on LinkedIn selling influence, although those certainly exist
December 1 Year End Thoughts
Unfortunately, our December 1 edition landed in spam boxes. We think we fixed the issue. If you wish to catch our year-end musings, it’s available below.
I like sugar, and the genius ways people put it into foods. As a result, I carry ten more pounds than I’d like to. As somebody who participates in longer triathlons and other endurance events, I feel it every time I line up to start a race. Each year I set a race goal that’s 8 months away and tell myself that I’m going to maintain discipline around food, especially the empty calories my brain rationalizes so that on race day I can really put on my best performance. Then I see the box of Oreos in the drawer…
Circumstances in 2025 have conspired to force Canada to react on many fronts. One involves a surge of defense and security spending that will see Ottawa commit to increases from $30B to $180B over the next 10 years. Crudely speaking this spending surge can go one of two ways.
On one path, we can buy a bunch of expensive toys from large, mostly American contractors, especially more F-35s from Lockheed Martin and gear from other top defense suppliers like Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, Palantir and others, pushing them to do some job creation in Canada and throw some small scraps to Canadian companies. As always occurs, the IP, profits and taxes will go elsewhere.
The other path involves taking a page from America’s great investment in defense and silicon and thereby setting themselves up as the innovation hub of the world. [If you haven’t read Chip War, I highly recommend it, as the story of how Lockheed and defense spending catalyzed modern-day Silicon Valley and the California Tech ecosystem.] This kind of crisis and this kind of spending can help buy Canada a home-made defense industrial complex with all its attendant dual-use offshoots that we’ve lacked for decades.
But big ideas prove messy and I question Canada’s tolerance for messy. Investing in unproven companies creates turmoil and requires a collective resilience. Many fail and many more falter before finding their way and historically our country has shown a low tolerance for setbacks and risk. When it’s a government program it feels like as a friend put it “we spend 90 cents to account for each dollar of spending,” knowing that anything less will get hysterically amplified with the lens of hindsight by The Globe and Mail and Opposition Parties looking for political currency.
But that approach won’t work any longer.
I think about US President Kennedy’s galvanizing speech that launched the moon program and built enough public tolerance for failures and deaths to allow Apollo to ultimately succeed, creating a patriotism dividend that lasted at least 40 years. Maybe it’s the best example of a visionary leader convincing a group to accept temporary mess for a greater good.
I think about Winston Churchill’s “never surrender” speech, providing resolve and hope to a scared nation. He successfully convinced his people that the UK needed to endure the mess of bombed streets and sons in coffins and to withstand Nazi bombardment and losses in the darkest of hours.
How resilient is the collective will of Canadians to endure mess and accept sacrifice to enable a greater good?
Like my challenge to refuse the gratification of Oreos and maintain a disciplined state of denial that unlocks a greater good, Canada’s circumstances give us an opportunity to break from our Oreo habit and pursue a better version of ourselves.
My dream for 2026 is more collective tolerance for failure. For Canadians to embrace a bigger risk appetite and build more collective grit. To applaud those who try to do hard but noble things and show a willingness to give up a thing we love and know won’t last for the promise of something better and more enduring. To cheer the creation of nation-defining stories that ultimately puts us in a better place.
We won’t publish a newsletter at the end of December, so this is a wrap for 2025. Thanks for reading, for your support and for your constructive disagreements as well. I wish you a happy Christmas and a great end to the year.
Chris
Bonus reading
The Canadian Council of Innovators (CCI) have done an excellent job of beating the drum of strategic Canadian procurement for years now. I’m hopeful that this article reflects as a harbinger of mounting political will to change the status quo. We’ve seen a wave of Buy Canadian take hold at the consumer level. It’s time to demand the same for our tax dollars. The article is behind a paywall, but also available through Apple News if you subscribe for that.
https://thelogic.co/news/the-big-read/smaller-canadian-firms-government-contracts/
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Chris Wormald @cwormald