The event, celebrating the city's 15th anniversary, will showcase the city's technological growth.
Drawn west by the Rocky Mountains, Dion Kelly stayed in Calgary for its thriving tech scene, part of a wave of founders who turned the city into a North American powerhouse. fastest growing innovation center.
After receiving her PhD in neuroscience from the University of Calgary, Kelly co-founded Possibility of neurotechnologieswhich uses a non-invasive brain-computer interface to help children with disabilities. The company was one of the top 10 startups featured at Calgary Innovation Week, November 3-6 (see full list). Here).
“All my friends and family are still in Ontario, so there was nothing keeping me here when I graduated,” she said. “But I really thought this was the best place to start our company because of all the funding and the people.”
“We're trying to create about 50,000 jobs.”
Jennifer Lussier
Calgary platform
Another one of this year's top 10 startups is Symbiotic AIwhich uses artificial intelligence (AI) to improve treatment options for patients with cardiovascular disease. CEO and co-founder Arjun Puri, who is also from Ontario, said that while he could build his company elsewhere, it would be at a “much slower pace and over a much longer period of time.”
Puri said having an innovation center at the University of Calgary, which is part of an expanding network of centers across the city, allows startups like his to move faster toward commercialization and access to data than startups in other provinces.
“Traditionally, startups, especially in healthcare, have found it quite difficult to be able to securely, responsibly and ethically access patient data,” he said. “But because of the governance and the layered innovation model that we have, we can do research at the university and then transfer that intellectual property to a company to commercialize it so we can generate benefits that actually benefit society.”
The goal is growth
Calgary's technology sector has experienced explosive growth in recent years.
Jobs grew 61 percent between 2021 and 2024, making it the fastest-growing tech talent market in North America and one of the 50 largest in the world. June report from Startup Genome says the city's tech ecosystem has added $8.1 billion in value since 2021, exceeding the global average.
“Our goal is to increase the growth rate by 10 times at the earliest stage. [startups] by 2031, which means we're trying to create approximately 50,000 jobs,” said Jennifer Lussier, Interim CEO Platform Calgarya not-for-profit center with provincial and federal government support that supports the city's technology industry. Lussier noted that the industry as a whole has created more than 60,000 jobs today.
The technology sector has been a part of the city for decades, but it has primarily focused on oil and gas. There was no unifying force until the early 2000s, when a group of entrepreneurial people decided they needed to start working together to better diversify the city and province's economies.
Today, the local sector has expanded to include everything from financial technology to clean technology and robotics. Now in its 15th year, Calgary Innovation Week has grown along with the city itself.
The first launch party took place in 2010. It was a one-day celebration of the top 10 tech startups in Calgary, where founders pitched their creations to investors and other entrepreneurs.
The group continued to operate as Startup Calgary, a volunteer-run non-profit organization that relied on grant funding for its first few years before hiring Kari Gordon as its first executive director in 2015.
“They were doing technology before it was cool,” said Gordon, who is now director of Creative Destruction Lab-Rockies.
“It brought in a community of people who I don’t think knew they needed a community at the time.”
“They started with this grassroots initiative, literally meeting in bars, or you got a community hall that somebody gave you, and they just started this group,” Gordon added. “It attracted a community of people who I don't think knew they needed a community at the time. They became a community and then they became a movement.”
In 2017, Calgary Economic Development, a non-profit organization supported in part by the City of Calgary, took over management of Startup Calgary. the organization was merged with the Calgary Platform in 2021 and in 2022 Platform Innovation Center was opened across from the Calgary Central Library in downtown.
Working on a shoestring budget, Startup Calgary produced 90 events in Gordon's first year. In 2025, the Calgary platform has already welcomed more than 1,000 people.
Innovation Week is now four full days of seminars, masterclasses and networking events held in offices, workplaces and hubs across the city.
Patrick Lohr, managing partner of seed capital firm Panache Ventures, argues that the tech industry must continue to improve and work with all levels of government to make Calgary and Alberta as desirable places to live as possible.
“The government needs to set the rules and conditions for businesses to continue to succeed,” he said. “We have a new city council and the most important message I've heard from our new city council is that they are here to facilitate dialogue, collaborate and work together as a team with the provincial and federal governments.”
BetaKit Prairies Reports partly funded by YEGAFa non-profit organization dedicated to sharing business stories in Alberta..
Image courtesy of Platform Calgary.
