Velocity has a new home at the University of Waterloo’s Innovation Arena in downtown Kitchener. The university-linked incubator will take half of the 90,000-square-foot Innovation Arena, which includes 20,000 square feet of purpose-built lab space for hardware and healthtech 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 $8.5 million CAD towards the building’s renovations, with additional funding from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario), the Government of Ontario, and philanthropic partners, including local entrepreneur and angel investor Mike Stork. 

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

Moving on up

Velocity began as an on-campus startup incubator and expanded into the Velocity Garage inside the Lang Tannery Building in 2012. The Velocity Garage opened with 8,000 square feet of space for startups and 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 support the university’s growing number of health and medtech startups. Adrien Côté, Velocity’s executive director, said the university began looking towards a purpose-built space in 2018, but the real momentum picked up in 2021.

“The City of Kitchener wanted to launch its Make It Kitchener 2.0 plan. Part of that was the city asking how they can support the life science, deep tech, and healthtech startups coming out of Velocity,” Côté said. “Then, in 2021, the university asked our team to design it, which was a really remarkable opportunity.”

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Côté and the Velocity team started 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 move further and faster. The result was a two-part design philosophy that framed the Innovation Arena’s design.

“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, no problem. There are maker spaces. There’s everything on campus. But converting a prototype into a thing someone sells needs a different set of resources.”

Côté noted that about 50 percent of startups in the Innovation Arena are business productivity or software-enabled technology companies, with the others being a mixture of healthtech, biotech, electronics, and robotics. 

“Our goal is that at any one time, the cumulative value of the startups working out of this space, as we ramp up over the next year, is valued over a billion dollars,”  Côté said.

From prototype to product

Velocity will occupy the second floor of the Innovation Arena at 280 Joseph St. on the University of Waterloo Health Sciences campus. In addition to the dedicated hardware and healthtech lab space, it includes a multi-use kitchen, meeting area, and office space for Velocity startups. The space’s main corridor, Velocity Main Street, runs the length of the Innovation Arena from front to back and divides the office space from the lab space.

“The space across the street, I loved it because it was scrappy. But the evolution of it was that we felt like we were bursting at the seams. Having something purpose-built would help a lot,” Côté said.

One advantage 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 trust that come 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 could go into a preclinical trial, you need to assemble that under a Quality Management System. We have rooms that support this. So now, if a hospital asks if it was made 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.’ That’s huge,” said Côté. 

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

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 exiting GeoTab, Stevens wanted to work on solutions to address climate change-related water shortages and reduce the cost of natural, organically grown food. 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’s head of robotics, Michael Giannikouris, work on the production robot in the Innovation Arena’s hardware space and use the farm for testing. 

“We were really lucky to get into Velocity back in March. I’ve seen 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 through 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 learn about 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 a bunch of robotics experience. We’re sharing 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 change,” Giannikouris said.

On the more recent grad side of the spectrum, Christy Lee and Ethan Alvizo are working on their startup, PatientCompanion. The platform streamlines communication between patients and nurses in hospitals and elder care centres. Instead of buzzing for a nurse and waiting to make a request, patients can use a tablet to request assistance.

“We allow patients to specify exactly what they need, whether it’s water or they’re in pain or need to go to the washroom. So nurses will know ahead of time before going into the room exactly what they need. We want to help to reduce the stress on both sides,” said co-founder Christy Lee.

PatientCompanion recently completed a pilot at a hospital in Fergus, Ontario, and will soon roll out to three additional hospitals. 

Real Life Robotics, which recently deployed its autonomous robot 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 Canada needs now.

“The time right now in our country is a perfect storm. We’re sending all of our dollars out. We’re sending all of our talents out. It’s really important that we start to circle the wagons and redefine what it means to be a made-in-Canada brand,” Virani said. “If you look around the companies at Velocity, they all have answered this call. It’s an opportunity for us to be at the cutting edge of all these technologies—Blockchain, quantum computing, LLM and AI—all the spaces we need to be in. It’s a great ecosystem. Being here is part of that journey for us.”

Feature image courtesy University of Waterloo.

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