Day one of Communitech's Techtoberfest at the Tannery in Kitchener. A keynote by Vass Bednar, three panels with investors, and two hours at the Biergarten.
I spent today at day one of Techtoberfest, Communitech's yearly event at the Tannery in Kitchener. It was the 29th one, and my first. The afternoon had a keynote and three short panels, where founders and operators asked investors the questions. The Biergarten ran until six.
Sheldon McCormick opening Techtoberfest 2026
Sheldon McCormick, Communitech's CEO, opened it in a Bavarian hat. The theme this year was "work in progress". Before lunch, over 50 local companies met with 20 to 30 visiting VCs. The panels covered quantum, physical AI and digital AI.
KeynoteVass Bednar on going the distance
QuantumQuantacet and Garage Capital
Physical AITwo Small Fish and IRV Fund
Digital AIRadical Ventures and Inovia
BiergartenUntil six
The afternoon program at the Tannery
The keynote: going the distance
Vass Bednar from the Canadian Shield Institute gave the keynote. She talked about how Canadian companies can start here and stay here.
Vass Bednar on Canadian pensions investing at home
She said "There's capital that builds Canada up, and there's capital that buys Canada up." Foreign investment in Canada was about $93 billion last year, the most since 2007. About $44 billion of it, or 47%, was spent buying Canadian companies.
47%of it was buying Canadian companies
Foreign investment in Canada last year, by Vass Bednar's numbers
Taalas was one of her examples. It is a Toronto chip company, and in August it agreed to sell to AMD. She said it could not raise the growth money it needed in Canada.
I was amazed when I first read about Taalas on Hacker News. Their demo, ChatJimmy, ran Llama 3.1 8B on their chip at about 17,000 tokens a second. Every answer came back almost at once, however long a prompt I gave it.
She also said founders choose suppliers too, not only governments. The email, cloud and tools a small company picks decide which Canadian companies get those first customers.
What does it look like to go the distance?
Quantum
The quantum panel
Tobi Day-Hamilton from Nord Quantique moderated Chloé Archambault from Quantacet and Michael Litt from Garage Capital. Both investors said technical founders explain too much of the technology in a first meeting. They want to hear first what it does for a customer.
Michael Litt got a laugh with "Take your pitch deck and run it through Claude, because guaranteed your investors are doing the same thing." He also asked for a room of quantum computers at the University of Waterloo, so students can build applications on real machines.
Physical AI
Introducing the physical AI panel
Matt Rendall from Clearpath Robotics moderated Albert Chen from Two Small Fish and Neha Khera from IRV Fund. Neha said a physical AI company's only lasting advantage is the data it collects at real customer sites. Albert talked about Finite Farms, a local company whose founder bought an apple orchard to learn why apple-picking robots fail.
Digital AI
Ali Asaria, Daniel Mulet and Steve Woods on the digital AI panel
The last panel was Ali Asaria from Transformer Lab moderating Daniel Mulet from Radical Ventures and Steve Woods from Inovia. Both investors told founders to focus on their customer and the problem they solve. Ali ended the panel by telling founders that "this is the time to be very loud about what you're doing."
The Biergarten
After the panels everyone moved to the Biergarten. I spent two hours talking with founders, researchers, investors and people from Communitech and Waterloo EDC, and showed a lot of them Builderloo. The Wi-Fi was slow, so I took photos of name badges instead of looking people up. I have a long list of follow-ups and a few interviews to set up.
Day two is tomorrow afternoon, with demos from local quantum, physical AI and digital AI companies. I'll be there.
