Day two of Communitech's Techtoberfest: a keg tapping, eight Waterloo founders on stage, and what I took home from two days at the Tannery.
Day two of Techtoberfest was shorter than day one and louder. There were no panels. Eight local founders each had about five minutes on stage to show what they build, and then everyone went to the Biergarten.
It started with a keg tapping, run by Kitchener-Waterloo Oktoberfest with both mascots on stage. Sheldon McCormick and Devin Galloway from Garage Capital took the mallet. It took a few hits.
A showcase instead of a pitch competition
Sheldon said this was an experiment. Techtoberfest used to have a pitch competition. This year the founders on stage were not all asking for money. Some already have it, and some have customers paying the bills. The point was to show what is being built here.
The founder showcase, sponsored by PwC
Devin was the MC. He split the eight founders into three groups: atoms, qubits and bits.
Keg tappingKW Oktoberfest
AtomsFinite, Poppy, Upside, CSMC
QubitsQubic, UpScale Quantum
BitsAllMind, Ground News
BiergartenUntil six
The founder showcase at the Tannery
Atoms
Finite Robotics
Matt Stevens of Finite Robotics opened with apples. Machines now pick most of the crops we know how to grow without people, and we grow far more of those than of the crops that still need hands, like fruit. A hundred million dollars has gone into apple-picking robots without a working one. Finite works on thinning instead: counting the tiny green fruit early in the season and cutting off the extra. He said people are bad at counting it. He has counted the same tree twice and got two different answers.
They worked one orchard in 2025 and 13 this year, and want to go from 3 acres to 200 next year. This is the company Albert Chen from Two Small Fish talked about on day one.
Poppy
Jay from Poppy showed a walkie-talkie for kids four and up. It has no screen, no ads and no subscription. A kid holds a button and talks to grandma. An optional add-on answers questions, and he played a clip of his son asking it where mangoes grow. Pre-orders open in the next month or two at talkpoppy.com.
Upside Robotics
Sam, the CTO of Upside Robotics, said most fertilizer farmers put on a field never reaches the crop. Their small solar robots drive between the rows and put down a little every week instead of a lot at once.
CSMC
Adam Gray, the COO of the Canadian Strategic Missions Corporation, talked about micro nuclear power. His case was that grids are running out of room, and not mostly because of AI. They have 31 government contracts worth $23 million so far. Why build in Waterloo? "Because in Waterloo we like doing hard" things. He used a stronger word.
Qubits
Devin said quantum has always been "ten years away," and that this is changing now.
Qubic
Margaret Panetta, the CTO of Qubic, showed the very small superconducting circuits they make in the University of Waterloo's clean room, for quantum computers and quantum sensors. They are a team of 10. Eight are PhD scientists and engineers, and five did their degrees at Waterloo and stayed.
UpScale Quantum
Alex Cooper of UpScale Quantum has spent seven years building his technology in a lab at the University of Waterloo. Garage Capital and Golden wrote the first cheque. He talked about defence uses and about GPS signals being jammed.
Alex Cooper of UpScale Quantum
Bits
AllMind
Anwaar Malik of AllMind builds research tools for hedge funds and asset managers. His point was that checking one new idea against all of a fund's data takes a team about three weeks. AllMind connects over 7,000 data sets with a fund's own systems so the question can be asked in one place.
Ground News
Harleen Kaur closed the showcase. Ground News shows every story with the outlets covering it and how each one leans, so you can see what your side isn't reading. It was built in Kitchener-Waterloo over seven years. Readers pay for it, and she said that's why it answers to readers.
The Biergarten
Afterwards I met founders from the stage and in the crowd, people from Spur and the Accelerator Centre, and Kitchener's MP. A film crew making a docuseries on the region's startups for Communitech asked me a few questions on camera about Builderloo. I have a list of interviews to set up.
Two days at the Tannery
Day one was investors talking about money. Day two was founders talking about what they make. I learned quite a bit from both days.
I didn't know Waterloo had so many farm robots. Finite thins apple trees and Upside fertilizes corn, and both build here. Most of what I'd heard about local tech before was software. Glad to learn more about this side of the tech community.
Nearly everyone I talked to asked the same thing in some form: where do I find out what's happening here? Funding, launches, who's hiring. That's why I started Builderloo, and two days of people asking it made me want to keep going.
Next time I'll bring stickers.
The Techtoberfest 2026 pin
Thank you to Communitech for a great two days, and for the swag. I'm keeping the pin.
The founder showcase, sponsored by PwC
Alex Cooper of UpScale Quantum
The Techtoberfest 2026 pin