university-of-waterloo
(16)
Velocity built a home for startups. Then it kept adding rooms.
A Waterloo dorm experiment grew into an incubator with laboratories, founder coaching and a separate venture fund. Its real business is helping good ideas survive their next expensive problem.
Mo Al Adham Is Making the Boring Parts of Wealth Management Do the Hard Work
After TwitVid, an early seat beside Instacart, and five years building products at Twitter, Mo Al Adham spent six months choosing his next decade. He picked a stubborn problem: making sophisticated, tax-aware investing feel ordinary.
Gurshabd Varaich Is Teaching Finance AI to Show Its Work
A BitGo internship showed the Waterloo engineer how much financial work still lives between spreadsheets, source records and sign-offs. Now he and two classmates are building Definite around a stubborn idea: an AI-generated number is only useful when it arrives with receipts.
Daivik Goel Submitted at 7:59. Then He Built What the First Three Applications Missed.
Three polished YC applications went nowhere. The rushed fourth arrived with one minute left - and began a sprint through pivots, payroll and the useful discipline of keeping things simple.
Adhityaa Chandrasekar
Adhityaa Chandrasekar is the founder and CEO of Subtrace (YC W25), a zero-code network tracer that acts like an inspect-element button for backend infrastructure. Using eBPF, Subtrace surfaces every HTTP request a process sends and receives in real time, with no root privileges or code changes. Before Subtrace, Adhityaa was a software engineer at Google working on Kubernetes internals and GKE infrastructure monitoring, and he built Commento, a popular open-source, privacy-first comments platform. He studied at IIT Madras and the University of Waterloo, and co-founded Subtrace with Sachin Sridhar, a friend of more than a decade.
Timmy Seto
Timmy Seto is the co-founder and CEO of Forge Automation, a Toronto startup in Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch that runs software-enabled factories to make custom CNC metal parts in four days or less. A University of Waterloo engineering graduate who interned at Apple, Formlabs, and iRobot, he has spent more than a decade around machines and describes his job in plain terms: send him a CAD file and he will make it exist in the real world.
Sara Beykpour
Sara Beykpour is the co-founder and CEO of Particle, an AI-powered news app that summarizes the day's stories and shows readers how coverage differs across the political spectrum. She spent more than a decade at Twitter shaping products like Vine, Periscope, and Twitter Blue before leaving in 2022 to build Particle with former Twitter engineer Marcel Molina. The company launched publicly in November 2024 and has raised roughly $15.3 million, including a $10.9M Series A led by Lightspeed.
Tolga Tezel
Tolga Tezel is the founder and CEO of Canopy Connect, an insurance data infrastructure company that lets consumers securely share their insurance information with agents and businesses in seconds. A University of Waterloo electrical engineering graduate and former early engineer at Dropbox and Nova Credit, he prototyped Canopy Connect over a weekend after a dinner conversation with a friend's mother who ran an insurance agency. Since founding the company in February 2020, he has grown it to serve thousands of agencies and raised a $6.5M Series A, building what he describes as trusted, consumer-permissioned infrastructure for property and casualty insurance data.
Jaimal Soni
Jaimal Soni is the co-founder and CEO of Insight Health AI, an Austin-based healthcare startup building AI agents that handle clinical busywork - referrals, intake, scheduling, fax processing, and note-taking - so clinicians can spend more time with patients. A University of Waterloo engineer and former Y Combinator founder, he spent six-plus years at Segment leading global sales engineering ahead of its $3.2 billion Twilio acquisition, and co-led R&D on Twilio's CustomerAI. He founded Insight Health in 2023 with a cardiologist, a neurosurgeon, and a former Twilio infrastructure leader; the company raised an $11 million Series A in April 2026 led by Standard Capital.
Parker Mitchell
Parker Mitchell is the co-founder and CEO of Valence, the New York company behind Nadia, billed as the world's first enterprise AI coach. He spent two decades before that building Engineers Without Borders Canada, the charity he co-founded out of the University of Waterloo in 2000, and advising Fortune 500 leaders at McKinsey. In 2025 Valence raised a $50M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with Nadia deployed across companies like Delta, Experian, Kraft Heinz and General Mills, having logged more than a million coaching conversations.
Fangjin Yang
Fangjin Yang is the co-founder and CEO of Imply, the commercial company behind Apache Druid - the real-time analytics database he helped create at Metamarkets in 2011. He turned a side project born from the millisecond demands of programmatic advertising into a $1.1B unicorn, raising $215M along the way. An original Druid committer and University of Waterloo-trained engineer, Yang now leads Imply's mission to power interactive, high-concurrency analytics applications at scale - with customers including Netflix, Atlassian, Salesforce, and Confluent.
Natalie Gordon
Natalie Gordon is the CEO and Founder of Babylist, the universal baby registry and family commerce platform she coded during her son's nap time in 2011. A University of Waterloo computer science graduate and Amazon Fresh alum, she turned a personal frustration with big-box registries into a profitable, $750M+ annual revenue business serving millions of families. She has expanded Babylist beyond registries into first-party ecommerce, editorial content, and a health vertical covering insurance-reimbursed breast pumps—including Medicaid recipients. In 2025, she launched the 'End the Baby Tax' campaign, uniting 30 baby brands against tariffs in a full-page Washington Post ad and a Times Square billboard. Named a 2026 CNBC Changemaker, she is one of the most trusted voices in the parenting and family retail space.
Sadi Khan
Sadi Khan is the Co-Founder and CEO of Aven, a San Francisco-based fintech unicorn valued at $2.2 billion that created the world's first home equity-backed credit card. A University of Waterloo computer engineering graduate, Khan spent over a decade at Facebook leading product for Internet.org, Maps, Search, and Ads before co-founding Aven in 2019. Aven has since issued over $3 billion in credit lines, saved consumers more than $215 million in interest, and raised $252 million in total funding. Known for his maximally rational decision-making style and habit of wearing the same outfit every day to reduce cognitive load, Khan aims to build America's first 'machine banking' platform and democratize access to home equity for millions of homeowners.
Derek Ting
Derek Ting is the co-founder and CEO of TextNow, the Waterloo-based company he started in 2009 at age 19 with classmate Jon Lerner while studying computer engineering at the University of Waterloo. What began as a scrappy solution to outrageous carrier text messaging fees has grown into the only U.S. mobile provider offering unlimited talk, text, and free essential data on a nationwide 5G network. The TextNow app has been downloaded more than 200 million times worldwide, making Derek one of the most consequential quiet disruptors in American telecommunications - building a profitable, venture-light company that serves millions of users who can't afford traditional phone service.
Andrew Miklas
Andrew Miklas co-founded PagerDuty with two Amazon colleagues in 2009, built the original high-availability architecture as founding CTO, and shepherded the company from a Hacker News beta post to a $1.8B NYSE IPO. After a stint as an early-stage investor at s28 Capital, he returned to Y Combinator - where PagerDuty got its start in the Summer 2010 batch - as a General Partner in May 2025, fifteen years after first walking through YC's doors as a founder.
Markos Georghiades
Markos Georghiades is an Engineering Partner at Andreessen Horowitz's crypto division (a16z crypto), where he focuses on cryptography and core development of Jolt - a16z's open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM). An undergraduate studying Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, he has co-authored multiple research breakthroughs: helping Jolt achieve a 6x throughput speedup (over 1 million RISC-V cycles/sec), enabling true zero-knowledge proofs via the NovaBlindFold technique, and implementing 64-bit proving without performance slowdown. His GitHub bio - 'sumcheck is love sumcheck is life' - says everything you need to know about where his obsessions lie.