Calgary Innovation Week kicks off with pitches from the city’s top 10 startups

Calgary Innovation Week 2024 soft-launched with a burst of energy this morning at the Platform Innovation Centre, as ten of the city’s most promising startups pitched the judges who will be deciding two of the three awards (the third is a people’s choice award) up for grabs at Launch Party on November 21. 

Attended by investors and stakeholders from across Calgary’s tech ecosystem, the pitches covered tech solutions for a range of industries, including logistics, construction and education. 

Before the pitches began, Alberta’s Minister of Technology and Innovation, Nate Glubish, emphasized the growth of tech investment and innovation in the province, noting there has never been a better time to be in tech in Alberta.

“We’re still just getting started,” he said. “We have more tech companies than ever before. They are growing faster than ever before. They’re raising more money than ever before, and for the first time in my lifetime, we actually have a dozen tech companies in Alberta that started here that are still here, and they’re now worth over a billion dollars,” he continued.

Glubish pointed to Alberta-born success stories like Neo Financial as proof of the province’s innovation potential.

Then each of the top 10 startup founders made their pitches to the judges and audience — while also providing a glimpse into the evolving sectors each of them is trying to transform.

Logistics and the future of moving

Simon Bullard, founder of Moovez, introduced a solution for one of life’s least enjoyable experiences — moving. 

Moovez wants to bring the on-demand convenience that consumers expect in today’s world, likening its services to those of Uber and SkipTheDishes but for large-scale item moves, both commercially and residentially. 

“The customer experience [in moving] is a nightmare,” Bullard said, pointing to an industry ripe for modernization. His platform could open up new efficiencies and options for both individuals and businesses as they increasingly lean on third-party logistics, he said.

“Thirty to 40% of businesses have already transitioned away from managing in-house fleets to using third party logistics. That trend is growing at 10% every year.”

Fighting fraud in IT

Tech Jutsu founder, Tracey Nyholt, virtually pitched the system her team has designed to tackle caller impersonation fraud, which she said, “is a huge problem as online and mobile gets more secure. Fraudsters are going for the easy target: the help desk.”

Her solution leverages use of the multi-factor authentication most systems already have in place, and reduces the need for pesky “legacy security questions” that most people find frustrating. 

Nyholt’s pitch highlighted the increasing need for secure, user-friendly identity verification, a sector that’s expanding in the era of heightened digital security.

Geospatial data innovation

Brett Jones of BigGeo shed light on the possibilities for energy efficiency in geospatial data processing. 

“Whether you’re planning a trip, ordering from your favorite coffee shop or tracking your package, you’re using spatial data. Over 80% of data globally is rich with geospatial information, but it’s historically been difficult to process and manage due to its cost,” Jones said, stressing that nearly every industry, from healthcare to agriculture, uses location-based data. 

But his company’s proprietary data processing and visualization engine can reduce the energy needed for data processing by up to 90%, demonstrating how innovation in data handling can create ripple effects in meeting sustainability goals across sectors. 

VR in real estate

For many, buying a new, pre-built home is a leap of faith, but ResVR founder Nathan Nasseri believes that virtual reality can close that gap. “New home buyers have a massive problem. They have no idea what their house is going to look like,” he notes.

Which is why his platform enables homebuyers to fully visualize their home in 3D before it’s built, offering confidence in their decisions and allowing them to plan interiors and even buy furniture to fit.

“Ninety per cent of home buyers can’t visualize [their future home] from small product samples or construction drawings. This often leads to buyers’ remorse,” says Nasseri. But virtual solutions can redefine the buying (and selling) experience in the property market.

Accessibility in education

“In Canada, about 15.8% of Canadian-born black kids can actually go to post secondary education, leaving over 80% that cannot do it,” said founder of Scholarships Cafe, Dr. Olumuyiwa Igbalajobi. 

“Every talented student should have equal access to scholarship opportunities,” he continued, noting that his platform helps students across 195 countries find and apply for scholarships. 

As higher education costs soar, solutions like Scholarships Cafe are becoming increasingly essential to ensuring global access to education and helping students avoid crushing debt, Igbalajobi noted.

Streamlining job applications

For job seekers, navigating the job market can be overwhelming — and increasingly their resumes are being vetted by AI, said Job Autopilot founder Yuri Vol. 

Which is why he developed an automated system that helps people apply to hundreds of jobs near-instantly, personalizing resumes to meet the specific demands of applicant tracking systems. 

Vol said his innovation addresses long-standing bottlenecks in job searching, and has the potential to transform how job seekers access opportunities in today’s competitive landscape.

AI for rental optimization

TraceRent founder Prabh Paul Parmar envisions a rental market where optimal pricing is transparent and accessible. 

By using public data to provide fair rental pricing suggestions to landlords, TraceRent can help modernize the rental market, making it more fair and efficient for tenants and landlords alike, he suggests.

“We start working with the landlords today. However, the tenants get empowered by actually knowing what the rents are.”

Infrastructure visualization

“Infrastructure projects are complex for multiple reasons, and they consist of over a million documents, and typically are organized in a very poorly named directory tree. So our solution has been to actually create a map and allow people to access information by clicking on a location on a map,” said Paul Newman of SitePhotos Canada, introducing his mapping-based platform for construction management. 

This innovation, designed to improve project coordination, could have widespread implications for infrastructure project efficiency, especially as Canada increases spending on large-scale infrastructure, he said. 

“Last year, according to Stats Can there’s 131 billion plus dollars spent on capital investment in infrastructure,” said Newman.

AI-powered procurement

Binoloop, co-founded by Purvaja Soochit, uses artificial intelligence to optimize procurement processes for government and business. 

Designed to save time and eliminate errors, Binoloop’s platform addresses a massive $4.2 billion government procurement software market in the US alone, showcasing how AI is revolutionizing administrative processes.

The platform can reduce a three hour review process of a document to three minutes, and make a three-week decision making process an hour long, said Soochit. 

Empowering data reporting

In an increasingly data-driven world, The Reporting Hub founder Brian DeLuca presented a streamlined solution for distributing complex Power BI reports to large audiences. 

“The biggest problem with Power BI is that the delivery and distribution is constrained to Microsoft channels. So if you have a Google email address and I want to share a report with you, I can’t do it,” he explained.

His white-label platform provides data sovereignty and accessibility, filling in a gap for companies that need to securely share insights with diverse stakeholders.

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