Google Canada and Communitech, announced a new partnership today with the goal to help mentor and grow a new generation of successful Canadian-led technology companies.
“Google has been a great corporate supporter of the Waterloo tech sector and of Communitech’s work with local startups, so I’m delighted to officially welcome Google into our partner space at the Communitech Hub,” said Iain Klugman, CEO of Communitech. “Announcing this initiative while unveiling Google’s new Toronto office creates another strong bridge between businesses in the Waterloo Region and downtown Toronto, continuing our long record of collaboration across the region.”
In conjunction with the announcement, Google Canada and Communitech will be opening a new digital collaboration space, as a place for mentoring and hosting start-ups in the early stages of their involvement with Communitech’s Hyperdrive initiative. Located adjacent to both the Hyperdrive and Google Kitchener-Waterloo offices, this new space will be used in part to connect startups to Google’s Global Entrepreneurial Network and Google Developer Network, as well as to startup initiatives around the world.
“At Google, we are dedicated to supporting Canadian technology entrepreneurship to help mentor and grow a new generation of successful Canadian-led technology companies,” said Google Canada’s Director of Engineering, Steve Woods. “Start-ups fuel innovation and play a key role in growing Canada’s digital economy – that’s why it’s critically important to nurture the amazing entrepreneurial talent here as a way of growing our start-up community.”
As part of this partnership, Googlers will act as technical advisors, mentors and staff the space daily to help startups working with Communitech, with a goal of creating an increased presence of great young companies in the Waterloo Region. This is good news for Waterloo-based startsups as Google has acquired a number of Canadian startsup including Dealmap, PostRank, to name a few. Also, last week Google announced it was committing $1.5 billion towards acquiring addition startups between now and 2017.