March 29, 2024

By Saifullah Muhammad, Spoke News

Communitech celebrated its 21st anniversary on Thursday, Nov. 9 at its annual general meeting held at the Tannery Event Centre and Communitech’s Area 151.

Communitech board chair and senior engineering director for Google Canada, Steven Woods, delivered the formal portion of the meeting in rapid-fire style, presenting the financial statements of 2017.

Audiences sit for the Communitech AGM in Kitchener, Ont., on November 9, 2018. Saifullah Muhammad/Spoke News

“We did what we set out to do: we staged a mind-blowing two-day conference, unique as the team that pulled it off, with more than 2,200 attendees, 56 speakers and visionaries from five continents engaging around the idea of Tech for Good,” Woods and Iain Klugman, the President and CEO of Communitech, said in a joint statement at the event.

“Companies in this plucky little ecosystem attracted over half a billion dollars in venture capital [fiscal year 2018]. And they continue to change the world through artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics and data innovation,” the statement said.

“Waterloo Region is a diverse, wealthy, vibrant community. But there’s always more work to do. We focus on all kinds of community-building: from doctors and hospitals to transit and transportation to nurturing a world-class cultural community. There are loads of talented people driving those initiatives, so our role is to be good supporting players and celebrate their success as they community’s success,” Klugman answered when asked about the vision for Waterloo Region as a whole.

“We are 21-years old, in that weird space where we’re not quite adults, but we have bills to pay. I want to make sure that our merry band of creatives, misfits and geniuses at Communitech still love coming in to work every day because we have a lot of serious work to do,” Klugman added.

Communitech was founded in 1997 by a group of entrepreneurs committed to making Waterloo Region a global innovation leader. Today, Communitech is a public-private innovation hub that supports a community of more than 1400 companies — from startups to scale-ups to large global players.

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