Taking shape
Giant Catalyst137 ‘maker campus’ is 75 per cent leased
KITCHENER — A federal agency that helps exporters with financing, insurance and foreign-market expertise is setting up an office in the big hardware accelerator taking shape on Glasgow Street.
Export Development Canada’s first office in Waterloo Region will open in Catalyst137 by June of next year. It will have a staff of about eight.
The agency wants to work more closely with the area’s tech sector, said Stephen Callaghan, vice-president of the agency’s Ontario operations.
“The energy and profile that we think Catalyst137 will provide are lined up nicely with where we want to go,” he says.
Catalyst137, at 137 Glasgow, is the redevelopment of a building that used to be a warehouse for tires, and later for footwear. The 475,000-square-foot building’s $55-million transformation is just about finished. One of the region’s leading tech firms, Miovision Technologies, recently moved in as the anchor tenant.
Miovision CEO and co-founder, Kurtis McBride, teamed up with Osmington Inc. and Voisin Capital to create Catalyst137, which he calls the biggest maker campus and hardware accelerator in the world.
McBride is thrilled with the firm’s new offices in the building. They feature skylights, 26-foot high ceilings, a games room, yoga studio, indoor bicycle storage, showers and change rooms, glass-walled rooms for meetings, two living walls and a circle-shaped hub where the 160 employees can gather for lunches and companywide meetings.
That hub will soon be outfitted with screens that will continually display detailed information about the work in each department at Miovision, a 13-year-old company that specializes in traffic data collection and analysis. Everyone will be able to see how product development is progressing, how sales are going and how much video is moving through
the company’s system.
“Each team will have a display of their priorities, and I will know who to go and bother,” says McBride.
Miovision’s new office has about 62,500 square feet of space. Behind a wall is enough space to double the size.
“We have a multi-phase expansion plan if we need more space,” says McBride. “We have room in here to grow to 300 people before we need to knock that wall down and expand out there.”
Nobody has a private office and McBride’s desk looks just like all the others.
“Whether you are a co-op student or me you get a standard desk,” he says.
For years, Miovision was located on three floors in a building on Manitou Drive in Kitchener. McBride believes the new open office in Catalyst137 is already making a difference.
“Our velocity of communication has gone up,” he says as he walks around the new offices. “We can share ideas, make decisions a lot faster than we used to just because of physical proximity and sight lines.”
A couple of years ago, the company asked employees for their preferences for a new location. The overwhelming response was somewhere in or near downtown Kitchener. That led to the threeway partnership among Miovision, Osmington and Voisin Capital to develop Catalyst137.
The sprawling warehouse was divided into five different areas. McBride calls them “bays.” Miovision has taken all of the first one.
“For the most part Bay Five is not yet leased, but Bays 1 through 4 are 75 per cent leased now,” says McBride.
Leasing is ahead of schedule. McBride believes that validates a key decision made when the project was announced in 2016 — brand the building as a maker campus and hardware accelerator for the Internet of Things. The building and area around it will be outfitted with hundreds of sensors for testing new technology.
“When we were raising money for this thing most people, not Osmington, but most people thought we were nuts because we were trying to brand a real estate project,” says McBride. “I actually think the brand helped us drive lease traffic.”
Part of the building’s central corridor is for professional services that will support the tech firms and startups. Blakes Nitro, the intellectual property division of Toronto law firm Blake, Cassels & Craydon, is opening an office there. SigmaPoint, SnapPea Design, Stryve Digital Marketing and Swift Labs have also signed leases. The Business Development Bank of Canada also has space in the building.
The National Research Council and the Industrial Research Assistance Program announced recently they will have offices in Catalyst137.
“We have all of these, except one, leased now,” says McBride. “So this would be ‘Professional Alley.’”
Tech firms that have signed leases include Javelin Technologies and PCC Integrate Inc. Westmount Signs is also moving in.
“There are probably 10 units left,” says McBride. “One of them is the large footprint unit we don’t want to break up. We want to keep it for another anchor user.”
That large unit contains about 40,000 square feet of space.
McBride pauses on his tour of the building near the main entrance. An artist is working on a mural above the doors. There is another wall in the lobby where Christie Digital MicroTiles will be installed, creating a large, interactive screen.
The lobby was recently used by Grand River Hospital for its annual general meeting. A social gathering for tech workers, called Startups and Beer, was also held there. McBride wants the space to be available to the community for events and meetings.
“That big wall there will have Christie tiles, so the idea is you can come in, bring a computer, plug it into the screen, and run your conference or your event or your annual general meeting in here,” says McBride.
“That big wall there will have Christie tiles, so the idea is you can come in, bring a computer, plug it into the screen, and run your conference or your event or your annual general meeting in here,” says McBride.
A restaurant/food market called The Graffiti Market is slated to open in the spring, while a Red Circle Coffee Co. café is expected to open in January or February. There also will be a microbrewery operated by Red Circle Brewing Co.
The restaurant/microbrewery will have a large covered patio, and will be open evenings and weekends; everyone will be welcome there, not just tenants in the building.
The restaurant, coffee shop and microbrewery will be owned by Ignite Restaurant Group, the same company behind The Berlin restaurant in downtown Kitchener.
Along the main corridor that runs through much of the Catalyst137 building are lots of booths for informal meetings.
Anyone is welcome to use these spaces.
“You just come and grab a space,” says McBride. “Ideally, you will buy services from a company in here or a coffee, and we will call it even.”