A magnet for talent

York Region: YSpace

The Greater Toronto region is ready to break out as a leading global tech hub, outpacing established regions like Seattle and San Francisco’s Bay Area in job creation, talent and workforce diversity. The secret of its success may be greater than Toronto itself. “When we talk about the startup community, people think of downtown,” says Sarah Howe of York University. “But you need to get out of downtown to get the full story.” Howe would know. She is director of Innovation York, the university’s innovation unit, and last year presided over the launch of YSpace , a tech accelerator that serves the Regional Municipality of York, which runs 70 kilometres north to Lake Simcoe and has a population of more than 1.2 million. Within six months of opening, Howe says, YSpace had to double its floorspace. “The demand from startups who were raising seed or series A rounds, hiring people, looking for co-op students and interns was just unbelievable.” And in just one year, YSpace’s 22 startups have raised $1.3 million in funding and generated $2.4 million in revenue. Thanks to the support of accelerators like YSpace, the Applied Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (ARIE) program at Seneca College, and the ventureLAB Regional Innovation Centre in Markham, many talented workers have found jobs at rapidly scaling local companies like SkyX, Densify, Doxim and Pond Technologies, which together have raised over $90 million. In fact, York Region has more workers employed in tech per capita than any other place in Canada. A total of 4,300 technology companies call York Region home, including multinationals like IBM, Siemens, GM, Qualcomm, Oracle and GE. And many of these companies—for example, Magna International, ATI Technologies and Compugen—were actually founded in the region. “I don’t think people recognize the potential that has already come to fruition here,” says Howe.