Velocity — University of Waterloo's Startup Incubator

Velocity is the University of Waterloo's startup incubator, founded in 2008 to help students and graduates turn research and side projects into companies, free of charge, alongside the university's separate Velocity Fund (an early seed-funding vehicle).

What it does: Velocity provides workspace, mentoring, pitch competitions and seed-funding connections to early-stage, technology-based startups founded by University of Waterloo students, staff and alumni, later expanding into a dedicated 'Velocity Garage' and, more recently, a 45,000-square-foot 'Innovation Arena' space in Kitchener's innovation district.

Results: University of Waterloo's own reporting shows alumni company funding climbing from $2.4 billion (mid-2021) to $3.6 billion (January 2022) to $4.3 billion (May 2023), with more than 400 companies supported and over 5,000 jobs created; independent coverage by The Globe and Mail confirms the same funding and jobs figures and the incubator's growth into new space. Notable alumni include ApplyBoard and Embark Trucks (both reaching multi-billion-dollar valuations), plus Waterloo graduates behind Instacart, Databricks and PagerDuty who did not go through Velocity directly.

Why it's a good practice: it shows a single university incubator sustaining a rising, consistently-reported funding and jobs trajectory over 15 years, with figures repeated consistently across the university's own updates and independent press coverage.

Read the full analysis: https://uwaterloo.ca/entrepreneurship/profiles/velocity-incubator

Read the full analysis: https://uwaterloo.ca/entrepreneurship/profiles/velocity-incubator