The Waterloo region is home to growing number of tech startups. Previously, Cronicle reported on Waterloo region startup Tauria, whose end-to-end encrypted video conferencing software offered a safer remote collaboration tool at the beginning of the pandemic.

The Midwest of the United States isn't the only region between the coasts with a growing tech scene. Tech companies in Ontario's Waterloo Region, a tech corridor in southeastern Canada near Toronto, set quarterly records this last month in August 2021 with a collective CDN$749.7 million in venture funding raised, a record for the region.

According to a report from Hockeystick and [b]riefed.in as reported by Communitech, while the number of investors and deals was down double digits since last year, funding was up an astonishing amount thanks to two deals in particular: Faire’s CDN$314M Series F raise, and Applyboard’s CDN$375M Series D round--the biggest ever single raise in Waterloo Region.

Magnet Forensics also raised CDN$100-million in an IPO, and two private equity deals also made headlines: a CDN$313-million investment in Axonify and a CDN$60-million round by Dejero. Water and energy conservation startup RainStick also announced CDN$1 million in seed funding. Autonomous transport startup Gatik, alum of the AVIN Waterloo Ventures at Communitech program, announced they had raised US$85 million in Series B.