Startup Cultures Across Canada – Calgary

Calgary’s growing post-oil culture makes space for tech startups, including renewables and energy tech.

Image: By Gorgo (Photo taken by author) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Calgary startup facts

Accelerators in Calgary: 6
Academic programs: University of Calgary

Why Calgary Needed Tech

In 2016, Calgary was living through an oil price slump that hit its head offices hard. That’s the backdrop to the “post-oil” idea: a city built on energy companies started looking for other ways to grow, and technology was the obvious candidate. It already had a lot of engineers, people who knew how to run large projects, and a business culture used to taking risks on big bets.

Energy hasn’t gone away, and it isn’t the opposite of tech in Calgary. A lot of the city’s startup activity sits where the two meet, in cleaner energy, industrial software and data. But the companies that put Calgary on the startup map mostly came from somewhere else entirely.

Calgary’s Quiet Tech Success Stories

The biggest early win was Solium Capital, which made software for managing employee stock plans. In February 2019, Morgan Stanley agreed to buy Solium for about CAD 1.1 billion (US$0.9 billion). At the time, Solium had 3,000 stock plan clients, including Instacart, Levi Strauss, Shopify and Stripe. The product lives on as Shareworks by Morgan Stanley.

Then came Benevity, which builds software companies use to run employee giving and volunteering programs. Founder Bryan de Lottinville started it in 2008. In December 2020, a deal with investment firm Hg made Benevity a “unicorn,” and CBC reported that de Lottinville and president Kelly Schmitt announced it to staff while dressed as unicorns.

Fintech is the newer strand. Neo Financial was started by SkipTheDishes co-founders Andrew Chau and Jeff Adamson, alongside Kris Read, and launched in 2020. Startup Genome now describes it as Calgary’s fintech leader.

Calgary has also produced founders who built elsewhere. Uber co-founder Garrett Camp was born and raised in Calgary and studied engineering at the University of Calgary.

The Ecosystem Since 2016

The six accelerators counted in 2016 have since been pulled together around a central hub. Platform Calgary is a non-profit, member-based organization that runs the Platform Innovation Centre downtown, with programs for founders, investors, job seekers and young people.

According to Startup Genome’s 2026 profile of Calgary, Platform Calgary’s 2025 impact report counted $323.9 million in investment secured by member companies that year, pushing their total past $1 billion since 2018, with 1,563 founders supported. The profile describes an economy strong in fintech, cleantech and agtech, and a city-wide innovation strategy backed by the Opportunity Calgary Investment Fund.

Startup Genome puts Calgary’s ecosystem value at about $7 billion, up 115% from the 2018–2020 period, with $3.4 billion in venture funding from 2021 to 2025 and 151 exits over the same years. It ranks Calgary in the top 10 North American ecosystems for affordable talent.

The same profile says newer companies in AI, health, agtech and defence are gaining traction. It notes that Neo Financial raised $68.5 million in 2026 to launch a credit securitization program, backed by more than 100 Canadian investors, and that Calgary’s CropMind Inc. was picked in March 2026 for Google’s Startups Accelerator Canada cohort, one of only 14 AI-driven startups chosen nationally. It also quotes someone who chose to scale a company there, summing up the city’s attitude: “Calgary isn’t trying to be the next Silicon Valley.”

At the university level, the University of Calgary’s Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking supports student and faculty startups, and says it backs the university’s goal of becoming “Canada’s most entrepreneurial university.”

What It Means for Founders

Calgary rewards companies that sell to businesses. Its big wins so far have been business software, not consumer apps, and its energy, finance and agriculture industries are big potential customers on the doorstep.

The city’s other advantage is cost and talent. Engineers and operators who learned their trade in energy are now working in tech, and they’re cheaper to hire than in Toronto or Vancouver. The challenge is the same as in most mid-sized ecosystems: there’s less local money for big later rounds, so founders should plan early for investors from outside Alberta.

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