If the first year of Toronto Tech Week (TTW) was about putting Toronto on the map, the second was about bringing the world to Toronto.
The weeklong event’s second edition cemented its status as one of North America’s largest grassroots tech gatherings; according to an impact report released on Wednesday, the city welcomed more than 32,400 attendees over 600 events from May 25 to 29.
“It’s the chaos that drives the adrenaline.”
“It surpassed all of our expectations, even for the organizing team and stakeholders,” TTW co-director and co-founder Mell Truong said in an interview.
Launched in the wake of Collision Conference’s departure from the city, last year’s debut was an experiment that co-organizers said paid off handsomely, as it more than doubled attendance and nearly doubled individual events year over year. Highly attended events included Homecoming— the conference’s flagship event that featured hot takes from Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke and Uber president Andrew Macdonald—as well as BetaKit’s Most Ambitious: Town Hall and Creative Destruction Lab’s annual Super Session.
The decentralized format of TTW allowed people to create their own niche events—from hackathons and fireside chats to founder brunches and investor cocktails—for free, as opposed to a traditional conference format where everything takes place in one location.
The impact report said most events revolved around networking, while other popular event formats were fireside chats, panels, and workshops. Seventy-two percent of events were free, and more than 90 percent were open to the public.
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Another step up from 2025, said co-director and co-founder Julia Konefal, was the international crowd: people from at least 87 countries and more than 500 cities came to Toronto. “A big piece of it was putting Toronto and Canadian innovation on the world stage,” Konefal said.
Though nearly 800 investors and more than 4,300 founders attended TTW this year, Konefal noted that the event isn’t solely intended for founders and VCs, but for all the tech workers and operators that work within the ecosystem.
This year, Truong said she was particularly proud of the Student Ambassador program, which worked with major universities to bring students to different Tech Week events and expose them to opportunities in Canada’s tech sector. “A big reason why Toronto Tech Week started was to address the brain drain that happened so often to our neighbours to the south,” Truong said.
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In fact, the impact report noted nine times more student engagement this year compared to 2025. One student Aaron Sulbaran, who flew in from Austin, Texas, at the last minute wrote on LinkedIn that he went from “knowing nobody in the country to getting invited into people’s homes.”
TTW organizers haven’t yet revealed much about next year’s plans, but now that the event has scaled up, the goal will be to maximize value and impact. To Truong, it’s about sustainability, and making TTW a flagship week that people plan around.
“The high density [works] for folks who are flying in and participating,” she said. “It’s the chaos that drives the adrenaline.”
BetaKit is a Toronto Tech Week media partner.
Feature image courtesy sarah Reiger for BetaKit.