Bookended by remarks from AI godfather Yoshua Bengio and a builders’ day at Shopify offices, Montréal’s first iteration of a grassroots tech week brought together more than 6,000 attendees across 100 events exploring tech’s social impact and the challenges of building a startup in Québec.
“There’s a vibrant ecosystem, but we don’t see these people all the time.”
The weeklong Open House Montréal event was organized by non-profit organization ElanTech as an expansion of its previous initiative, Startup Open House. The decentralized format modelled tech weeks in New York City and Toronto, where organizers set up flagship events and community members hosted their own associated gatherings.
Startup Open House debuted in 2013 as an initiative to help the startup community open its doors to the public, and was acquired by Elevate in 2019. Post-pandemic, the event returned to Montréal in May 2024 after ElanTech (formerly MTL NewTech) acquired the local rights. Elevate brought the Toronto event back this October, alongside community promoters TechTO and ElanTech.
Other events included a builders’ hackathon, a social impact breakfast at the former Notman House tech hub, and presentations on building in niche markets like gaming tech and travel, hosted by TechTO.
In an interview with BetaKit, ElanTech co-founder Ilias Benjelloun and executive director Simran Kanda said the week was an attempt to reinvigorate Montréal’s ecosystem and draw new members in, particularly those who don’t fit the traditional founder profile.
“This wasn’t just the same people,” Kanda said, adding that she connected with parents trying to understand the tech in their kids’ world as well as artists from the animation community.
Benjelloun said he wanted to deliver a conference where the programming could “marry tech innovation and positive social impact.”
During Bengio’s talk on Oct. 18, in conversation with Benjelloun, the researcher discussed the worrying “disconnect” between technologists and the rest of society, particularly when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI).
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“When I did my computer science degree, I got essentially zero courses on how society works, how politics work, how scientific advances can be both positive and negative,” Bengio said. “We have to be very careful and mindful of how scientific and technological progress is managed and deployed.”
For Benjelloun, the disconnect between tech and society must be bridged as Canada tries to increase its economic productivity. “We need a sense of urgency,” Benjelloun said. “I want the Canadian values of inclusion, social impact, environmental impact, and diversity to stay.”
As this theme infused many of the week’s events, including the breakfast at the former Notman House hub, other events gave founders the opportunity to build AI products as the technology becomes a staple of every startup’s business plan.
On Friday, startups opened their offices for an afternoon to allow attendees to hear from executives and explore job opportunities. Participating offices included adtech company Optable and travel content scaleup Stay22.
Maria Julia Guimaraes, CEO and founder of inclusive wearable tech startup Totum Tech, opened her office to visitors at innovation hub Ax.c with Brazilian desserts. Guimaraes told BetaKit she was “amazed” to see how much was going on tech-wise in the city.
“There’s a vibrant ecosystem, but we don’t see these people all the time,” she said. Guiamares added that she would have participated in previous editions if she could go “back in time.”
To cap off the week, startups were invited to an AI Build Day at Shopify’s Montréal offices on Sunday to develop AI-driven products and demo their work in a special edition of Shopify’s open-office Builder Sundays.
Behdad Karimi Dermeni, CEO and founder of AI accounting platform ReinvestWealth, told BetaKit it was “inspiring” to work in a packed room of fellow startup founders at the offices of Canada’s most valuable startup. “Being around that type of energy is pretty unique,” he said.
Grassroots energy, funding challenges
Québec’s tech ecosystem, much like the rest of Canada, has faced a slump in early-stage fundraising in recent years, partly due to the difficulties in fundraising that come from a stalled exit market and lower liquidity.
That theme resounded throughout the week, with a TechTO and Boast-hosted event exploring how to effectively fundraise at all stages—and when to avoid taking on venture capital entirely.
“Bootstrapping keeps you in check in a way raising funds doesn’t,” Émile Chouha, founder of crypto mining hardware startup Helium Deploy, said at the event, referring to the ever-more-common practice of building a high-growth startup with no venture capital.
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Timothé Bouillet, COO and co-founder of Kalk, a Centech-incubated startup that automates quoting for construction projects, told BetaKit: “In Québec, we have a lot of people that tell you how to build a business from scratch. The hardest part is securing the funding.”
Open House Montréal itself operated without government funding, as ElanTech didn’t manage to get grants from the city, Kanda said. Operational costs for the week were about $18,000, not including the cost of labour. Kanda said local restaurants generously partnered to give free food and coffee.
One of her goals was to make the event affordable and accessible for founders and participants. However, Kanda said this event would be difficult to pull off again next year without additional funding.
Disclosure: BetaKit majority owner Good Future is the family office of two former Shopify leaders, Arati Sharma and Satish Kanwar.
Feature image courtesy Madison McLauchlan for BetaKit.