The Collision Conference is returning to its first in-person event in two years, marking Toronto’s Enercare Centre June 20 through 23. The tech event will be the largest international gathering of its kind in Canada since prior to the COVID-19 Pandemic, with 35,000 attendees expected to convene in our nation’s fintech hotspot.
“While we’ve successfully hosted Collision online for the past two years, nothing compares to in-person events,” said Paddy Cosgrave, founder of Collision.
Organizers say the event will host 250 partners, 900 speakers, 850 investors, and more than 1,000 startups, including 100 unicorns. Vancouver participants include fintech fiends Blossom—which just launched an app—and Pocketed, which recently won The Odlum Brown Forum Pitch Finale. The consistently expanding Trulioo is being featured as a unicorn of the event.
“As we move past the pandemic and continue working towards … economic recovery, Collision is exactly the kind of electric, forward-looking event that will help generate even more ideas and innovative solutions,” said Vic Fedeli, Ontario’s minister of economic development, job creation and trade.
One of the cooler events at Collision is probably PITCH, a competition for early-stage startups exhibiting with minimal funding and no pivots. Judges this year include David Dufresne of Pref, Rupa Athreya of Techstars, Faisal Kazi of Siemens Canada, and Harpaul Sambhi of Magical.
The competition has been shortlisted ahead of next week’s main event and includes two BC startups.
Dyne is an app born from the entrepreneurship@ubc and HATCH programs which aims to connect people over food using partnerships with restaurants.
“Dyne helps you improve life over food by enabling you to meet new people with the same interests as yours,” their website reads. “We help you find your friends at their availability to eat at your favourite restaurants at a cheaper price through the use of coupons.”
Produce8, also from Vancouver, provides software to help remote and digital-first teams work better together.
“It has become difficult, distracting and even anxiety-inducing for digital workers and their teams to keep moving the ball forward every day,” explains CEO Joel Abramson. “We need to automate some of the awareness so we can reduce the effort and distractions that eat away at productivity.”
If you’re in town for the event, be sure to collide with Techcouver Editor-in-Chief Rob Lewis, who will be attending.
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