software company teknol moves its engineering hub from silicon valley to calgary
invest alberta's ceo said there's lots of "positive buzz" on the street about calgary being a place to set up business
3 minute read
rahul beri, ceo and founder of teknol, with rick christiaanse, ceo of invest alberta, announce teknol relocating its engineering office to calgary during a press conference in calgary on tuesday, july 11.
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invest alberta
a silicon valley software company has chosen calgary to set up its engineering headquarters with a $12.5-million investment over the next three years that’s expected to generate 125 jobs.
teknol is a software-as-a-service company designed to assist small early-childhood learning centres in their administrative operations, giving them a platform to manage everything from payroll to collection of fees, marketing and communications.
rahul beri, ceo and founder, said the company chose calgary because of its talent pool, relative affordability compared to other canadian tech centres and its location, being a relatively short flight from its san fransisco headquarters.
“we want to build a great part of our business team and engineering teams in calgary,” he said. “we’re not just moving people, we want to grow in calgary.”
it has yet to finalize where its calgary office will be, but noted the bulk of its hiring will be done in the first two years of its investment. he noted it will be relying on the talent-development pipelines flowing from the university of calgary and university of alberta to provide its future workforce. it will also be recruiting experienced talent as well.
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he said labour makes up the bulk of costs for any it company and the available manpower will be critical to its ability to expand.
teknol largely relied on word of mouth to decide on calgary
beri said there is an opportunity for growth in the market, particularly with the $10-a-day childcare partnerships between provinces and ottawa. it is his intention for teknol, despite its roots in california, to be known as “a canadian company in canada helping canadians.”
landing teknol was important for invest alberta for a few reasons. this is one of the first software-as-a-service companies the crown corporation has landed and helps fill a void in the calgary tech ecosystem.
teknol is also one of the first companies to rely on word of mouth from other companies that have come to calgary to make the jump, as opposed to being heavily recruited by invest alberta and calgary economic development.
rick christiaanse, ceo of invest alberta, said this is a sign of the maturation of the market and the importance of building that base to the point where it attracts companies on reputation.
“companies do talk to each other,” he said. “there’s a lot of conversations that happen within the ecosystem, and the positive buzz is helping us expedite some of those deals and move some of those deals forward.”
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this has not happened overnight. invest alberta has been working on building these relationships with offices in silicon valley and other locations for over three years.
christiaanse said this will not be the last company it announces that has decided to come to calgary through word of mouth and there will be more slated through the fall.
calgary-based orennia raises $25 million
the sector’s success is not just being felt by the businesses relocating to cowtown.
on monday, calgary-based startup orennia announced it had secured us$25 million in series b financing to scale up their operations.
orennia is a data and analytics platform geared for the energy transition, providing insights across renewables, storage, clean fuels and decarbonization sectors. the platform is intended to help increase returns for developers, investors, bankers and corporations by providing up-to-date and reliable energy transition analytics.
“as the world decarbonizes its energy stack, trillions in capital need to be deployed. without accurate data and predictive analytics, developers and investors will struggle to deploy capital efficiently and maximize returns,” said brook papau, orennia’s co-founder and ceo in a press release. “our platform continues to be the only solution developers and investors have to find accurate and actionable information focused purely on the energy transition.”
