Satish Kanwar at Toronto Tech Week. – Photo courtesy Toronto Tech Week
Toronto Tech Week is returning in 2026, built by members of the city’s technology ecosystem and supported by a new multi-year partnership with the City of Toronto.
The week runs May 25 to 29 and follows an inaugural year that drew more than 15,000 attendees across 300 independently hosted events.
Organized by local founders, investors, and community groups, Toronto Tech Week is distributed across neighbourhoods and venues rather than centred in a single location.
How a calendar gap became a catalyst
For several years, the largest annual technology event on Toronto’s calendar was Collision, an international conference that had relocated to the city from Las Vegas. It brought scale and visibility, but not built or owned locally
In mid-2024, Toronto learned that Collision would not be returning. Its departure removed a major conference from the calendar and left an open question about how the city’s technology and innovation community would continue to convene at scale.
Later that year, a public post by local entrepreneur Satish Kanwar helped focus a conversation already underway. Attention turned to what a Toronto-built alternative could look like.
That discussion quickly moved toward action. A group of local organizations, including venture firms, studios, and community and media groups such as Golden Ventures, Daybreak Studio, and BetaKit, formed a non-profit and began assembling an alternative.
The result was the first Toronto Tech Week, held from June 23-27, 2025.
Built in under 12 months, the event was decentralized by design.
Its debut also coincided with the launch of Web Summit in Vancouver, placing two large technology convenings on Canada’s calendar within weeks of each other.
Why the structure mattered
Toronto Tech Week was designed as an open platform coordinated through a shared framework.
Organizers focused on alignment rather than programming, providing a shared calendar, a common identity, and light infrastructure. Individual events were hosted independently by venture firms, startups, accelerators, and community groups across the city.
That structure mirrored how Toronto’s innovation economy already operates. Activity is distributed across neighbourhoods, sectors, and institutions, with different parts of the ecosystem convening their own networks. Toronto Tech Week brought those efforts into a single, visible window.
The same structure also enabled a fast build. The inaugural edition came together in under 12 months.
“Toronto is a global tech hub, and that means real jobs, real growth, and real economic impact to neighbourhoods throughout the city,” Mayor Olivia Chow said in the release. “This multi-year partnership reflects the City’s commitment to supporting the talent, ideas, and companies that power our innovation economy. Toronto Tech Week is our chance to showcase what we’re building, and invite the world to build it with us.”
From event to infrastructure
Ownership shapes priorities, determines which relationships persist, and influences how momentum carries forward year to year.
During Toronto Tech Week 2025, many of the discussions Digital Journal covered centred on commercialization and execution, including how ideas move into companies, infrastructure, and longer-term economic activity.
That theme surfaced across coverage during the week, from conversations about invisible technical risk in large-scale systems to leadership challenges inside growing companies and questions around control of critical technology and capital.
“Toronto plays a central role in shaping Canada’s innovation narrative,” says Federal Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon. “By convening ideas, leadership, and ambition in one place, initiatives like Toronto Tech Week create the conditions for collaboration and progress. Technology will continue to be a key driver of Canada’s economic future, and platforms that connect talent, capital, and innovation are critical to ensuring Canada remains competitive on the global stage.”
Digital Journal’s reporting during the week also examined how those pressures show up in applied contexts such as fintech and real estate technology.
A decentralized format lowers barriers to participation, but it also increases the importance of shared context. With hundreds of events taking place, how those conversations connect shapes how participants interpret what they see and hear across the week.
Toronto Tech Week’s mainstage program is set to return in 2026 as a shared focal point amid a decentralized event schedule. In its inaugural year, it featured leaders, including Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke and Waabi founder Raquel Urtasun, at the Brickworks for a central forum during an otherwise distributed week.
In its first year, the mix of a focal event and a broad set of distributed activities offered an early look at how the format could work in practice.
“The momentum coming out of our first year exceeded anything we could have imagined,” says Mell Truong, founding organizer of Toronto Tech Week.
“Continued leadership from the City of Toronto and the support of our partners allow us to scale Toronto Tech Week thoughtfully, staying grounded in the community while expanding its reach and impact. Our long-term vision is to build a platform that grows year over year and reflects the ambition, diversity, and strength of Toronto’s tech ecosystem.”
Toronto Tech Week’s first year shows how a locally run platform can keep a city’s tech ecosystem connected. The new multi-year agreement provides a foundation for that format to develop over time.
Final shots
- Toronto Tech Week became Toronto’s largest locally organized technology gathering in 2025.
- Its open, decentralized format relies on independent hosts across the ecosystem.
A multi-year partnership with the City of Toronto provides organizers with a longer planning runway heading into 2026.
