June 22, 2026
OpenText's Ireland bet, who's hiring across 62 KW companies, and two new things on the site
I shipped two things to kwbuilds this week that change what this update can be. There is now a jobs crawler that reads the careers page of every company in the directory once a day, and a change feed that watches those same companies and records what moves between runs. So this is the first issue I can actually build on numbers. The single biggest headline was OpenText, a Waterloo company, putting 400 jobs and 105 million euros into Ireland during Mark Carney's state visit. Here is KWBuilds Weekly for June 15th to 21st!
The directory stands at 648 published KW tech companies. Both of the new instruments went live mid-week, so think of these as the opening baseline, the first frame of a picture we can now watch change week to week.
Of those 648 companies, 62 have at least one open role right now, and the first full crawl pulled in 325 of them. 80 are remote, and 47 list a salary range, which is a number I will keep watching now that Ontario's 2026 pay transparency rules are pushing posted ranges toward the default.
The most active boards belong to Magnet Forensics, Tempo (formerly Roadmunk), Perpetua, and Anyon Systems, each with at least 25 openings. Behind them, Avidbots and BinSentry are at 13 roles each, Float Financial at 11, Ranovus at 10, and Scispot and Lillio at 8. Engineering is the deepest single department, followed by sales and finance.
Our new change feed (internal for now, a feature I will open up soon) saw really strong hiring signals this week. Magnet Forensics went from 43 to 46 open roles, and Nulogy added one to land at 6. In the other direction, RouteThis trimmed from 7 to 4 and Applied Brain Research from 2 to 1.
The team-size estimator also nudged Anyon Systems, the Montreal and Waterloo quantum-computing company, and Rapid Novor, the Kitchener protein-sequencing lab, up into the 51 to 200 band. Rapid Novor's own site now puts it at more than 50 people, so that one lines up. The bands are estimates from public signals, not payroll counts, so read them as a direction rather than a hard number.
Two things shipped on kwbuilds this week that you can see for yourself. There is now a community page that gathers the KW groups, hubs, and news worth knowing in one place: the meetups (KW Techs, WatCamp, KWLUG, CivicTechWR, Kwartzlab), the hubs and accelerators (Communitech, Velocity, the Accelerator Centre, Make It Kitchener), and the local press. And every company profile now carries its open roles, pulled daily from the company's own careers page, so a company like Scispot now lists its open jobs right on its profile.
The week's biggest KW story was OpenText committing to create 400 jobs in Ireland over three years and invest 105 million euros (about $170 million CAD) across new offices in Cork and Galway. The announcement landed during Mark Carney's state visit to Ireland, which set up a Canada-Ireland partnership on AI cooperation, and OpenText framed the expansion around agentic AI, cybersecurity, and sovereign cloud for the European market. OpenText is headquartered here in Waterloo, so a 400-job bet abroad is worth watching from this side. (BetaKit) It lands a few months after OpenText cut about 4% of its workforce, roughly 880 people, this past March as part of a three-year cost-cutting plan (BetaKit), so the new roles are heading to Ireland while the overall headcount has been coming down.
Juggernaut Labs, an Accelerator Centre AC:Incubate company, got written up for a no-code platform that lets non-technical people (accountants, marketers, salespeople) build and run AI workflows across close to 100 models, with a "fractional AI success manager" to help them set it up. Co-founder Ken Naku put the problem plainly: the businesses he worked with had the domain experts who understood the work, but those people could not actually contribute to how the AI got built.
Tailscale, the Toronto networking company in our directory, shipped new features for Aperture, its AI access and control product, aimed at shadow AI, corporate data access, and reining in what AI agents can reach. Tailscale closed a $230 million CAD Series C last year, runs across more than 30,000 businesses, and made its first acquisition earlier this year buying Vancouver's Border0. CEO Avery Pennarun's pitch is that the best model and tools keep changing, so companies should not have to rebuild their AI setup every time one piece does. (BetaKit)
Everything I listed in last week's look ahead happened, and there was plenty more on top.
UW CPI Talk with Joel Reardon, June 15 on campus, the empirical takedown of "anonymized" data broker datasets where his team reidentified 88% of the hashed emails they bought.
AI Power Hour: prompts that push back, Communitech, June 15 in Kitchener.
KWLUG dinner at Prohibition Warehouse in Uptown Waterloo, June 15.
Founder Institute: How to Think Like a Founder ran online June 16, the session I previewed here last week.
Accelerator Centre Founder Exchange, June 16 at the AC, 20-minute rounds with Joseph Fung (Uvaro), George Tsintzouras (Argus Command), Tricia Mumby (Mabel's Labels), Bryan Webb (Clearpath and OTTO), Youssef Helwa (FluidAI), Andre Hladio (Intellijoint), and Corry Flatt (GovAI, formerly Bonfire).
CivicTechWR with Matthew Dufresne of CanadaGPT, June 17 in Kitchener.
Launchpad.io and AWS Outcomes-as-a-Service Roadshow, June 17 at the Accelerator Centre.
Build with AI: Tech Worker Edition, Communitech, June 18, a hands-on $299 lab on where AI actually gets used inside tech companies.
Product Manager Waterloo Summer Social at the Boathouse in Victoria Park, June 19, the PM community's drop-in.
UW Engineering talk: The Overreach of Science in the Modern World with Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School, June 19 on campus.
AI Power Hour: what is an agent and how do I build one, Communitech, June 22 in Kitchener, building a no-code browser agent live.
Founder Institute: how to get your first 10 customers with Jonathan Greechan, online June 22.
Founder Institute: economic development and building entrepreneurial communities, an online panel June 23 on what cities and ecosystem builders can do for founders.
Women in Tech Waterloo Region: Yoga in the Park, Victoria Park, June 23, $15, for International Yoga Day.
GPUG: Advanced PHPUnit Shenanigans with Larry Garfield, June 24 at Vehikl in the old RIM campus.
KWSQA June Social at Morty's Pub in Waterloo, June 25, $20 for non-members.
This is the first issue where I could point at a number and say "that moved." It is going to get a lot more interesting once there are a few weeks of these stacked up and the change feed has real history to diff against. See you next week, stay tuned for the change feed release, and come say hi at one of the events!
Torrin