More tech workers than LA or Seattle
Toronto's Tech Scene
Toronto has quietly become one of North America's largest tech hubs — enough that it's earned the nickname "Silicon Valley North," built on a deep AI research bench and a startup ecosystem that grew out of the same university corridor that discovered insulin.
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Long before "Silicon Valley North" became a talking point, Toronto already had the raw ingredients: a major research university, a dense financial sector willing to fund things, and — increasingly — more tech workers than Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle or Washington, D.C., trailing only the Bay Area and New York in North America.
MaRS Discovery District
Founded in 2000 on University Avenue, MaRS Discovery District is now North America's largest urban innovation hub — a 1.5 million square foot complex supporting over 1,200 startups, with a stated mission of connecting publicly funded research to venture capital and commercial partners. Its location isn't an accident: it sits on the same University Avenue site where insulin was first administered to patients in 1922 — see our medical history guide for that story.
An AI research bench most cities can't match
The University of Toronto's computer science department, home to deep-learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton for decades, is one of the reasons Toronto punches above its weight in AI research specifically — the Vector Institute, a dedicated AI research institute, was built directly on top of that academic strength, and has helped anchor a wave of AI startups and corporate research labs in the city.
Homegrown companies and outside investment
The city's most visible tech success story, e-commerce platform Shopify, is headquartered in Ottawa but has a major Toronto presence; BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion, co-founded by Waterloo-area entrepreneurs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, is part of the same wider Ontario tech corridor. International investment has followed: Toronto's tech sector has repeatedly out-added jobs compared to Silicon Valley and New York City combined in recent growth cycles, driven partly by comparatively lower costs and Canada's more accessible skilled-worker immigration pathways.
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Sources
- MaRS Discovery District — Our Story
- MIT Technology Review — Toronto Would Like to Be Seen as the Nice Person's Silicon Valley
- Wikipedia — MaRS Discovery District