Velocity Foundry

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UW’s Velocity Foundry forges new future for hardware startups
September 13, 2014 | Terry Pender | The Record | LINK

KITCHENER — Tristan Lehari and Darius Gai are working on a prototype of their wearable technology — high-tech goggles that measure a competitive swimmer's performance — while politicians, business people and academics crowd around them.

Their business, TritonWear, is among more than 20 startups in the University of Waterloo's newest technology incubator — the Velocity Foundryin downtown Kitchener.

The Foundry, a home for hardware startups, officially opened on Friday. There is room for 25 startups in the 11,000-square-foot space at 45 Water St. S., and it will be full before the end of next week.

The Foundry is located in part of a former shopping mall — the King Centre — that was built in 1980. The centre was a failed attempt to lure back shoppers who were flocking to suburban malls.

Now, the space occupied by the Foundry is like a 21{+s}t century blast furnace for the new economy. It is a large, bright space with a huge window looking out onto Water Street, high ceilings and white walls. The entrepreneurs work in the open, but there are private meeting rooms. The facility is outfitted with latest equipment to support the startups.

Lehari and Gai listened politely to the speeches by UW president Feridun Hamdullahpur, Kitchener-Waterloo MP Peter Braid and Kitchener-Centre MPP Diaene Vernile, but their minds were on their swimming goggles.

The goggles are equipped with a small square unit that measures an athlete's key metrics, and sends the data to the coach's tablet in real time.

"And it does that for every swimmer in the pool," says Lehari, a varsity swimmer at UW before he graduated from the university's mechatronics program in 2011.

The Triton goggles allow a coach to collect key information on every team member, rather than having to spend time collecting the information from one swimmer at a time.

"All that data, which is currently just lost because there is too much data and too many swimmers, now all that data gets uploaded onto the cloud for long-term tracking and trending," Lehari said.

The Triton unit, which straps onto the back of the goggles, features more than a dozen algorithms that collect data on 12 metrics at a much lower cost than the technology of competitors, Gai said.

The data it measures includes the time it takes to swim the length of the pool, the number of strokes, turnaround time, distance per stroke, cadence, distance under water, stroke profile and velocity profile.

"It is actually really complicated digital-signal processing based on the sensors we have in the device," Gai said.

"You see expensive radar equipment and expensive camera equipment out there to track swimmers," he said. "Our device works with a tablet, right out of the box. It uses Wi-Fi and the device starts working right away in the pool."

Other startups in the Foundry are trying to bring low-cost vision care to poor people, developing automated indoor gardening systems, and working on robots to do commercial floor cleaning.

"We call this the Velocity Foundry because of its focus on hardware, materials and life sciences companies," said Mike Kirkup, director of UW velocity incubators.

The other UW incubator in downtown Kitchener is called the Velocity Garage. Located inside the Tannery building, one block to the west, it is a home for software startups.

"We are extremely excited about the new facility, and about really building on what Velocity can deliver," Kirkup said.

Hamdullahpur said the opening of the Foundry is another demonstration that the UW "is growing in a manner that we are very relevant to the aspirations and needs of our society and the world."

Braid said that "I am willing to bet that the next big thing will start in Kitchener-Waterloo, perhaps right here in this building."