Startup Events in Toronto

Ready to become your own boss—but don’t want to build a business entirely on your own? Join fellow entrepreneurs, business builders, and opportunity seekers at the Franchise Canada Show Toronto — Fall 2026, Canada’s premier franchise exhibition. This free event brings leading franchise brands, experienced operators, and industry experts together under one roof at the Toronto Congress Centre. Whether you’re actively exploring business ownership or simply curious about franchising, this is an opportunity to discover proven business models, compare investment options, and get practical guidance directly from the people who know the industry best. ## What you’ll discover Explore franchise opportunities across 60+ sectors Meet representatives from established brands and emerging concepts in food, technology, beauty, construction, professional services, retail, and more. Explore opportunities at a wide range of investment levels and find options that match your experience, ambitions, and budget. Speak directly with industry experts Connect face-to-face with franchisors, successful franchisees, and experienced professionals. Ask candid questions, understand the realities of ownership, and gain insights that can help you make a confident, informed decision. Attend free educational seminars Learn about financing, legal considerations, marketing, operations, franchise selection, and other essential aspects of building a successful franchise business. Hear practical strategies and real-world lessons from people who have already made the journey. ## Why attend? Since 1996, the Canadian Franchise Association has helped thousands of Canadians explore business ownership through credible franchise systems. The Franchise Canada Show is the CFA’s official exhibition and one of the best places to begin—or accelerate—your search. Come prepared to learn, make valuable connections, and discover what your next chapter could look like. Get into business for yourself—but not by yourself

IMPORTANT: - Bring your laptop! - Doors close at 6:15PM sharp Join us for our monthly Grok Bot meetup in Toronto at 800 Bay! We'll still be giving away Cursor credits that you can use with Grok Bot as well. Join us for an exciting night of learning all the different ways you can automate your life with Grok Bot. We'll be bringing in two amazing speakers and have some time for Q&A at the end. The agenda for the night will be super chill. There will be dinner and drinks provided - come have fun! 🗓️ Event Agenda 5:30 - Mix and Mingle 6:15 - Speaker 1 6:30 - Speaker 2 6:45 - Q&A 7:00 - Networking and Building 8:30 - Event Ends Previous events: See here Want to help as a volunteer? Sign up here Hosted by Neerav, Jia and Sukh. Volunteer Team: Joe, Dhanush, Kurt, Daniel, Gio, Ruhao, Monica, Mariia, Sahil, Shreya

Welcome back to our annual happy hour at The Parlour! Hyde Park Venture Partners and CIBC Innovation Banking invite you to an evening with founders, investors and leaders from across Toronto’s technology ecosystem. Join us at The Parlour for thoughtful conversation, new connections and an opportunity to reconnect with colleagues from across the venture community. Hyde Park Venture Partners invests in early-stage software companies across the Midwest and Toronto. CIBC Innovation Banking provides growth capital and tailored banking solutions to technology companies and their investors across North America and Europe. Drinks and light bites will be served. Space is limited, so please RSVP.

Welcome to the 8th session of the 4th edition of the Toronto LLM Meetup Group. We really appreciate the growing interest in our events and will continue to ensure equitable access for all participants. We are sorry to have disappeared for some months due to busy schedules, but we are back! And this time, we’ll be exploring decision models and non-LLM primitives. To make this extra fair (or unfair), we will be using a decision model to approve/reject your request to attend. Bonus points if you've built your own Jev-like system and are willing to live benchmark it with us. 🖤 Special thanks to Gordon Gibson and Ada for providing the lovely event space in Silicon Alley and Hudson Labs for their support and resources. 📖 Papers & Resources It is not necessary to read them all before the session, but browsing through them might help you more actively participate in the discussion session. TypeSafe AI Jev Contrastive Language Models ⏱️ Timetable 17:30 - 18:00 Icebreaker & Networking 18:00 - 18:30 Speaker Session #1 18:30 - 18:50 Discussion 18:50 - 19:20 Speaker Session #2 19:20 - 19:40 Discussion 19:40 - 20:00 Networking 👋 About Us The Toronto LLM Meetup group is founded by Suhas Pai, CTO and Co-founder of Hudson Labs, and Lily Ren, Senior AI PM at Telus Health. The aim of this group is to facilitate deep dives into LLM research topics, harnessing the skills of Toronto's vibrant AI ecosystem and promoting intellectual rigor. To this end, for each session we assemble a team of top Toronto AI scientists and practitioners to conduct an in-depth study of an emerging topic that is expected to go mainstream 6 months from now. The team presents their findings along with jumping-off points for future research at a meetup session, held at Toronto's top AI companies. Eventually we aim to spawn off community open-source research projects this way. 📧 Mailing List Thank you so much for your interest. We’re thrilled to see so many of you sign up for this event! We’ll be collecting em

⏰ EARLY BIRD: $15 until Sunday, Oct 18 at 11:59 PM. Then $20. 🎟️ Get your ticket here: Heads up: your Meetup RSVP doesn't include a ticket. Please grab yours at the link above. 📅 Wednesday, October 28 · 6:30–9:30 PM 📍 IDK Social Bar, 172 Ossington Ave 👥 Groups of 3 or more get 25% off at checkout On October 28, TechinTO takes over IDK Social Bar for our Halloween Special, and this time we want you dressed for it. No stage, no slides, no pitch decks. Come as your favourite villain, hero or inside joke, grab a drink, and talk to people about what you're actually building. WHAT YOUR TICKET GETS YOU ✅ An evening with Toronto founders, devs, designers, marketers and PMs ✅ A colour wristband for your field, so you know who's who before you say hi ✅ A chance to win a free 1:1 social media or personal brand strategy session with Sonia Ovcharenko of Lovemarked 🎃 A prize for the best costume FIRST TIME AT TECHINTO? You don't need to know anyone. The wristbands and nametags make it easy to start a conversation, and the whole night is built around meeting new people. THE VENUE IDK Social Bar: a two-level spot downtown with good drinks and a room built for actual conversation. 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techinto.event/ 🌐 Website: https://www.techinto.ca zero corporate stiffness. absolute social energy. actual human conversations.

Join us at Shopify's Toronto office on Thursday, Oct 29th for an evening of learning, networking, and fun. 🎯 Theme: The Real Work of Data Engineering: AI, Scale, and the Mistakes That Teach Us Some of the best engineering lessons come from the things that didn't go according to plan. We are bringing Toronto's engineering community together to explore the real work behind building data and AI systems: the technical decisions, trade-offs, challenges, and lessons learned along the way. Because increasingly, the hardest problems don't sit neatly inside data engineering, software engineering, or machine learning. They sit at the intersection. 🎤 Meet Our Speakers Derek Pyne Staff Data Engineer | Shopify The Use of River to Build Data Loops to Improve Models Jill Cates Staff Data Engineer | Shopify Can an AI Agent Fix Your Data Warehouse? Using health metrics to find tech debt and verify the fix Mitchell Posluns & Pranavan Pirahalathan Manager, Analytics Engineering & Data Scientist II | Wealthsimple From Craft to Context: How AI Turned Engineering Discipline into Critical Infrastructure Adeniyi (Ade) Bello Data Architect | Assent (PE backed by Blackstone + Vista Partners) Rethinking the Data Stack: Building a Zero-ETL, Go-Engineered Warehouse Who Should Attend? Whether you're a data engineer, software engineer, ML/AI engineer, analytics engineer, platform engineer, architect, or engineering leader working on these problems, we'd love to have you in the room. 📍 Location: Shopify Toronto Office 📅 Date: Thursday, October 29, 2026 ⏰ Time: 5 - 8 PM ET Sponsors Lead Sponsor: Shopify Supporting Sponsors: Astronomer Cheers! DET Canada Team (Vipul Choudhary, Rushika Verma) Interested in speaking at a future event? How to Submit Talks We are always looking for speakers! Submit your talk ideas HERE. ℹ️ About Data Engineer Things Data Engineer Things (DET) is a global community built by data engineers for data engineers. Subscribe to the newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn to gain

As we dove into GTM Engineering, we grew envious of the communities in New York and San Francisco that were sharing ideas and learnings. This is our attempt to solve that with each speaker opening the hood on a system that runs in production today. You hear the problem, see the solution and results. Speakers from Flinks, Ada and AXL Labs and more to be announced. What happens Five live demos, ten minutes each Questions after each demo Networking with other Toronto builders Who should come People who build or own GTM systems People who want to see how other teams build pipeline We approve each guest, so that the room stays full of builders.

This is a meetup for AI game devs who are actively using AI tools and agentic workflows to build video games. It will be a cross between a meetup and a demo event (food and drink will be provided). The event can provide a stage to present your game, share your experiences building agents for game dev/design, or share the role(s) agents play in what you're building. If you're looking to advance the game development and design abilities of agents beyond what's currently on the market, this will be a place to learn a new tool, connect with others who have similar skills, and possibly create new opportunities. You should come if you're... Terminally online on Reddit, GitHub, and Discord, learning what the newest discovered AI game-dev workflow is this week. Making games (or at least prototypes) with agents doing real work in the loop. Terms like MCP, agent harness, skills, subagents, worktrees, context windows, compaction, tool calls, evals, and Opus 5.5 sound like normal conversation. This event is not for those... Not building or coding game projects with creative AI tools. Interested in business networking. Give us a quick description of your game or project and a list of what tools you're using when you register! Who's hosting this? We’re Robert, Maeesha, and Peter, the co-founders of Chatforce. We’ve been working with AI agent technology since early 2024, and we’ve hosted events like this before. You can find those on the Futurework calendar. We’re hosting this meetup because we’d love to meet other people building games with AI, compare what’s working, and have the kinds of conversations that are better in person. We're excited to meet you!

[Summary] This meetup is for those who are interested in code, web development, design, cloud, or AI. All levels are welcome, so feel free to bring your laptop and discuss what you are working on or what you are learning. You can share your projects and ideas with other participants freely. There are outlets and WiFi, drinks are about $5 for tea, they take card only. [Price] Attendance is FREE. But you need to buy something from the venue. [Policies] \- We do not tolerate harassment of our members \- We remind users that that this meetup is intended for networking and hobby development\, and any attempts at using this meetup event as a dating platform will not be not be tolerated Further information: https://torontostack.exchange/

Canada is building companies worth buying from, backing, and joining. On November 2, they open the floor. Most people see Canadian innovation as a headline. A raise. An exit. A list. Co-hosted with the Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus Ecosystem team, more than 35 startups on one floor, with accelerators, founder programs and investors that back them. Startups from U of T, AI ventures from the Vector Institute, and from the TechTO community, all in one room. Come to buy. Come to back. Come to join. 🤝 B2B buyers: find the tools built here before your competitors do 💰 Investors: meet founders who are raising now, booth by booth At 7 pm, Together Toronto takes the stage with the people who built some of Canada's biggest company stories. Startup Showcase & Ecosystem Tours Ecosystem tours start every 45 minutes from 4:15PM. See where Toronto's next startups start: UTE: U of T's entrepreneurship network across all three campuses ONRamp: UTE's co-working space for founders Centre for Entrepreneurship: funding and mentorship for students, faculty and alumni UTEST: U of T's incubator for deep tech and research startups Black Founders Network: access, funding and community for Black founders at every stage Vector Institute: one of Canada's top AI research institutes Innovations & Partnerships Office: formalizing partnerships with U of T researchers and technologies See who else is exhibiting here! Speakers Sam Pillar, Co-founder & CEO, Jobber Started Jobber in Edmonton in 2011 and grew it past 100,000 home and commercial service businesses. If you sell software to small businesses, this is the playbook. Andrew Lockhead, Co-founder & CEO, Stay22 Built Stay22 in Montreal into a platform that moved over $1B in travel bookings in 2025, then raised $122M from Summit Partners. A Canadian company winning the creator economy. Noah Buchman, Co-founder, President & CRO, Propel Holdings Took Propel from a 2011 startup to the TSX, with lending brands across Canada, the US and the UK.

[Summary] This meetup is for those who are interested in code, web development, design, cloud, or AI. All levels are welcome, so feel free to bring your laptop and discuss what you are working on or what you are learning. You can share your projects and ideas with other participants freely. There are outlets and WiFi, drinks are about $5 for tea, they take card only. [Price] Attendance is FREE. But you need to buy something from the venue. [Policies] \- We do not tolerate harassment of our members \- We remind users that that this meetup is intended for networking and hobby development\, and any attempts at using this meetup event as a dating platform will not be not be tolerated Further information: https://torontostack.exchange/

Join our in-person Toronto Physical AI Workshop and Meetup, co-presented by Nebius and Voxel51, hosted at the Terrace Room, University of Toronto. A laptop is required to participate in the hands-on workshop - please bring one. Space is limited, so register early. A company, university, or government email address is required to take part in the hands-on workshop. Personal and disposable email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and similar) cannot be used for the workshop environment. This is a blanket policy of the workshop platform to prevent fraud and abuse and to meet compliance requirements. If you need an exception, contact the hosts before the event. By submitting, you agree to Voxel51's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy and agree to receive occasional emails.

How do you move from actively guiding AI agents to having them carry work through your team’s development process? Join us for a practical session on agentic workflows in GitHub. We’ll show how people and agents clarify requirements, plan changes, and capture project knowledge, then use those shared skills and context to automate tasks such as assessing issues and reviewing pull requests. Through demos, we’ll explore how these steps can connect into a workflow that takes a small bug from report to proposed fix, helping teams move faster and reduce bottlenecks. Along the way, we’ll show how engineers can inspect the agent’s work, step in when it needs refinement, and retain control over what merges. Come at 5:30 PM to grab some pizza and network. The presentation kicks off at 6:00 PM!

Attendees will engage in a series of interactive talks, panel discussions, vendor expos, in-depth building tours, and raffles.

[Summary] This meetup is for those who are interested in code, web development, design, cloud, or AI. All levels are welcome, so feel free to bring your laptop and discuss what you are working on or what you are learning. You can share your projects and ideas with other participants freely. There are outlets and WiFi, drinks are about $5 for tea, they take card only. [Price] Attendance is FREE. But you need to buy something from the venue. [Policies] \- We do not tolerate harassment of our members \- We remind users that that this meetup is intended for networking and hobby development\, and any attempts at using this meetup event as a dating platform will not be not be tolerated Further information: https://torontostack.exchange/

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