Calgary’s tech sector continues to boom, leading the way across North America while other markets across the globe falter, according to a newly released report.

Platform Calgary’s 2025 Impact Report, delivered at the Feb. 19 Community Connect even,t showed massive increases in the number of tech companies in Calgary, along with the growth in value of 13 per cent at a time when other markets internationally have dropped 14 per cent.

Calgary is also the fastest-growing tech talent city in North America, with a 61 per cent increase in 2025, according to Platform Calgary’s CEO Jennifer Lussier.

“It’s been a busy year. Let’s just put it like that,” she said during the delivery of the impact report.

Along with the overall footprint of Calgary’s tech ecosystem, more than $235 million in tech revenue was generated by these companies.

At Platform Calgary, they’ve seen a 36 per cent increase in the number of founders and welcomed more than 172,500 people through the doors at the 9 Avenue SE Innovation Centre.

“The reason we track this, it’s a vibrancy index,” she said.

“We know when you come to Platform, you’re either a founder, a student, a job seeker, a career changer; you’re an investor, you’re a mentor or coach or subject matter expert, or you’re a support partner or service organization that’s helping these companies. So, we’re very, very proud of these numbers.”

Lussier said they continue to build an ecosystem made up of students, entrepreneurs, investors, community partners, and subject matter experts moving Calgary’s tech scene forward.

“People raise their hands to come here,” she said.  

“They want to learn how to build, they want to learn how to raise money. They want to learn how to hire, and they want to learn how to generate revenue and find customers.”

Provincial government changes could provide a big boost

Nate Glubish, Alberta’s Minister of Technology and Innovation, said that while it’s important to think about where the province’s technology scene is going, it’s important to acknowledge where it’s come from.

He said back in 2004, maybe $3 million annually was being invested into Alberta tech. By 2017, it was $30 million. Over the past three years, $2.1 billion has been invested.

“That’s something to be excited about. It’s progress,” he said.

“We’re making waves in not just Alberta’s tech sector, but all across the country and around the world, and Calgary has been the epicenter of that. Calgary has been recognized all around the world as one of the fastest-growing and most exciting tech hubs in the world.”

Glubish said the Alberta government is working on three key pillars to help drive continued momentum in the industry. First is the protection of intellectual property. He said there are amazing researchers, entrepreneurs, and innovators here, coming up with great ideas.

“We have done a very poor job of commercializing those ideas and protecting those ideas and turning it into patents and protectable proprietary intellectual property,” he said.

“What happens instead is those ideas ultimately get sucked up into American companies, and they ultimately create wealth for American investors, and that is a policy failure across this country.”

He said the province is developing a comprehensive IP strategy to protect those ideas.

Further, to help move them forward, the province is creating a co-investment strategy. Minister Glubish said that too often companies have to look outside Alberta – and Canada – to find scale-up cash.

“What that means is that the ownership stake of those companies, the cap table, is now controlled in many cases by Americans,” he said.

“The challenge there is, then you have investors who don’t care about Alberta. They just care about making money, and they often will exercise their influence and their ownership to compel the founders to move that company to a different jurisdiction.”

Glubish said the Alberta government is also looking at an overhauled technology procurement plan, that streamlines the process for Alberta-based companies to navigate and succeed in a very vague government procurement process.

Mindset shift is needed: CED CEO Brad Parry

While grant money is always available for startups and burgeoning tech companies, Glubish said they’d prefer to help companies gain customers.

“What I know from experience is that finding a customer is so much more rewarding and valuable than finding a grant, because a grant is one-time, but a customer is for life, if you do a good job,” he said.

“Imagine how valuable the customer is on your resume as an entrepreneur, if that customer is the Government of Alberta.”

Calgary Economic Development president and CEO Brad Parry agreed that getting a customer is better, and that companies and investors have to shift their mindsets to unlock more growth.

“There’s an adage, everybody knows, right? Canadians want to fight to be first, to be second,” Parry told the audience during a panel discussion.

“I think we need to change that. We need to have people willing to take risks.”

He said the key is getting the stories out there, and drawing people from “out of the towers” in the downtown.

“It’s not going to be easy, and we talk about this all the time, collaboration sucks,” Parry said.

“It’s incredibly hard, but it’s the most important thing we can do, and we need to get our corporates to get their head out of their ass and start to support these local companies to do it right.”

In 2026, Platform Calgary expects to see 300,000 people through the doors and support more than 1,200 founders in their programming.