MaRS, Instacart announce tech hubs in Toronto

This week has been quite a newsworthy item for tech news in Toronto. A big announcement of two new tech hubs from MaRS Discovery District and Instacart along with Elevate kicking off its second annual, city-wide tech fest on Tuesday. Yung Wu, CEO of MaRS made the announcement on the Elevate main stage that its newest tech hub will occupy a 24,000 square-foot space along Toronto’s waterfront as part of the Toronto Waterfront Innovation Centre. This new hub developed in partnership with the University of Toronto will be located in the to-be-created HIVE tower stated the press release and will provide a collaborative work-space for scaling startups. The Waterfront Innovation Centre, situated near Sugar Beach and Sidewalk Labs’ Quayside location, is set to open in 2021 and is estimated to accommodate 3,000 workers. On the same day, Instacart, the San Francisco-based grocery delivery service announced its own tech hub, calling it a significant expansion of its presence in Canada. The hub, to be named “Instacart North”, will create 200 new jobs in Toronto over the next several years in engineering, product, design and research and development. The company has been growing its connection with the city over the past year with the acquisition of Toronto-based Unata which was announced in January.  This news just shows how Toronto has quickly become one of the hottest tech markets in the world.