Juice Mobile is the latest tech company to set up shop in Waterloo, Ont., hoping to take advantage of what is rapidly becoming Canada’s most concentrated source of engineering talent.
The Waterloo office will be home to a newly hired staff of developers that will work on Juice Mobile’s mobile programmatic and programmatic direct platforms. The company says it has not yet determined how many hires it will make.
In recent years the Waterloo-Kitchener area has become a thriving hub for IT companies looking to draw on the engineering talent coming out of the University of Waterloo, as well as Blackberry, which left a lot of qualified engineers out of work through three years of deep cuts. Google employs some 300 development staff there; Square, the Jack Dorsey-led mobile payments company, opened an office last spring.
It’s also home to a number of successful homegrown startups, like cloud-based e-learning software developer Desire2Learn and video direct marketing platform Vidyard, which raked in $18 million in Silicon Valley investment last month.
Juice Mobile founder and CEO Neil Sweeney said in a release the company is looking to attract the same kind of top engineering talent to help develop its solutions for programmatic and programmatic direct buying in mobile. Juice Mobile plans on offering several internship positions to Waterloo and Wilfred Laurier students with the potential for long-term employment.
“This new office truly emphasizes our commitment to evolve our mobile platforms and draw the top class talent needed to take us there,” he said.