Tech workers fill Little Italy’s patios and the park benches around Dow’s Lake every sunny afternoon, sipping coffee and enjoying gelatos. It’s not the type of thing they could easily find in the Kanata North tech park, the suburban hub that once defined the city’s technology sector. Instead, companies including Autocorp.ai, Rewind, Qlik, bitHeads and […]
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Tech workers fill Little Italy’s patios and the park benches around Dow’s Lake every sunny afternoon, sipping coffee and enjoying gelatos. It’s not the type of thing they could easily find in the Kanata North tech park, the suburban hub that once defined the city’s technology sector. Instead, companies including Autocorp.ai, Rewind, Qlik, bitHeads and Adobe operate from buildings on Preston Street.
Over at Lansdowne Park, another technology cluster has quietly formed around TD Place, where firms such as Robotics Centre and seoplus+ have established their headquarters in one of the city’s busiest entertainment districts.
Invest Ottawa’s vice-president of ventures Nick Quain said the shift reflects a maturing city that has seen tech clusters rise and fall before.
“There was a period where, right beside St. Laurent Shopping Centre, you had Assent, MindBridge and Lixar,” Quain said. “They all moved or were bought out. There was probably more money raised on Industrial (Avenue) than March Road for a couple of years.”
Quain said Ottawa’s tech ecosystem has become increasingly decentralized as newer firms prioritize flexibility, hybrid work models and urban amenities over large suburban campuses.
“I think that speaks to the present day,” he said. “It shows where our startup ecosystem really is.”
The Preston Street corridor
The most established of the new clusters runs along Preston Street in Little Italy. It is concentrated in office towers at 333 and 343 Preston St. The tenant list in these buildings is a major cluster of Ottawa software companies: Autocorp.ai, Rewind, bitHeads, Commvault, Adobe, Corel, Qlik and Freebalance, along with several smaller solo-preneur ventures.
Andrew Lemoine, co-founder and CEO of Autocorp.ai, said the company landed at 343 Preston almost by accident, thanks to a meeting with its benefits provider, Sun Life.
“We met with Sun Life at their Preston Street office and realized it’s central, it’s not directly downtown,” Lemoine told OBJ. “So you’re not dealing with that direct cluster of downtown traffic, and it’s a little more easy to access.”
Autocorp builds fintech software for Canadian car dealerships, with more than 800 dealerships now using the platform. Lemoine said Preston Street suits the company’s remote-first model because the building functions like a co-working space, available when needed but without the full commercial commitment that Kanata North properties typically require.
“The KRP properties are a little bit more difficult to get into as a startup,” he explained. “They really vet the companies a lot harder, and sometimes when you’re a startup and you’re in growth mode and maybe in between a seed or Series A round, it depends on really what they’re looking for.”
Lemoine said the neighbourhood itself is a selling point for client meetings and team outings. “There’s no shortage of good food within a five-minute walking distance,” he said. “Who doesn’t like Little Italy? Especially in summertime.”
He pointed out that there isn’t a deliberate tech community along Preston Street, and said if Autocorp continues to grow it could potentially end up in Kanata North.
“I think the companies here are coincidental,” he said. “We don’t see other tech companies as much as we would maybe in Kanata.”
The ghost of St. Laurent
Long before Preston Street emerged as a destination for technology companies, the city’s most explosive tech boom formed along Belfast Road, St. Laurent Boulevard and Industrial Avenue during the late 1990s telecom bubble. Mitel was there, Nortel had offices nearby and several smaller startups set up shop in the area.
At the centre stood JDS Fitel (later JDS Uniphase), an optical networking giant founded by former Bell-Northern Research engineers. The company specialized in fibre-optic components. In 1999, JDS merged with California-based Uniphase in a US$6.1-billion deal that briefly turned Ottawa’s east end into one of the hottest technology markets in the world.
At its peak, JDS Uniphase reached a market valuation of US$64.2 billion, equal at the time to the combined value of Canada’s three largest banks. The company even announced plans for a massive one-million-square-foot campus to support up to 10,000 employees. For a brief moment, the money flowing into Ottawa’s east end eclipsed activity in Kanata’s traditional telecom hub. But then the dot-com bubble burst.
JDS Uniphase shut its Ottawa headquarters in 2003 and shed thousands of jobs. The land became the Ottawa Train Yards retail complex and O-Train’s Line 1 maintenance facility. The cluster completely vanished.
“I think it also just naturally speaks to the funnel or the pipeline,” Quain said. “It’s a cautionary tale for all startup founders to be realistic.”
Lansdowne Park
Lansdowne Park is one of the more surprising tech clusters to emerge recently.
“I actually said there was more money raised at Lansdowne Park than at the Kanata Business Park one year,” Quain said. “You’ve got Field Effect, CIRA, seoplus+ and a bunch of others.”
Amanda Stephens, vice-president at seoplus+, told OBJ the digital marketing agency moved to 825 Exhibition Way, a class A building at Landsdowne, two years ago after trying different locations around the city, including the Byward Market.
“There’s really not a single person for whom it will be a negative to work in this area,” Stephens said. “I start my day with a walk on the canal every morning. We literally have people who will skate to work on the canal in the winter.”
The amenity ecosystem around Lansdowne is a genuine tool for encouraging office attendance, she said.
“There is this idea to be like, ‘I want to hang out after work,’” she explained. “Coming into the office early or going out for lunch to do those types of things creates attraction and reasons to come here.”
She acknowledges the Lansdowne tech community is still finding its identity. She notices most of the tech companies in the area don’t interact with each other.
“This is something I wish we could engage in more,” she said. “There’s certainly a vibe that you’re among peers, but I wouldn’t say it’s been like where we have coffee together or anything.”
However, she believes the cluster will grow as more companies make the jump. With a handful of companies it is just an outlier, she said, but as more companies set up shop, a cluster could begin to really form.
Bayview Yards
A few kilometres from Lansdowne is yet another cluster of tech firms at Bayview Yards, which is built around accelerating companies, with many tenants being fresh startups. The facility itself is a repurposed municipal works building that hosts roughly 60 to 70 companies.
“We do see a lot of companies are in this area,” Quain said. “And some in Mechanicsville as well. They pop into our building, use our meeting rooms and sometimes augment what they’re doing here.”
The cluster at Bayview Yards includes tenants spanning clean-tech, robotics and defence-tech. Among them are BluWave-ai, InDro Robotics and AirShare. The facility integrates directly with Area X.O, Canada’s advanced autonomous vehicle and smart mobility testing ground.
Lemoine of Autocorp, just up the road on Preston Street, acknowledges Bayview Yards occupies a category of its own. “It’s a nice, central area right outside of the cluster of downtown,” he said. “They have a lot of unique companies there.”
Hunt Club and Riverside
A less defined cluster is beginning to take shape in the city’s south end around Hunt Club Road and Riverside Drive. PureColo and Knak both operate there, while the former IBM building anchored a technology presence in the area for years.
Lemoine knows the area well. Autocorp launched with office space on Hunt Club before going remote during the pandemic. But he said there’s a different force shaping where these clusters grow now.
“As a city, we’re all anxiously waiting for the LRT to be completed, because as of lately, the Queensway feels more like the Don Valley Parkway,” he said. “Traffic has become so heavy in Ottawa that you plan meetings around traffic jams. A lot of founders are looking at the most optimal locations to deal with traffic.”
Quain said the emergence of multiple technology clusters across the city is a reflection of how the local economy has evolved since the Nortel era.
“You’ve got Preston. You’ve got some really interesting startups right there in Little Italy,” he said. “You’ve got some different ones mixed into Lansdowne and Westboro as well. It really reflects the city’s transformation from a telecom city to a more diverse startup ecosystem.”
For Stephens at seoplus+, Kanata North isn’t even an option, despite the fact that she herself lives in Kanata. She believes companies that don’t consider other locations in the city may be missing out on many benefits.
“For those companies that are a couple of hundred employees or less, there are certainly some pretty appealing options here,” she said. “To eat lunch and look out at the Glebe or the football field or the canal is a pretty cool thing you can’t get in too many other places.” 
