Techstars Toronto

Techstars Toronto opened in 2017 as the accelerator's first Canadian program, a joint effort with Real Ventures, and was run by Sunil Sharma, who came to it from leading the Founder Institute's Toronto chapter. By 2023 the program had marked 100 direct investments into Canadian and international companies; Balance, Cinchy, Fable, Inkblot, KitchenMate and Tread were among the startups it backed. It stopped taking applications and paused programming around 2024 following Sharma's departure. BetaKit reported on 19 January 2026 that Techstars is recruiting a new managing director and completing fund formation with the intention of restarting the Toronto accelerator, and that since 2025 Techstars invests US$220,000 per company, up from US$120,000. Sharma joined TechTO Talent in August 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, to argue that it was a great time to be a founder. He was describing two roles at once that night: he had wrapped a Founder Institute mentor review hours earlier, and told the room the program had run 16 Toronto cohorts in six years and produced roughly 250 new companies, with an average founder age of 38.