Sorry to break it to you, Silicon Valley, but Canadian cities have become some of North America’s fastest growing tech hubs. The transition to tech titan happened slowly, but Canada has managed to outpace America’s famous tech cities with great engineering schools and a relatively breezy immigration system (especially compared to the US immigration system).
Education forms the foundation for the quality of tech labor in Canada and several of Canada’s post-secondary schools have been rated among the world’s best universities.
The top five ranked Canadian tech talent cities are also those that produce the highest number of tech graduates. Montreal produces the highest volume of tech graduates followed by Toronto, Vancouver, the Waterloo Region, and Ottawa.
Canada has also made it simple for people already on temporary visas to become permanent residents. Canada has also eased its immigration process with the Global Talent Stream (GTS), a program designed to fast-track the entry of foreign workers with specialized skills.
All of this adds up to a highly skilled Canadian workforce that includes 900,000 tech talent workers. This easy access to foreign professionals is very tempting to tech companies hurting for new talent.
And plenty of American tech companies have caved to Canadian temptation and have moved into Canada to open up or greatly expand their tech offices. Right now, the most popular Canadian city for tech companies is Toronto.
So, which US tech companies have gone North to Toronto?
5 American tech companies opening international offices in Toronto
Tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Intel, and Uber have gone — or plan to go — north of the border. And companies like Asana, Postmates, Lyft, and Zenefits are in the midst of staffing their companies in Canada too. Is your company falling behind by not considering an expansion into Canada?
Here is a roundup of the latest swarm of global tech firms setting up shop in Toronto:
1. Wayfair
Wayfair is an American e-commerce platform that sells furniture and other home goods directly to consumers. Founded in 2002 and headquartered in Boston, Wayfair recently announced that it is opening an engineering office in Toronto and plans to hire 200 roles. These hires will include software engineers, infrastructure engineers, product managers, experience designers, analysts, and data scientists.
2. Cloudflare
Cloudflare is a San Francisco-based company that offers a variety of software products related to web infrastructure and security. Cloudflare’s Toronto office will be its 16th globally — it is no stranger to international expansion — but its first in Canada. The company’s COO claims that Toronto’s strength in artificial intelligence inspired the company’s expansion into Canada. The Toronto-based Cloudflare team will recruit local talent to support the company’s brand awareness, customer acquisition, and customer support.
3. Netflix
Netflix has spent $2 billion dollars in Canada since 2017, and the company thinks it’s time to double down on its presence in the country. They recently announced that they’ll open a new office in Canada which will be in addition to Netflix’s production hub in Toronto. The streaming giant has been slowly building its international presence with headquarters in the UK, Netherlands, India, Mexico, France, and Australia, and an Italian office opening later this year.
4. Reddit
More than 52 million daily active users log into Reddit for social news and discussion. The wildly popular website was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in San Francisco, but because Canada is home to Reddit’s third largest user base the company looked North for expansion. Reddit plans to use its Toronto team to work with Canadian brands and establish community engagement.
5. Twitter
Twitter — a micro-blogging and social media networking platform — has announced plans for its new engineering hub in Toronto. The first hires for Twitter’s new Canadian team will be engineers who will work on Twitter’s discovery and connection as well as its health and content teams. According to the company, Twitter chose to build this team in Toronto because of the city’s diversity and proximity to top tech talent from surrounding universities. Expansion into Canada is part of Twitter’s push to establish an engineering team in many of its major worldwide markets.
Many of these companies are expanding into Toronto to 1) access to some of the world’s top tech talent and 2) get close to their Canadian customer bases.
But there are plenty of other reasons for you to consider expanding into Toronto, including simply being close to the US which makes coordinating with US and Canada-based teams easy.
And although it is culturally similar to the United States, Canada is considered by many to be more accepting of immigration, for example, did you know that more than half the population of Toronto is native to another country?
Ultimately, opening an office in Canada gives you access to a talented workforce and a welcoming quality of life. Ready to expand north of the border?
Syndesus can help you with a ‘soft landing’ in Canada
Toronto, among other Canadian cities, is a booming tech hub now, so just imagine what it’ll be like in two years or five — you have no time to waste expanding into Canada!
If opening an international office seems overwhelming, don’t worry, Syndesus can help. You don’t have to open an office or incorporate in Canada to tap into Canadian talent.
Hiring workers remotely through a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) like Syndesus means that the immigration, payroll, and even finding talent and other administrative processes are taken care of for you while you focus on expanding your talented workforce and moving your company forward.
Want to hear more? Book a consultation to chat about your hiring situation. Syndesus can help you expand your team with the world’s most talented technology professionals but without the world’s most frustrating immigration system.
