The decentralized event drew 32,400 attendees from 87 countries, nearly double last year, with Shopify's CEO and Uber's president among flagship speakers.
Toronto Tech Week's second edition more than doubled its attendance, drawing 32,400 people across 600 events from May 25 to 29, according to an impact report released Wednesday. The 2025 debut had set the stage; this year cemented the event as a fixture on the global tech calendar.
“It surpassed all of our expectations, even for the organizing team and stakeholders,” co-director and co-founder Mell Truong said in an interview.
The decentralized format let anyone create a free event – hackathons, fireside chats, founder brunches, investor cocktails – rather than funneling everything into one conference hall. Seventy-two percent of events were free, and more than 90 percent were open to the public.
Flagship events included Homecoming, where Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke and Uber president Andrew Macdonald spoke, alongside BetaKit’s Most Ambitious: Town Hall and Creative Destruction Lab’s Super Session. The lineup reflected the event’s breadth: nearly 800 investors and more than 4,300 founders attended.
Co-director Julia Konefal pointed to the international crowd as a key jump from the first year. People from at least 87 countries and more than 500 cities came to Toronto. “A big piece of it was putting Toronto and Canadian innovation on the world stage,” she said.
Truong highlighted the Student Ambassador program, which worked with major universities to bring students to events. “A big reason why Toronto Tech Week started was to address the brain drain that happened so often to our neighbours to the south,” she said. The impact report showed student engagement was nine times higher than in 2025.
One student, Aaron Sulbaran, flew in from Austin, Texas, at the last minute. He wrote on LinkedIn that he went from “knowing nobody in the country to getting invited into people’s homes.”
Organizers have not revealed next year’s plans. Truong said the goal now is sustainability – making TTW a flagship week that people plan around. “The high density works for folks who are flying in and participating,” she said. “It’s the chaos that drives the adrenaline.”
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