Grassroots tech conference hosted 32,000 attendees across more than 600 events, organizers say.<\/p>\n
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If the first year of Toronto Tech Week (TTW) was about putting Toronto on the map, the second was about bringing the world to Toronto.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The weeklong event\u2019s second edition cemented its status as one of North America\u2019s largest grassroots tech gatherings<\/a>; according to an impact report<\/a> released on Wednesday, the city welcomed more than 32,400 attendees over 600 events from May 25 to 29.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the chaos that drives the adrenaline.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt surpassed all of our expectations, even for the organizing team and stakeholders,\u201d TTW co-director and co-founder Mell Truong said in an interview.\u00a0<\/p>\n Launched in the wake of Collision Conference\u2019s departure<\/a> from the city, last year\u2019s debut was an experiment that co-organizers said paid off handsomely, as it more than doubled attendance and nearly doubled individual events year over year. Highly attended events included Homecoming\u2014 the conference\u2019s flagship event that featured hot takes from Shopify CEO Tobi L\u00fctke<\/a> and Uber president Andrew Macdonald<\/a>\u2014as well as BetaKit\u2019s Most Ambitious: Town Hall<\/a> and Creative Destruction Lab\u2019s annual Super Session<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n The decentralized format of TTW allowed people to create their own niche events\u2014from hackathons and fireside chats to founder brunches and investor cocktails\u2014for free, as opposed to a traditional conference format where everything takes place in one location.\u00a0<\/p>\n The impact report said most events revolved around networking, while other popular event formats were fireside chats, panels, and workshops. Seventy-two percent of events were free, and more than 90 percent were open to the public.<\/p>\n The best of Toronto Tech Week<\/p>\n BetaKit is Toronto Tech Week\u2019s official media partner. Read all of our coverage here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Another step up from 2025, said co-director and co-founder Julia Konefal, was the international crowd: people from at least 87 countries and more than 500 cities came to Toronto. \u201cA big piece of it was putting Toronto and Canadian innovation on the world stage,\u201d Konefal said.<\/p>\n Though nearly 800 investors and more than 4,300 founders attended TTW this year, Konefal noted that the event isn\u2019t solely intended for founders and VCs, but for all the tech workers and operators that work within the ecosystem.\u00a0<\/p>\n This year, Truong said she was particularly proud of the Student Ambassador program, which worked with major universities to bring students to different Tech Week events and expose them to opportunities in Canada\u2019s tech sector. \u201cA big reason why Toronto Tech Week started was to address the brain drain that happened so often to our neighbours to the south,\u201d Truong said.\u00a0<\/p>\n RELATED: How Toronto Tech Week became Canada\u2019s largest grassroots tech event<\/a><\/p>\n