UBC Tech Map

About this map

Startups and spinouts, funding, campus programs, student clubs, research labs, and recurring events across the UBC ecosystem. Criteria-based inclusion, no rankings, no accounts.

It is free and public, and it exists to answer four questions on one page: who is building at UBC, who funds ventures coming out of campus, where students plug in, and which recurring events are worth showing up to.

Everything here is written from public information. The dataset lives in a database, but nothing about it is private: every entry carries the public sources that established the UBC connection, the whole thing is published as data.json on every build, and read live at api/live — no account needed for either. Field and enum definitions are published the same way, at schema.json. The source code itself is not public; the data, the schema, and the licence it is published under are, regardless.

What gets listed

Inclusion is criteria-based. There are no scores, no rankings, and no pay-to-list. A startup qualifies if it meets all of:

• It is a technology company — a product, not an agency or consultancy.
• It has a substantive UBC tie: current UBC students, alumni who founded within five years of graduating, UBC faculty or staff, or a company built on licensed UBC IP or spun out of a UBC lab.
• It is alive: the site is up and there is public evidence of activity in the last twelve months.

There is no minimum size or funding. Pre-revenue solo founders qualify. Exclusion is never a judgement about quality — anyone left off can see exactly which criterion they missed.

What each section covers

• Startups & spinouts — Companies with a substantive UBC tie: founded by students, by alumni within five years of graduating, by faculty, or built on licensed UBC research. Most established spinouts have long since moved off campus.
• Funding — Capital that is genuinely reachable from campus — funds with a UBC or student mandate, plus outside investors with a documented record of backing UBC ventures.
• Accelerators & campus programs — Accelerators, incubators, and course programs run by or hosted at UBC. Innovation UBC absorbed entrepreneurship@UBC and the University-Industry Liaison Office, so its programs are listed individually.
• Student clubs & orgs — Student-run organizations with public evidence of activity in the 2025-26 academic year. Engineering competition teams are out of scope; software, product, and venture clubs are in.
• Labs & research groups — Active research groups led by UBC faculty, taken wholesale from department and institute lab directories. Research areas map to the same verticals as the startup section; no rankings and no picking of famous labs.
• Recurring events — Recurring series only. One-off events are excluded because they go stale the moment they finish.

What is deliberately missing

No job listings, no ratings, no news feed, no accounts, and no companies from other campuses. Individual angel investors are not listed personally. Salary and funding-round data are excluded from this version because both go stale quickly.

Keeping it current

Submissions are read and applied by hand, in batches every few weeks. Every entry more than six months past its last check gets a sixty-second liveness review, and club and event listings get a full sweep each September because exec turnover is what quietly breaks a campus map. Removal requests are the one exception to the batch cadence: from a listed company or person they are honoured within seven days, no questions asked. Corrections beat completeness — a smaller accurate map is worth more than a bigger stale one.

All 235 entries were last verified August 4, 2026.

Get listed, or fix an entry

The submission form is the way in — a new listing, a correction, or a removal request. It asks what you are doing first and then shows only the fields for that, so fixing one wrong link never means filling in a whole entry. Give the public source for each claim. Anything submitted becomes public information the moment it is submitted.

Who maintains it

Josh Syer, a UBC student. This is a community project, not a university publication and not affiliated with or endorsed by UBC. It is not a deal-sourcing tool and it feeds no private database. The data is CC BY 4.0 and forkable today, no waiting required. The code is MIT licensed but held privately.