Tech’s prime time is dawning In Calgary

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For more than 20 years, Jennifer Aubin has enthusiastically sang the praises of high tech’s potential from the figurative rooftops of Calgary.

There were days when her words seemed drowned out by the more traditional noise emanating from the city’s energy industry. But today her message is more important than ever — not that Aubin has been a single, lone voice in the prairie wilderness. After all, she’s worked with about 70 tech outfits during the last two decades, ever since first getting the chance to join a local startup, back in 2000.

Aubin has met and worked alongside thousands of Calgarians eager to showcase the diversity of the city’s talent pool, but things have been amplified lately.

The current COVID-19 pandemic is one of the central reasons.

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Previously, Aubin wasn’t sure there would ever be a critical mass large enough to sustain an industry in the city, as promising startups were more than likely to be lured away to places with a more established tech culture than Calgary’s.

But, with the rapid growth of remote working during the past year, some of the perceived barriers have vanished, leaving Calgary in a much better place to grow a more vibrant and larger technology sector. To Aubin, that’s a welcome change for the better.

“Before COVID, I would not have thought so, but it has forced everything to be remote and therefore there’s no longer the need to think about borders as much. Yes, I think it is more achievable now,” she says.

“There is a lot more awareness today and the group has become more sophisticated. We just need to keep working on education and awareness and to take advantage of all the diversity we have in this province.”

“And yes, there still is some work that needs to be done on highlighting and showcasing the amazing world that exists here in Alberta,” she adds.

Today, Aubin is the chief people and culture officer at one of Calgary’s most promising technology outfits — Attabotics.

She’s worked there for three years — no doubt pleasing her father, who once wondered aloud if she’d ever stay long enough at any one place so he could actually be sure whom her employer was.

But that was the very nature of the city’s initial tech scene — constant change — as companies vied for staff and sought a chance to get a precious foothold on that potentially lucrative but extremely competitive ladder.

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Though Aubin originally saw herself as a marketing person, it was her success as an up-to-the-minute, fresher version of the once solid HR head honcho that drew Attabotics to approach her.

“When we landed Nordstrom, I was sent an offer. That was exciting; usually startup companies don’t hire someone like me until they’re at least at the 40-people mark and even then they just want you to come on part time,” she said.

Her talents immediately came in handy: “In my first year I believe I hired 108 people.”

To return to Nordstrom: the US-based luxury department store chain was one of those clients that tech companies usually only dream of capturing. But Attabotics did just that — a pivotal moment in its growth and indeed the spur to hire Aubin.

Large and successful companies such as Nordstrom have a deep well to draw upon when it comes to potential suppliers. So why bother with some upstart outfit, faraway in Calgary, to construct a new warehousing facility?

Strangely, the answer has quite a lot to do with ants.

Attabotics is indeed high tech: robotics and artificial intelligence are part of its DNA. But, at operational heart, it is a logistics company. And, to go yet more Luddite, it essentially builds warehouses.

That’s where the ants march in. Because, being clever critters, they think and act vertically as well as horizontally when building their colonies. They also build and think in blocks — a trait the international container shipping industry also discovered to its profit, more than a half century ago. The founder of Attabotics became another devotee by drawing similar inspiration.

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So, get robots to stack same-sized packets to ever-heightening ceilings with the ability to retrieve them quickly and efficiently, and suddenly you arrive at not just an efficient warehouse but also one requiring a much smaller landmass on which to build.

Why does that smaller footprint matter so much nowadays? Because, for profits’ sake, you can build it much closer to the customer, as opposed to erecting some traditional large landmass, low-ceilinged warehouse way out in the boonies. That not only cuts land costs, but also reduces carbon emissions with much shorter delivery distances.

In addition, using robots to store and retrieve goods in vertically stacked shelving significantly increases efficiencies and cuts energy consumption compared to traditional warehouses.

Investors and governments have taken notice.

The federal government recently invested $34 million through Ottawa’s Strategic Innovation, which comes on top of earlier funding worth $11 million.

Attabotics, which currently employs more than 200 people in Calgary, also accepted $66 million in a recent private round of capital funding and was earlier a recipient of funding from the Opportunity Calgary Investment Fund.

“The talent responsible for building Attabotics’ system from the ground up came from Calgary, and we look forward to using these funds to further grow our business and create even more opportunities for the local economy,” said founder and CEO Scott Gravelle, following the announcement of the most recent federal funding.

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The company — which has sold its unique, high tech warehousing operation to a half dozen retailers — says it plans to use these new funds to accelerate commercial growth, scale up operations and continue investing in new technologies.

Meanwhile for Aubin, who left small-town Alberta life and arrived in Calgary back in 1991, there’s a certain satisfaction in watching her city catch up with what she’s been preaching for so long.

“Marketing was where I wanted to be, but I got a call in 2000 from this new tech company and was told, ‘You have the right personality for a startup.’”

“I didn’t even know what that was back then, but I got my first introduction that summer and, for 20 years since, that’s what I’ve been doing,” she says.

“I feel I’ve been shouting about tech in Calgary and Alberta all that time, which has been interesting in an oil economy.

“Yes, there were opportunities for me in oil and gas in those early days, but I always felt there was something more,” she says. “There’s been this tech underground and now it is coming to the forefront.”