Toronto Tech Week more than doubled its attendance in its second year, according to the event's impact report, which counted more than 32,400 attendees across over 600 events held throughout the city from May 25 to 29.
The figures, released Wednesday, cement the weeklong gathering's place as one of North America's largest grassroots tech conferences and mark a major step up from its 2025 debut, which itself was an experiment launched after Collision Conference left Toronto.
"It surpassed all of our expectations, even for the organizing team and stakeholders," co-founder and co-director Mell Truong told BetaKit.
A decentralized format
Unlike a traditional conference centred on one venue, Toronto Tech Week lets participants create their own events, from hackathons and fireside chats to founder brunches and investor receptions. According to the impact report, most events focused on networking, with panels and workshops also popular.
Seventy-two percent of events were free to attend, and more than 90 percent were open to the public.
Among the biggest draws was Homecoming, the conference's flagship event, which featured talks from Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke and Uber president Andrew Macdonald. Other heavily attended events included BetaKit's Most Ambitious: Town Hall and the Creative Destruction Lab's annual Super Session.
An international draw
Co-director and co-founder Julia Konefal told BetaKit the second edition drew a noticeably international crowd, with attendees coming from at least 87 countries and more than 500 cities.
A big piece of it was putting Toronto and Canadian innovation on the world stage,
Konefal said the event drew nearly 800 investors and more than 4,300 founders, but stressed that it is aimed at the full range of people working in the sector, not just startup leaders and venture capitalists.
Growing student engagement
Truong highlighted the event's Student Ambassador program, which partnered with major universities to bring students to Tech Week events and introduce them to opportunities in Canada's tech sector. The impact report found student engagement was nine times higher this year than in 2025.
A big reason why Toronto Tech Week started was to address the brain drain that happened so often to our neighbours to the south,
One student, Aaron Sulbaran, flew in from Austin, Texas, at the last minute and wrote on LinkedIn that he went from "knowing nobody in the country to getting invited into people's homes."
What's next
Organizers have shared few details about next year's edition, but with the event now operating at scale, Truong said the focus will shift to maximizing value and making the week sustainable enough that people plan their schedules around it.
It's the chaos that drives the adrenaline.
Truong added that the density of events in a single week is part of the appeal for visitors flying in from abroad.
