In September 2022, almost 12 years since its establishment, Giatec Scientific Inc. brought on its 100th employee. To ring in the occasion, Giatec held its third annual backyard party to celebrate the growth of our team, as well as our 12th birthday. Giatec loves birthdays, so our 12th year in business was an awesome excuse to get our team together to celebrate. We had music, food trucks, swag, speeches, and lots of fun!
Bringing our team to triple digits is a huge milestone for everyone at Giatec, as everyone has aided in the company’s growth. However, it is especially notable for those who have been with Giatec since the beginning. Celebrating big milestones like this as a team allows us to reflect on how far our company has come in just over a decade.
Our co-founders, Aali R. Alizadeh and Pouria Ghods, immigrated to Canada to pursue their PhDs in Civil Engineering, believing an extensive career in academia awaited them. However, their life courses took a turn when they saw the stark differences between the advances in academic research and the reality of collapsing bridges built just a few decades ago. Pouria and Aali knew that they had to be a part of the change and solution by bridging the gaps between these two worlds. They needed to revolutionize this traditional industry and bring it to the 21st century.
The idea for Giatec began at a local Ottawa coffee shop, and soon, Giatec was officially established on September 7th, 2010. From its founding until 2015, Giatec was incubated at Invest Ottawa (at the time called OCRI), where it shipped its first product in 2012. In 2015, like a baby bird pushed from the nest, Giatec graduated from Invest Ottawa’s incubation program with 10 employees. This is when Giatec introduced the first version of our flagship product, the SmartRock® wireless concrete sensor.
Since the first SmartRock sensor was introduced, it has had two more updated versions. Giatec has been able to position SmartRock in more than 9,000 projects, onboard over 8800 users, and expand to over 85 countries throughout all 7 continents.
Now, our team is comprised of over 100 employees. They have immigrated from over 15 different countries, speak over 20 languages and over 38% of our team are women. What is more, our leadership team is made up of 50% women, and over 75% were born outside of Canada bringing various cultural and religious backgrounds.
Hiring a world-class workforce is one of Giatec’s four strategic goals. We can proudly say that, so far, that goal has been achieved.
We are so proud of the entire Giatec team for making all these achievements possible and cannot wait to see what other great moments await us in the coming years.
