During Toronto Tech Week on May 28, the Black Entrepreneurship Alliance (BEA) is debuting Co-Founder Connect, a data-driven event paired with a new professional matching app, LiinkUP, designed to help founders find compatible partners and overcome structural barriers in startup formation.
- Co-Founder Connect uses data and pre-event matching to enhance co-founder pairing.
- LiinkUP app offers swipe-based and algorithmic matching for founders and professionals.
- BEA links event participants to mentorship and funding programs for sustained support.
What happened
On May 28, at Toronto Tech Week, the Black Entrepreneurship Alliance (BEA), in partnership with YSpace at York University, is hosting Co-Founder Connect, an event designed to help founders identify ideal co-founders using a pre-mapped and data-informed approach. Unlike typical networking mixers, this event segments attendees into tracks such as founder, operator, technical builder, or early-career professional, enabling better alignment before the event kicks off. Attendees share their goals, skills, and projects, allowing organizers to identify promising matches ahead of time.
The event features 60-second pitches, speed matching sessions, interactive areas, and a fireside chat to facilitate deeper connections. To extend networking beyond the event, BEA is promoting LiinkUP, a new matching app developed by Toronto startup Nodalli. LiinkUP leverages extensive user data to match individuals based on factors like skill compatibility, work styles, and startup goals, streamlining initial conversations and helping founders find partners who complement their abilities.
Why it matters
Founder isolation, particularly among Black and racialized entrepreneurs, remains a significant barrier to startup growth in Canada. Venture funding to Black-led startups fell to just 0.15 percent of all VC funding in 2025, even as the number of Black-led ventures increased. This disparity highlights systemic obstacles in accessing networks, co-founders, and capital, which are critical to advancing startup ideas.
By rethinking traditional networking, Co-Founder Connect and LiinkUP address these challenges with intentional, data-driven matchmaking to ensure founders find the right collaborators. This infrastructure aims to reduce early-stage risks for startups by facilitating stronger, more complementary co-founder partnerships, thereby enhancing the likelihood of long-term success and funding traction.
What to watch next
BEA plans to integrate LiinkUP into more events beyond Toronto Tech Week and scale its impact through partnerships with innovation hubs like Futurpreneur, George Brown Polytechnic, and IDEA Mississauga. These collaborations will provide founders with access to mentorship, venture support programs, and networking ecosystems critical for startup growth.
The effectiveness of Co-Founder Connect and LiinkUP as tools to close funding and network gaps for racialized founders will be important to monitor. Their success could influence how startup ecosystems approach founder matchmaking and support services in Canada, potentially serving as models for other regions facing similar structural inequities.