We’re a Vancouver-built CRM with a Winnipeg engineering footprint. Here’s what we showed in May.
What Manitoba Innovates Is
Manitoba Innovates launched in 2025 as a merger of the Manitoba Technology Accelerator and Tech Manitoba, backed by North Forge. Per the official launch announcement (Newswire, March 3, 2025), the new organization is designed to consolidate Manitoba’s startup support infrastructure under one roof — accelerators, mentorship, funding connections, and community.
For a province with a growing tech scene but limited national visibility, this merger matters. It gives early-stage Manitoba companies a single front door instead of a maze of overlapping programs. And it gives companies like us — built elsewhere but hiring locally — a reason to plug in.
MbTech Week and the Broader Spring Calendar
The spring tech calendar in Manitoba is anchored by a handful of events that bring the community together:
- AI Summit Winnipeg (May 19, 2026) — The province’s flagship AI event, showcasing applied AI in agriculture, logistics, and SaaS. We demoed the Avoca AI voice agent integration and Bee AI inventory features.
- Tech Thursday programming — Ongoing monthly meetups organized through Manitoba Innovates. Informal, technical, community-driven.
- Spirit of Winnipeg Awards (May 27) — Celebrating the local business community. A good reminder that the companies building software in Winnipeg are also the companies hiring in Winnipeg.
What MoveRight Demoed
At AI Summit Winnipeg and throughout the MbTech Week calendar, we showed three features:
Dynamic pricing and demand tiers. The Prophet-based forecasting model that assigns demand tiers to every calendar day per location. We walked through a live demo: enter a postal code, see the demand curve for that location, and show the tier pricing that results. Several attendees asked about the data requirements — you need 18+ months of historical jobs, and the model gets sharper with more data.
AI voice agent integration (Avoca). Live demo of an after-hours call being answered by the AI agent, capturing the lead, and flowing it into MoveRight’s CRM. The AI didn’t quote a price or promise availability — it captured, confirmed, and queued. Several attendees were surprised at how natural the call flow was.
The New Opportunity flow. Four screens, 30 seconds, from lead to booked job. We showed it with real data: a walk-in lead at the booth who submitted their info and received a quote on the spot. The crowd reaction was less about the AI and more about the speed — people expect CRM software to be slow.
What Other Manitoba Founders Are Working On
The Manitoba tech scene is small but focused. Startups in the region tend to work in agriculture tech, logistics software, and vertical SaaS — industries where domain expertise is more valuable than flash. The founders showing at AI Summit were building practical applied AI tools: crop yield predictors, fleet optimization, document processing for regulated industries.
The common thread: Manitoba founders tend to build for specific verticals rather than horizontal platforms. That’s a strength, not a weakness. Vertical SaaS companies that understand their customer’s workflow deeply compete on value, not on feature count.
Why a Moving-Software Company Shows Up at a Tech Week
We’re a B2B SaaS company. The customer might be in Tampa, but the engineers are in Winnipeg. The product decisions are made in Vancouver, but the Prophet model, the dispatch board performance optimizations, and the demand-tier system were all built by engineers who live and work in Manitoba.
Showing up at MbTech Week isn’t a branding exercise. It’s a recruiting exercise. It’s a community exercise. It’s saying: we hire here, we build here, and we want to know what other builders are working on.
What’s Next
- RampUp Weekend recap — We participated in April’s RampUp Weekend. Expect a writeup on what we learned about rapid prototyping from 48 hours of building.
- DARE Innovation Awards — We were at the February DARE Awards, connecting with founders in the digital agriculture and logistics space.
- Open invitation to Manitoba founders — If you’re building something in Manitoba and want to talk about vertical SaaS, AI applied to messy real-world data, or what it’s like to build a CRM for an industry most people don’t think about, DM Jared. We talk to founders every week.
Building something in Manitoba? DM Jared. We talk to founders every week.
References:
- Manitoba Innovates — https://manitobainnovates.ca/
- MbTech Week events — https://mbtechweek.ca/events/list/
- North Forge — https://www.northforge.ca/
- Newswire — Manitoba Innovates launch — https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/manitoba-innovates-launches-to-transform-the-startup-landscape-852706663.html
- BetaKit — Winnipeg tech hubs merge — https://betakit.com/winnipeg-tech-hubs-merge-to-revitalize-manitobas-startup-ecosystem/