Simantic scales from Waterloo startup to global AI hardware innovator

Share Waterloo founders are transforming how firmware is built and tested, with support from Velocity and the University of Waterloo’s entrepreneurial ecosystem As artificial intelligence (AI) learns to write code, it still struggles to test firmware without access to physical hardware. For University of Waterloo founders Seungmin Hong (BASc ’26) and Ahnaf Shahriar (BASc in progress), that challenge represented an opportunity. That insight became Simantic, a startup developing simulation technology that allows engineers and AI systems to build, test and validate firmware in virtual environment