The Accelerator Centre in Waterloo celebrated the success of its clients on Wednesday evening as 10 companies presented and one graduated at the annual Client Showcase.

The graduating company was Sober Steering, whose CEO Catherine Carroll poignantly thanked her dedicated staff as the company prepares to move on. Sober Steering is now testing its product, which ensures a vehicle won’t start if the driver has traces of alcohol.

“It was a great evening,” said Accelerator Centre CEO Paul Salvini following the standing-room-only event. “It just speaks to the energy and the commitment of the entire community.”

The Showcase begins a busy week in the Kitchener-Waterloo startup community. The Innovation Summit conference takes place today and tomorrow, and Communitech’s Rev accelerator will hold its demo day, dubbed Centre Stage.

Related: Waterloo AC Expands with Reactor

The companies presenting at showcase will all continue as tenants in the facility on the University of Waterloo campus, even though most are well into their growth stage. The Accelerator Centre believes in long-term mentorship and the companies tend to incubate in the facility for a number of years.

The presenting companies and their products are:

Bidvine – Bidvine is a virtual personal assistant for finding local service providers. It’s fast, free way to get competing quotes for local services from interested, available professionals. 

Ecopia -- Ecopia Tech creates intelligent systems that vastly improve the process of analyzing geospatial imagery through the employment of computer vision techniques. With large amounts of geospacial data becoming available at an increasing rate, efficient retrieval and organization of useful information from this data has become a large issue. 

Find BoB – Find BoB helps smart financial institutions protect existing assets by encouraging succession behaviour within their organizations. Its mission is to disrupt the financial services industry by providing a vastly improved way to conduct merger and acquisition activity, succession planning and talent management within financial organizations. 

FTD Highrise Inspection – FTD Highrise conducts visual inspections of mid- and high-rise buildings using a robot named SAM. Using robotics to conduct inspections allows for more detailed and comprehensive results, which allows owners, managers and residents to cost effectively maintain their properties.

In the Chat – In the Chat is a social sales and service company powered by an advanced text analytics engine that reads, categorizes and delivers social media posts to their clients for action. ITC’s Insights solution drives fast decision-making for companies in competitive industries, while their Sales and Service platform enables real-time consumer engagement via the social web.

Grip Films -- Grip Films’ goal is to share the stories of startups and local businesses in a way that captures and accurately represents their company ideals, attitude and brand identity. By using online platforms, like company websites and social media, brands can entertain and engage with their customer base through high quality videos.

SmartAd -- SmartAd is a patented smart digital advertising kiosk that offers consumer intelligence statistics and content personalization through targeting-based on age and gender recognition. It is being offered for the first time in the digital out-of-home advertising industry worldwide.

Sociavore – Sociavore (formerly MyLocal) is an integrated website and social media platform for independent restaurants.  Through its service, owners and employees can easily manage and update a restaurant website and social media using any device.

StresswelliQ – StresswelliQ has developed olutions for lifestyle-enhancing and disease-preventative medicine. Its mission is to innovate and develop novel wearable biomedical devices, biomarker measurement capabilities and psychological tools to quantify mind-body intelligence. 

Traffic Soda – TrafficSoda gives online marketers the power to drive more organic, targeted web traffic to their site. The system interacts with online audiences across thousands of channels, through value driven conversations, curiosity and comprehensive analytics.

Salvini joked afterward that next year the organizers will need a larger venue due to the full house.

“It’s nice to see there is so much interest in the community,” he said. “And it is just growing everywhere.”