Mike Kirkup is moving on.

The director of Velocity, the University of Waterloo’s technology incubator, said in an open letter on Tuesday that he is leaving to become the CTO at Kitchener-based Encircle.

“After four years of working to make it the best place in the world to build a startup, the time has come for me to go help a startup become the best in the world,” said Kirkup in the letter. "I truly love the team we have built at Velocity and will miss working with them every day."

Kirkup will head the technology team of Encircle, which will soon move out of the Velocity facility but remain in the Communitech Hub. Encircle provides real-time documentation and collaboration software for the Property/Casualty insurance industry.

Under Kirkup’s leadership, Velocity has grown into the largest free accelerator/incubator in North America.

Velocity is based in the Communitech hub, where it has recently expanded to encompass a total work space of 36,711 square feet. At the end of 2015, the incubator had the capacity for about 74 to 76 companies at any one time. With the recent expansion, the capacity has risen to 120 companies.

Velocity: A Unique University Facility

An alumnus of the University of Waterloo and the region’s most successful startup, Research in Motion (now BlackBerry), Kirkup has been the director of Velocity since 2011. As of late 2015, a total of 163 companies entered Velocity during Kirkup’s tenure, and more than 40 have graduated from the program.

Graduates include such companies as the chat service Kik, Thalmic Labs, whose Myo armband lets users wirelessly control technology through gestures and motion, and Vidyard, whose platform helps marketers use video to reach their audience. As well as finding clients, the companies have been darlings of venture capital investors. Kik has raised a total of US$120.5 million, Vidyard US$60.7 million and Thalmic Labs US$14.5 million.

Velocity said last year that its graduates had raised a total of $250 million (valued with the Canadian dollar at par to the US dollar). Velocity also helps to fund early stage companies by contributing seed capital totaling $400,000 each year to the best prospects.