Miswar Syed was looking for a university where he could earn a PhD, and launch a startup.

He moved from Saudi Arabia to attend the University of Waterloo, and his startup that clears solar panels of dust or snow with the flick of a switch — Swish Solar — is in Velocity, the school’s renowned tech incubator. Syed is raising funds and running pilots for a technology that promises to save billions of dollars a year in the global market for solar-panel maintenance.

Kwaku Twum is from Ghana and his startup, MapKot , is all about helping small farms get fair prices for crops. He, too, wanted to enrol in a PhD program and develop his startup, so he came to UW and balances his academics with work on MapKot, which is also in the Velocity program.

The two founders are part of a trend that

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