Tetsu Yamaguchi
Founder & Chief Consultant
Knowgic Technology is an advisory firm based in Waterloo, Ontario. We work the corridor between Canadian deep technology and Japanese industry — in both directions, and increasingly at the point where that work meets public policy.
We are small on purpose. The engagements we take on are the ones where the founder is in the room, because that is the only version of this work that is worth paying for.
Story
Tetsu has worked with Canadian companies since 2003 and has been based in Canada since 2010.
Before founding Knowgic, he was an Executive Vice President at Maplesoft, the Waterloo-based Canadian software company, where he grew the business substantially across Japan's universities, automotive industries, and precision machinery industries. That strategic and holistic work is the template for what Knowgic does now: take a Canadian technology into the Japanese institutional and industrial market, and stay with it long enough for it to take root.
Since then he has run the Japan-Canada bridge from the Waterloo Region — arranging the 2023 visit of Japan's Ambassador to Canada to Kitchener-Waterloo, presenting the regional ecosystem at the Consul-General's residence in Toronto, and partnering with JETRO and Invest Ottawa on trade missions in both directions.
His current work is concentrated in Physical AI and Advanced Manufacturing leveraging with Generative AI: the engineering talent pipeline, the funding programs that could build it, and the companies on both sides of the Pacific with something to contribute to it.
He works in Japanese and English, and the point of that is not translation. It is being able to tell a Canadian executive what a Japanese counterpart actually meant, and to tell a Japanese executive why a Canadian proposal is structured the way it is. Most cross-border failures happen in that gap.
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Most engagements start with a short call. Tell us roughly what you are working on and we will tell you whether we can help.