Tech firm finds home
The addition of a high-tech company at the historic Whalen Building on Thunder Bay's north side is a key step in turning the area into an information and technology cluster, the city's economic development department says.
Tornado Medical Systems CEO Stefan Larson announced Monday morning that the company will move into the 100-year-old building on Cumberland Street early next year.
Tornado will take over the sixth floor of the building, and the 7,000-square-foot space will be gutted and renovated over the next few months, Larson said.
"About a third of it is going to be workstations and collaboration areas for our software development team," he said. "The other third of the space is going to be hardware engineering labs and product development labs for the actual hardware team.
"The other third is just plain old office space that we need just to support the business."
The existing infrastructure (mechanical, electrical and data networking systems, for example) in the building will suit Tornado's needs, Larson said. Any upgrades required are minor.
Larson said Tornado looked at other spots in the city, but decided on the Whalen site after listening to the city's Community Economic Development Corporation in plans for the building itself and the area around it.
"We really need the kind of world-class facility that just looks and feels state-of-the-art, and feels like a great place to come to work," he said. "That's an incredibly important part of recruiting the kind of world-class talent that we need."
Tornado develops medical imaging technologies which are used to detect, diagnose and treat disease.
Thunder Bay Community Economic Development Commission CEO Steve Demmings said the leadup to Monday morning's announcement was a long one.
"We have been aspiring towards this day for the last 2 1/2 years," he said. "I cannot overstate the importance of having a world-class company like Tornado domiciled in this building.
"It's going to be a tremendous catalyst for leasing . . . the balance of the space."
The idea, though, is to expand the technology cluster outside of the Whalen Building's walls, said Michael Power, CEO of the Thunder Bay Regional Research Institute.
"Where is science done in communities like Toronto, or Vancouver, Montreal or San Francisco?" he said. "Scientists and PhDs and post-docs and graduate students, they work all hours of the day, all hours of the night, and certainly weekends, so access to restaurants, and access to just lifestyles and walking trails and so on was important to them."
In downtown Toronto's Richmond Street or University Avenue areas, for example, the academic hospitals, as well as startup imaging companies like Tornado, are found, he said.
"It's not just access to the MRI, it's access to all of the other lifestyle amenities that make this type of business work," Power said. "It's just the right location for Tornado."