Inqli and Rainforest Alberta collaborate to unify Alberta’s innovation community

Inqli, which bills itself as Alberta’s first knowledge-sharing platform, is partnering with Rainforest Alberta, a community hub for innovation, on a pilot program.

inqli’s mobile application connects people who want to learn about a topic with people who want to share information about that topic. Established in 2019, inqli has offices in Calgary and in Victoria.

The partnership with Rainforest Alberta is meant to help inqli achieve its goal of unifying Alberta’s innovation community through information exchange. The ultimate goal is to level the playing field for people in the province’s innovation space, says the company.

Rebecca Kirstein Resch (pictured above), founder and CEO of inqli, said the partnership provides an exciting look at the future of Alberta’s innovation space and helps it scale up the capacity and user base of the platform. “This partnership reinforces our commitment to supporting individuals who are traditionally left out of the innovation space to share their perspective and access opportunities,” she said.

“It’s increasingly important that we have a space for innovators to collaborate and share their knowledge as we grow Alberta’s tech scene. Our goal is to help individuals and companies collaborate in a way that leads to diverse connections, meaningful change, and innovation.”

Kirstein Resch described inqli as an inclusive, knowledge-sharing platform that provides equitable access to knowledge, opportunities, and connections by fostering cultures of curiosity and generosity.

“We discovered through the pandemic how many challenges our technology platform facilitated, including internal knowledge sharing inside enterprises and most recently . . . helping people navigate ecosystems of many different partners, many different service providers,” she said.

“So founders like myself, I’ve experienced this first hand; there are so many opportunities that we miss, so many of them that we can’t keep track of everything that’s available to us—funding, training, mentorship—all these great opportunities, particularly in Alberta. So we discovered that in fact our technology can solve a very meaningful problem thereby helping people navigate the ecosystem by putting the technology in their own hands to ask their own questions and match them to opportunities that are appropriate and people that can help them guide their way through the ecosystem.”

The new pilot program is led by Rainforest Alberta, which has been looking for ways to better connect people in the innovation and technology ecosystem. inqli will provide Rainforest Alberta with the full capabilities of its social app, allowing the innovation community to benefit from the variety of perspectives that are shared within the inqli platform.

“Rainforest has always promoted the importance that diversity plays in accelerating innovation in our province. inqli's software allows for these diverse perspectives to come together in a more accessible way,” said Brad Zumwalt, Rainforest Alberta co-founder.

Kirstein Resch said inqli’s innovative networking platform relies on the notion that we all have knowledge and experience that can help others get where they are going next—all you have to do is ask. Alberta’s innovation community is growing but needs a centralized platform for starting these conversations and sharing knowledge.

“Central to inqli’s cause is the removal of traditional barriers to entry that we see in the technology space,” said James Lochrie, an inqli investor, managing partner of Thin Air Labs, and co-founder of Wave Accounting. “Some of the best ideas come from the collaboration of individuals who have different experiences. inqli not only connects Alberta’s innovation community, but it opens doors to people who have great ideas, but don’t always get a seat at the table.”