2026

We are pleased to announce the 7th edition of the McGill Engine's Summer Startup Internship Award Program (SSIAP) which provides McGill undergraduate students with an experiential learning opportunity within our startup ventures over the summer. They have the opportunity to collaborate with both the startup venture and a mentor at the McGill Engine Centre to ensure they have a well-rounded learning experience.

This year the SSIAP will support 9 summer startup internship awards. Two are made available through the Jim Nicell Startup Internship Award supported by endowed gifts from several members of the Faculty of Engineering Advancement Board and friends of the Faculty in honour of the past dean, Professor Jim Nicell. The remaining internship awards are funded through the support of other generous donors, namely, John D. Thompson and Stephen Hamelin.

The SSIAP stipend is valued at up to $6,750 per award.

Intern Profiles

Startup Profiles

Acuiti Health Inc

Acuiti Health Inc is developing software to provide stroke survivors unlimited access to high-quality neurorehabilitation at home, for a fraction of the cost of traditional therapy. Patients are guided through physical therapy exercises using software on their own tablet, mobile, or desktop devices. Patients’ movements are monitored through cameras, and they receive real-time feedback to help them perform exercises in a more effective way. Clinicians can create personalized exercise programs and monitor patients' progress and adherence through an online dashboard.
We are trying to solve an important gap in clinical care. Stroke survivors typically receive only a fraction of the physical therapy they need due to high cost and shortages of therapists. Home exercise programs are used to increase rehabilitation dose, but adherence is often low and patients struggle to perform exercises in an effective way without supervision.
Acuiti is an early-stage startup. We are incubated at Centech, a top technology startup incubator in Montreal. We have received financial support from the Quebec Ministry of Economy, Innovation, and Energy, as well as McGill Neurosphere and the McGill Engine Centre. The intern will join at an exciting and critical time; we plan to bring our initial product to market in Spring/Summer 2026.

Alta Construction Group

Alta Construction Group is a civil engineering startup located in Montreal. Our goal is to revolutionize the construction and development industry by leveraging automated construction technologies, sustainable materials, and digital fabrication to address Canadian housing affordability and efficiency challenges. Our approach integrates data-driven decision-making, digital project controls, and emerging construction methods to improve speed, cost transparency, and coordination across all project phases.
As a licensed general contractor, Alta is actively delivering residential and mixed-use construction projects in the Montreal area. While the company is technology-forward in its vision, it is firmly grounded in hands-on project execution, regulatory compliance, and on-site construction realities. Alta is building a strong operational foundation by coordinating a range of projects while navigating local permitting and construction standards.

Doloris

Doloris is an applied neuroscience and digital health venture transforming how chronic pain is monitored and treated. Built on a proprietary natural language processing algorithm, Pain+ operates in a web app format, decoding patient-generated pain narratives to deliver value adds for users, clinicians, insurers, and researchers. Our platform enables real-time pain phenotyping, symptom trajectory prediction, and improved clinical decision-making. Recognized through McGill’s innovation ecosystem and supported by interdisciplinary research, Pain+ brings together scientific rigor, patient-centered design, and modern engineering to close the gap between subjective pain experiences and objective, quantifiable analytics.
We are now entering a major product development phase, integrating clinical data layers, building secure and scalable backend infrastructure, and preparing for deployments in research and healthcare settings. Join us in shaping a future where pain is measurable, understandable, and treatable with precision.

goCerise

At Gocerise, we are building a price discovery application for groceries in Montreal, hoping to expand across Canada in the near future. As platforms like Uber Eats, Instacart, and other grocery delivery apps have solved the problem of “time" for those who have "money", our app aims to solve the problem of "money" for those who have "time". We aim to achieve this through price transparency for the consumers.
We are a big team of 15 people, constantly in flux, with separate marketing and software teams to consistently hit our goals and stay on track with our delivery schedules. We are always looking for enthusiastic people to join our team and help us with our goal of price transparency.

Lodavo

Lodavo is a Montreal-based fintech startup building a savings app that makes saving feel fun, rewarding, and motivating. For students especially, saving is tough when money’s tight and costs keep rising, yet so many people still spend on lotteries/gambling and other non-essentials, so we’re building a way to shift that same fun and excitement toward healthier savings habits. Users securely connect their existing bank accounts, track their progress, and earn tickets for cash prizes from $100 to $10K as they build better financial habits. We’re a small, fast-moving team of McGill and Concordia founders (software engineering + finance), and you’ll work directly with us to turn creative ideas into real growth, shaping the brand voice, content strategy, and campaigns young Canadians actually care about. We’ve already hit 1M+ total views across platforms in a few months, we want to 10x that, and you’ll be a key part of making that happen. If you want an internship at a startup where you can own projects, try fun experiments, learn a ton, and help build a product with real social impact, you’ll fit right in.

NanopHast

NanopHast is a McGill-based startup disrupting the pH sensing market by developing miniaturized, solid-state pH probes for environments where traditional glass probes fail. Our technology is clog-resistant, calibration-free, and effective in small and aggressive chemical samples, addressing long-standing challenges in hydrometallurgy and chemical processing.
We work closely with Kingston Process Metallurgy (KPM), an industry partner that validates our probes in real-world process streams where conventional sensors must be replaced every few days due to clogging. NanopHast is a focused team supported by academic advisors Prof. Bhushan Nagar (Biochemistry) and Prof. Thomas Szkopek (Electrical Engineering), and we have been supported by initiatives including Lab2Market Validate and Launch, McGill TechAccelR, and the McGill Innovation Fund.
Our mission is to replace fragile, high-maintenance pH probes with a robust, scalable alternative, enabling reliable, low-maintenance chemical monitoring that improves efficiency and sustainability across mineral extraction, battery recycling, and advanced materials processing. What matters most to me is building technology rooted in real industrial needs and delivering meaningful, real-world impact.

Phoela Health

Phoela Health Inc. is a McGill-born medtech startup developing low-cost, portable biosensing platforms for rapid detection of microbial contamination at the point of need. Our technology is built around a CMOS-based optical biosensor that enables fast, quantitative measurements outside centralized laboratories, with applications in food safety, healthcare, and environmental monitoring.
Founded by McGill engineers, Phoela is a small, highly technical team working at the intersection of hardware, embedded systems, software, and bioengineering. Our mission is to make microbial detection faster, more accessible, and more reliable by translating advanced sensing technologies into practical, field-ready tools that can be used in real-world settings.

SeeVita

SeeVita is an early-stage health-technology venture developing AI-powered, contactless vital-sign monitoring using standard RGB and infrared cameras. Our technology enables real-time estimation of physiological signals—such as heart rate and blood-pressure trends—without wearables or physical contact, making it suitable for applications in preventive healthcare, telemedicine, insurance, and safety-critical environments. Our team is a small, interdisciplinary group of engineers and researchers with backgrounds in machine learning, signal processing, and embedded systems. We value scientific rigor, ethical AI development, and real-world impact, with a mission to make continuous health monitoring more accessible, scalable, and privacy-preserving.

UQwest

Many students give up on going on exchange because finding the right courses and getting them approved is slow, confusing, and highly manual. We are Eliott and Jordan, two final-year Mechanical Engineering students at McGill, and we’ve built UQwest, a platform that tackles this problem by creating a strong and constantly evolving database of university information such as courses and syllabi. Our goal is to help any student from any university quickly find the courses they need to go on exchange wherever they want, without getting blocked by admin hurdles. We’re currently three people working on the coding side, and we’re expecting a fourth member to join soon to help with advertising and social media.