Southeast Saskatchewan doesn’t have a Co.Labs like Saskatoon or a Cultivator powered by Conexus like Regina.
What it does have is Estevan, a city of about 11,000 anchored in energy and mining, and a four-year-old hub that’s been building a startup ecosystem without the infrastructure bigger cities built first.
Innovation Saskatchewan recently announced that it’s investing $149,000 over three years in the Southeast TechHub (SETH) in Estevan, to fund RISE (Rural Innovation Startup Ecosystem), a regional incubator designed to help tech companies launch and grow in southeast Saskatchewan rather than relocate to find support.
RISE will offer mentorship, founder programming, pitch opportunities, and targeted support similar to what exists in the province’s larger cities. It will also partner with post-secondary institutions to deliver technology training for rural and Indigenous participants. The program sits alongside SETH’s existing work with Southeast College and the University of Regina on the Innovation Centre for Energy Development, which focuses on applied research in energy generation and advanced manufacturing.
For technology and operations leaders in the sectors SETH serves (eg. energy, mining, critical minerals) this is worth watching.
Rural innovation gaps affect talent pipelines, applied research capacity, and whether the regions generating resource wealth can also generate the technical workforce to support modernisation. Those are workforce and procurement questions as much as they are economic development ones.
“This investment is a signal that rural Saskatchewan belongs at the centre of the province’s innovation story — not at the edge of it,” says Gord More, Executive Director of SETH.
SETH was named Project of the Year by the Saskatchewan Economic Development Alliance in November 2025. While the RISE investment is modest, it’s the kind of infrastructure that usually needs to happen before the next big step.
Final Shots
- RISE is a first-of-its-kind regional startup incubator in southeast Saskatchewan, bringing founder support to a resource-sector community.
- The program connects to SETH’s broader post-secondary partnerships, including ICED, which focuses on applied research in energy and advanced manufacturing. These are sectors where Canadian organisations are under pressure to build local technical capacity.
- For employers in rural energy and mining, workforce development programming aimed at rural and Indigenous participants is about both talent pipeline and economic development.