It started with programs like My Little Pony and Sonic the Hedgehog. It now involves the Anaheim Ducks and Texas Rangers.

In the dozen years since the Calgary-headquartered company A Parent Media Co. (APMC) launched its Kidoodle.TV streaming platform, CEO Neil Gruninger has seen the business lift off in many directions.

It now includes a separate sports streaming service that is gaining big league attention on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border.

And across all of its business lines, APMC’s annual revenues have jumped about 350 per cent since 2023.

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“We’re the little engine that could,” Gruninger says. “We just kept chugging away and now all of our experiences have created this one.”

As Calgary prepares to see its population top two million residents in the upcoming years, the city’s economy is expanding, anchored by energy — but also including innovative new industries and companies, such as aviation, logistics and tech firms.

Kidoodle is a streaming platform available in more than 160 countries, with 18 million monthly active users. Started by APMC in 2014, it provides families access to popular children’s programs, such as Gabby’s Dollhouse, Sesame Street and Paw Patrol.

Gruninger and fellow Albertan Mike Lowe co-founded the company in 2012 during the middle of a booming oil sector in Calgary.

Since 2024, APMC has been rapidly evolving its sport media and technology enterprise.

With its Victory+ subsidiary, the company provides a direct-to-consumer streaming service with live regional games of the NHL’s Dallas Stars and Anaheim Ducks, baseball’s Texas Rangers, along with Western Hockey League and National Women’s Soccer League matches.

More than a decade ago, the city was not known as a hotbed for tech startups that could scale up quickly.

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Gruninger, a Lethbridge native, acknowledges it was difficult in the early days to bootstrap the business, but points out APMC was able to secure investors in the city after Kidoodle began operating.

Over time, it gained fans — it was named best streaming service at the Webby Awards last year — attracted investors, and expanded.

“Ultimately, if we didn’t live in Calgary, we probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity and the foundation of investors to align with our mission of keeping kids safe,” says Gruninger.

“That was really core to the early days of us being able to raise capital. And if it wasn’t for the oil boom, I don’t think we could have had that opportunity, quite frankly.”

Today, APMC has about 50 employees in its Calgary office, and about 215 employees across Canada and the U.S., with an office in Dallas, where the University of Lethbridge grad is now working.

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Gruninger also sees big plans ahead for the company, and the sector, as its technology expands into new areas.

“Hopefully, we can bring more jobs to Calgary, quite frankly, because there’s content creation from the creator’s side, there’s just so many things that we need to continue to expand on,” he adds.

“Calgary is just a wonderful city to work in and to be a part of.”

Calgary having a ‘Goldilocks moment’

As Calgary gallops toward a population of two million residents — possibly as early as 2030, according to one forecast — the city continues to build a broader, more diverse economy.

Energy remains a pillar, with head office jobs and massive capital investment, although growth is increasingly coming from other industries

From the development of a burgeoning aviation hub — led by companies such as WestJet and De Havilland Canada — to a spate of home-grown tech firms like Neo Financial and Benevity, to an array of transportation, logistics and clean-tech businesses, different sectors are taking root as Calgary’s population nears another landmark level.

“It’s a huge milestone,” says business leader Dan Balaban, CEO of renewable energy developer Greengate Power and chair of the Opportunity Calgary Investment Fund (OCIF), which aims to kickstart growth and create jobs within strategic sectors in the city.

“It puts us in an entirely different league of size of city, and it makes us even more significant on the global stage.”

The drive to diversify Calgary’s economy and smooth out its long-standing volatility runs deep.

But will these efforts insulate the community from the boom-and-bust cycles of past decades, when a nose-dive in global oil markets led to an economic crash?

Servus Credit Union chief economist Charles St-Arnaud points out the city’s economy didn’t see a sudden gusher of oilpatch spending in 2022 once global crude prices topped US$100 a barrel.

On the flip side, Calgary didn’t suddenly see capital budgets being shredded when oil prices stumbled below $60 last year.

“I don’t think the rest of the country . . . understand really how Calgary is diversifying and that we’re not just an oil and gas town,” St-Arnaud says.

“The volatile economy is not as volatile as it used to be.”

As the energy industry has become more efficient and focused on financial discipline, the percentage of people in the Calgary area working in the oil, gas and mining extraction sectors has declined. It decreased from 7.7 per cent in 2006, down to 4.7 per cent last year — a drop of 5,800 positions, according to Signal49 Research, previously the Conference Board of Canada.

Last year, total employment in the Calgary metropolitan area increased by about 2.5 per cent, adding more than 24,000 jobs. While positions in mining, oil and gas dipped slightly, employment in transportation and warehousing surged 16 per cent — up more than 9,000 positions — and by 25 per cent in building, business and other support services.

Looking at the city’s gross domestic product also reveals a trend.

From 2000 to 2024, GDP tied to the city’s primary and utilities sector, which includes oil and gas (along with agriculture, forestry and utilities), increased in value by 72 per cent.

However, its contribution slipped as a percentage of Calgary’s overall GDP from 21.6 per cent to 19.8 per cent during that same period, as other areas — such as health care, finance and real estate — increased at a faster pace, Signal49 data indicate.

“The economy is what I would call in a Goldilocks moment,” says St-Arnaud.

“We have that very strong baseload growth from the oil and gas sector, contributing a third of our growth in (provincial) GDP over the past six years, but without swallowing all the resources and crowding out other industries.”

However, Calgary’s GDP performance still tracks closely with oil prices, notes economist Robin Wiebe of Signal49 Research.

“When oil prices are soft, then Calgary’s GDP growth slows,” Wiebe says.

“Will (diversification) get you out of the boom-and-bust cycles? Well, maybe. But still, if one fifth of your output is coming from one sector, then you are still pretty exposed to it.”

Tech talent growth tops in North America

The city’s quest for greater economic diversity dates back decades, often gaining momentum during the toughest of times.

In the early 1980s, after oil prices tanked, former MP and business leader Art Smith and then-mayor Ralph Klein took steps to co-found the Calgary Economic Development Authority.

“Every time the oil and gas industry got sick, the economy of the city died with it,” Smith told the Herald in 1994.

“We needed a better balance for the economy, to provide a flattening out of the highs and lows.”

More than three decades later, there are signs new sectors are expanding.

Calgary led all major North American cities in its growth rate for tech talent between 2021 and 2024, increasing by 61 per cent. In total, 64,600 people were employed in the tech industry in 2024, earning an average annual wage of almost $105,000, according to a study last year by commercial real estate firm CBRE.

Significant venture capital investment has been flowing into tech firms since 2019, topping $3.2 billion, data from the Canadian Venture Capital & Private Equity Association show.

Marcos Lopez, the former chief executive of Solium Capital — established during the 1990s tech boom and sold two decades later to Morgan Stanley for $1.1 billion — believes the local tech landscape has evolved.

“It’s way easier today to bring people from Toronto to Calgary, or from Vancouver to Calgary, than it was 30 years ago,” says Lopez, who is now the CEO of local fintech firm Credit App Technologies.

“As the city grows, we have more services, more people come here, the reputation grows. I think part of that is size.”

In 2019, Solium became the city’s first billion-dollar tech “unicorn,” with a valuation topping a billion, and was later joined by companies such as Benevity and Neo Financial.

Balaban, whose family moved to Calgary from Toronto when he was nine, started his first tech company in the city, Roughneck.ca, in 1999 when he was in his mid-20s. It was a cloud-based software solution for the oil and gas industry, helping companies manage aspects of their operations, such as emissions reporting.

“There were very few technology startups in Calgary,” recalls Balaban, who later founded Greengate Power, which has developed some of the largest wind and solar projects in the country.

“I certainly felt alone in what we were trying to do. But 20, 25 years later, we have a very well-established technology sector.”

Lopez expects the industry will continue to grow by the time Calgary reaches two million residents, as will the city’s oil and gas industry.

He wants to see the momentum continue with more entrepreneurs and investors willing to take risks and scale up businesses.

“The more people that live in Calgary that are exposed to high-growth companies, the more opportunities we’ll have for more of those to be created — the same way our oil and gas sector grew up,” Lopez says.

There are signs that’s happening.

Last week’s announcement that the province is placing orders for five new waterbombers for $400 million, manufactured by De Havilland Aircraft of Canada, placed another spotlight upon the aviation sector’s growth.

The business, which relocated its head office from Toronto to Calgary four years ago, is developing a massive aviation complex east of the city, near Strathmore, where it will eventually assemble the DHC-515 waterbomber, along with other planes.

Over time, the company could have 2,000 to 3,000 people working at De Havilland Field, says Neil Sweeney, vice-president of corporate affairs for De Havilland Canada.

“For aviation in southern Alberta, literally, the sky is the limit,” Sweeney says. “The only thing that can hold us back is if we don’t have the don’t have the talent.”

Calgarian Mark Blackwell, chief operating officer at Builders VC, a San Francisco-based venture capital fund which has offices in the city, says by the time Calgary reaches two million residents, he anticipates ongoing efforts to create a foundation in other industries will pay off, such as in quantum computing, artificial intelligence and data centres.

Other sectors could also pick up steam in the coming years, including in life sciences, agrifood, or creative sectors like TV production and digital media, say experts.

“We can do more. We’re still in a nascent stage. Obviously, the last 10 years, we’ve seen that change happen,” says Brad Parry, chief executive of Calgary Economic Development.

“I think (in) transportation, logistics and advanced manufacturing, we have a huge opportunity.”

The provincial government wants to attract $100 billion of new data centre investment within five years to Alberta as hyperscalers look to invest in AI-focused facilities.

Data from the Alberta Electric System Operator show developers have applied to connect 15 proposed data centres in the Calgary area to the provincial grid, although there’s no guarantee they will all proceed.

“We have a unique competitive advantage for us to win: low-cost energy, access to water,” Blackwell points out.

“That is a real needle-moving opportunity in the next five years.”

New sectors need right skills

One key element for developing new sectors is finding staff with the right skills to build an evolving business.

Neo Financial, which joined the group of Calgary tech unicorns in 2022, was founded only seven years ago by Jeff Adamson, Andrew Chau, Chris Simair and Kris Read. Since then, the financial technology firm has raised more than $650 million in funding and has more than 600 employees.

On Tuesday, it announced United Airlines is working with the Calgary-based business to launch a co-branded credit card — the United MileagePlus Neo World Elite Mastercard — in April.

As one of the fastest-growing companies in the country — with a three-year revenue growth rate of 1,279 per cent, according to Deloitte’s annual Technology Fast 50 list in 2025 — Neo has been able to find the right talent to expand its business.

Local post-secondary institutions are training more people for jobs in the industry, and more skilled workers are moving to Calgary.

“If we treat talent as something that we build, attract and retain — not something that we just shop around for — yes, I absolutely think that we can” find the people to continue growing the business, says Adamson.

“The constraint isn’t do smart people exist. It’s more, can we move fast enough to win them?”

Yet, there needs to be a concerted effort to ensure firms can continue to scale up, and do so from the city.

“We’re in the early, early, early innings of building this ecosystem,” he adds.

Meanwhile, the city’s economy is expected to continue growing through 2030.

Signal49 Research forecasts Calgary’s economy will expand by 2.4 per cent this year — tops among major cities in Canada — and then increase by an annual rate of 2.9 per cent through the rest of the decade.

Balaban believes efforts to develop new sectors are already making a difference, but must continue.

“When the oil and gas industry catches a cold, the city doesn’t catch as significant a cold alongside it . . . but it certainly impacts us,” he says.

“That’s why ongoing economic diversification efforts are so important. But I think we absolutely have become more economically resilient than we were 20, 25 years ago.”

Chris Varcoe is a Calgary Herald columnist.

cvarcoe@postmedia.com

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