Welcome Sharyat Bhanwala - Edmonton’s New Community Manager
We are so excited to announce our newest team member for Startup TNT Edmonton! The city’s investor community, its founders, and the relationships built around our summits are the reason the work matters. We have been heads-down building the infrastructure to support that community better, and today we are excited to share what that looks like in practice.
Sharyat (Shar) Bhanwala has officially landed at Startup TNT as our Edmonton Community Manager. His role is straightforward: be the person in the room bringing community together, build the relationships, and make sure founders and investors in Edmonton have someone to call. If you have been wondering what is next for TNT in Edmonton, Shar is a big part of the answer!
So, who is Shar?
He comes to this role from inside the ecosystem. Before joining TNT, Shar was completing his Master’s in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alberta while working at the Engineering Incubator, supporting early-stage founders and connecting them with successful local founders as mentors. He also knows the founder’s seat firsthand as he started a company as a student, and it was Edmonton’s startup community that helped him navigate it.
Ask him what connects it all — the degree, the incubator, the company — and the answer is community. It has been his foundation throughout his life, and it reinforced a belief he brings to this role: people genuinely want to help one another. He has always tried to do his part individually, but he has found it far more impactful to build spaces where people can come together and uplift each other.
Shar in his natural habitat — out in the community, flyer in hand.
Why Startup TNT? Why now?
For Shar, this is personal. The Edmonton community is what helped him navigate the challenges of starting a company as a student, and supporting founders at the Engineering Incubator was his way of paying that forward — leveraging the local community and creating opportunities for successful founders to mentor the next wave.
What drew him to Startup TNT is that it goes beyond traditional startup support. TNT actively builds community on both the founder and investor side, and pools the capital required to get early-stage ventures actually funded — creating meaningful opportunities for people to invest locally, and a supportive environment where new angel investors can gain hands-on experience. Joining at this pivotal moment means working alongside the TNT team and the Edmonton Champions to directly shape the future of the city’s startup community.
He is an Edmontonian by choice, having moved to the city in 2019 and built relationships across the ecosystem through the University of Alberta, the Engineering Incubator, and the 28+ startups he has supported there. He knows the community well, and the community knows him.
His conviction on startups is worth noting. Shar believes great startups start with great problems — the real test is not how well a founder pitches their solution, but how well they understand the problem they are solving and the people who experience it.
That thinking comes from experience. Working in student residences — spaces that bring together people from all over the world who have left their familiar networks behind — taught Shar that community does not happen by accident, especially for people without an existing network to lean on. It has to be built deliberately, with intention, and the strongest version is not one person holding everything together — it is a structured system that empowers everyone to step up and support one another. If that sounds a lot like what we are building at TNT, that is exactly the point.
Want to say hello?
Reach out to Sharyat directly at sharyat@startuptnt.com or connect with him on LinkedIn. He is always excited to meet new people and would love to use the time he has before the Fall summit to learn more about the Edmonton community.
