Square CEO Jack Dorsey says Waterloo is “amazing”

Square co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey in the Kitchener office the company promised last year would open in 2014.

They already have a big presence in San Francisco and New York, so why did Jack Dorsey want to open a Square office in Canada’s version of Silicon Valley?

“It’s an amazing town,” says Dorsey. “The energy we saw very early on parallels a lot of what we see in Silicon Valley”

BNN reporter Kristina Partsinevelos spoke with Dorsey yesterday at the company’s new digs. The bearded, bed-headed Square co-founder says Canada’s “tech triangle” is an engineer driven place that naturally benefits from its proximity to the University of Waterloo.

Dorsey says Square has about ten people in its Canadian office right now but has room for about twenty more. He says many of the engineers there would be working on the same things as those in the company’s other offices, but told The Waterloo Record that a focus would be a new peer-to-peer money transfer product called Square Cash. Dorsey said the Canadian developers are focused on a new product called Square Cash, one use of which could be to easily split restaurant tabs amongst multiple diners.

It was nearly a year ago that Square announced it would open an office in the area. The office, unveiled this week, is actually in Kitchener, on the ninth floor of 305 King St. West.

Mobile payment and point of sale player Square was founded in 2009 by Dorsey and Jim McKelvey to capitalize on the disproportionate number of companies that were unable to accept credit cards. In 2013, the company processed more than $15 billion worth of transactions.

Update: Fortune is today reporting that Square has just raised $100-million at a valuation of nearly $6-billion.

Click here for the full interview.