Top 45 Biotech Angel Investors in Canada in December 2024

Bootstrapped Debt Financing

Balaji S. Srinivasan is the Co-Founder and Board Member of Coin Center. He was the CTO of Coinbase and cofounder of Counsyl, Earn, Teleport, and Coin Center. He was previously CEO at Earn.com, which was recently sold to Coinbase. Prior to taking the CEO role at Earn.com, Dr. Srinivasan was a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Prior to joininga16z, he was the co-founder and CTO of Founders Fund-backed Counsyl, where he won the Wall Street Journal Innovation Award for Medicine and was named to the MIT TR35. Dr. Srinivasan holds a BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University. He also teaches the occasional class at Stanford, including an online MOOC in 2013 which reached 250,000+ students worldwide.

Tom Williams

Ajay Agrawal is the Co-Founder of Sanctuary Cognitive Systems Corporation. He previously worked at Queen's School of Business as a Assistant Professor. Ajay Agrawal attended the University of British Columbia.

Dr. Fong is a Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary. He was formerly the Head of the Department of Radiology at the University of Calgary and the Calgary Health Region. Dr. Fong is active in funding and nurturing start-up companies. Over the past two decades, he funded over 50 companies in diverse technology sectors,with an emphasis in medical devices. Dr. Fong is the co-founder and board member of Calgary Scientific Inc. and is also on the board of Clarius Mobile Health, Cohesic Inc. and Innovere Medical. In addition to seed investing, Dr. Fong is active in the Calgary community sitting on six charitable boards and foundations.In 2015, Dr. Fong joined the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) at the University of Toronto business school as a mentor. CDL helps young entrepreneurs to shape or pivot their nascent ideas. He is widely credited with launching CDL at the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary, bringing together seasoned business leaders from Alberta, Canada and the US to grow budding companies. Dr. Fong is on the Strategic Advisory Board of CDL and a Fellow of CDL in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver. In 2017, Dr. Fong was named to the Order of Canada for his contribution to medical technology innovation and philanthropy.

Noel Hall is the Director of Corporate of Wellcome Trust. He is a former Board Director, Co-founder, and President of Aspreva Pharmaceuticals Corp. He attended the University of London.

Ajay Agrawal is the Co-Founder of Sanctuary Cognitive Systems Corporation. He previously worked at Queen's School of Business as a Assistant Professor. Ajay Agrawal attended the University of British Columbia.

Originally trained as a medical doctor, Dr. Ray Muzyka cofounded BioWare, a video game development studio focusing on story and character, in the early 1990s. He practiced emergency/family medicine for two years full time, with medicine transitioning to part-time over the following decade as he focused on his role as BioWare’s CEO. BioWare wasacquired by Electronic Arts in 2007, and Dr. Muzyka took on the roles of Senior Vice President at Electronic Arts and General Manager of EA’s BioWare division, which grew over the next five years to span eight development locations worldwide with about 2000 staff (1400 full time). He retired from video games in October 2012, with his third “career chapter” at ThresholdImpact, where he focused on sustainable, profitable impact investing: mentoring and angel investing in information technology, new media, and medical innovations with social entrepreneurs. An active angel investor and entrepreneurial mentor, Dr. Muzyka is a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization, the A100, the Ashoka Support Network, and the Board of Governors of the University of Alberta (serving as Chair of the Human Resources Committee and on the Learning and Discovery Committee and as a member of the University of Alberta Advancement Council). He is Chair of the University of Alberta’s entrepreneur Venture Mentoring Service, a venture advisor at iNovia Venture Capital, and a member of the Alberta Research and Innovation Advisory Committee and the Alberta Premier’s Advisory Committee on the Economy. He also serves on a number of private company boards. He previously served on the board of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences from 2001-2008 and was on the Board of Trustees of the Stollery Children’s Health Foundation from 2012-2015. He was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame in 2011 and received the International Game Developers’ Choice Awards 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award. Dr. Muzyka received the inaugural Alumni Innovation Award in 2015 from the University of Alberta. He additionally was named as the 2017 Allard Chair in Business at the MacEwan University’s School of Business and as an Honorary Paul Harris Fellow by Rotary Club International in 2016, in recognition for his philanthropic efforts. Other awards include entry into Canada’s Top 40 under 40 and Ernst and Young’s 2001 Entrepreneur of the Year (IT, Prairies).He obtained his Bachelor of Medical Science from the University of Alberta in 1990, his Doctorate of Medicine from there in 1992, and his MBA from the University of Western Ontario (Ivey School of Business) in 2001.

Prior to Maginatics, Amarjit co-founded and helped lead three companies that built lasting technologies. He was co-founder and VP of business development and sales at SiByte (acquired by Broadcom), co-founder and EVP of business development and sales at PA Semi (acquired by Apple), and co-founder and CEO of Agnilux (acquired by Google).Earlierin his career, Amarjit was director of sales for strategic accounts in Digital Equipment Corporation’s semiconductor group. After that business unit was purchased by Intel, he served in a similar capacity for Intel. Amarjit also worked for many years at Texas Instruments in its technical sales organization.Amarjit received a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from San Jose State University.

Over the course of the last decade, first as a graduate student at Harvard University in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology with PhD advisor Professor Stuart Schreiber and then as an independent postdoctoral fellow at the Lewis-Sigler Institute at Princeton University, Dr. Ethan Perlstein developed an approach to studying old drugs anddiscovering new drugs in model organisms called evolutionary pharmacology. Ethan is an author on 19 peer-reviewed scholarly publications, including the discovery of a novel mechanism of action for the antidepressant Zoloft based on studies in yeast cells.

Jeffrey Mallett was most recently the Chairman of SNOCAP, and has a rich history and proven experience in growing technology companies. As president and chief operating officer for Yahoo Inc. from 1995-2002, Mallett helped drive extraordinary growth and success for the company while simultaneously serving as an elected member of the Board ofDirectors. Mallett joined Yahoo in 1995, when the private company consisted of 12 employees and had no revenue. He helped the company go public in 1996, and during his seven year tenure, Mallett helped build Yahoo into one of the most recognizable entertainment and media brands in the world. By 2002, Mallett managed a global workforce of 4,000 employees in 27 countries, with $1 billion in revenue, and had overseen more than 20 acquisitions for the company. Mallett is currently an owner and executive committee member of the San Francisco Giants. Prior to his tenure at Yahoo, Mallett was vice president and general manager of the consumer products division of Novell, Inc. and a member of Novell's global marketing board, where he was involved with the merger of Novell and WordPerfect Corp. in 1994. He was a founding executive team member and vice president of Reference Software, an independent worldwide leader in consumer software language services, and led the company to a successful acquisition by WordPerfect in 1992. He also served as director of the Canadian-based telecommunications company Island Pacific Telephone, where Jeff drove the start-up's growth and development until it was acquired by telecommunications giant Cable and Wireless in 1987. Mallett lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife of 19 years and their two children.

blah - teh software was teh busted and they didn't want to fix it or hire someone to fix it, odd folks, these.

Lawrence Bloch, M.D., J.D. is the former President of Infinity. He joined the company as chief financial officer and chief business officer in 2012 and has played a key role in developing and executing the company’s corporate and financial strateBeforeior to joining Infinity in 2012, Dr. Bloch served as chief executive officer of NeurAxon, Inc., acompany focused on developing next-generation pain therapeutics, from 2007 to 2011. Previously, he served as chief business officer and chief financial officer of NitroMed, Inc., raising $150 million in equity and $20 million in venture debt to support the commercial launch of BiDil®. From 1999 to 2004, he served as chief financial officer and vice president of business development of Applied Molecular Evolution, Inc., leading the company’s $101 million initial public offering and $420 million merger with Eli Lilly and Company.Dr. Bloch began his career as an emergency medicine resident physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham & Women’s Hospital. He holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.D. from Harvard Medical, School, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Lee Lau is a Partner and Co-Founder of Alignvest Management Corporation. Mr. Lau co-founded ATI Technologies in 1985 and built the company into one of the world’s largest supplier of graphic chips and add-in boards to the personal computer industry. In addition to managing the company, Mr. Lau was ATI’s largest shareholder, first employee andresponsible for innovation and development of all products. Mr. Lau helped build ATI into a TSX and NASDAQ listed global market leader, with annual sales in excess of $2.2 billion and over 3,000 employees. ATI was sold in 2006 to Advanced Micro Devices for cash and stock consideration of $5.3 billion. Since then, Mr. Lau has managed his family office investing in a variety of alternative asset products. Prior to founding ATI, Mr. Lau held various design engineering positions with Mitel, Motorola and Plessey.Mr. Lau holds a Masters in Engineering and a BASc from the University of Toronto.

Jed McCaleb is a Board Member and Advisor to the CEO. He is the founder of the Astera Institute, which is dedicated to improving the process of science. He also co-founded the Stellar Development Foundation and created eDonkey2000, one of the largest file-sharing networks in its time. His favorite organisms are the aliens among us, the octopus.

Wei Guo, the founding partner of UpHonest Capital, is an active angel investor in Silicon Valley, focusing on early-stage cross-sector investments. He founded Wei Fund in 2015 and UpHonest Capital Fund I in 2016, invested in well-known companies such as Hims&Hers(NYSE: HIMS), Vicarious Surgical(NYSE: RBOT), Knightscope (NASDAQ: KSCP), Checkr,Lime, Boom, Rescale, Dialpad and more. Since 2015, he has invested in over 400 Silicon Valley startups, over 76 companies with valuations greater than 100 million USD, and 23 portfolio companies that have successfully exited.

Nick is a co-founder and CEO at Aislelabs. Before Aislelabs, Nick co-founded Sysomos, a leading provider of social media analytics. Sysomos is used by enterprise users and digital marketers around the globe, including 70% of the Fortune 50 companies.Nick is also on the faculty at the University of Toronto's computer science department. Heholds several patents, and has published more than 100 research publications in the areas of big data analytics, information mining and searching. Nick serves on the editorial review boards of several international scientific journals in field of data management. Prior to joining the university, he was a member of AT&T's research staff.Nick is an active angel investor and mentor to several startups, including at the Creative Destruction Lab at the Rotman School of Business. Nick holds a PhD from the University of Toronto.

Fred has served as our Chief Executive Officer since April 2016. As CEO, he has led the transformation of IMV into a leading clinical-stage immune-oncology company with world-class collaborators and a strong scientific foundation. He has more than 21 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry, having served in several managementpositions encompassing business development, intellectual property, strategic planning, pre-marketing, and communication. Before joining IMV, Fred spent 14 years at Medicago serving in many roles of increasing responsibility, most recently as Vice President of Business Development and Strategic Planning. He had been an integral part of Medicago’s success, including securing more than $300M CAN in non-dilutive funding in revenues and future milestones from licensing agreements and government contracts, and the $357M CAN deal acquisition by Mitsubishi Pharma in 2013.Fred is also a Director of CQDM, a biopharmaceutical research consortium and served as second Vice-Chair of the Vaccine Industry Committee of Biotech Canada between 2012 and 2016. Prior to Medicago, Fred was Licensing Manager at the University Paris VII-Denis Diderot, one of the largest sciences and medical university in France. He owns a BSc degree in Biology and a Master’s degree in Biotechnology and Business Management from the University of Angers (France).

Paul Buchheit co-founded social network aggregator FriendFeed, along with three other former Google employees. He is also an investor in FriendFeed and participated in a $5 million Series A round in February 2008.He was the 23rd employee at Google, where he created Gmail and implemented many of its innovative features. He developed the originalprototype of Google AdSense, and was responsible for Google's famous "Don't be evil" motto in a meeting.

Lance Tracey - Founding Partner @ Full Stack

Nilesh is co-founder and CTO of Aislelabs and he leads the product development and engineering. Before Aislelabs, Nilesh co-founded Sysomos in 2007. Sysomos went on to become the most advanced social media analytics platform of its kind, serving 70% of the Fortune 50 enterprises, and was later acquired in 2010. Nilesh is also an angel investorand advisor to a number of startups and incubators including Extreme Startups, MaRS Jolt, Bionym, and Granify. Nilesh has significant experience in building robust and scalable software systems, data management platforms and big data analytics solutions. Nilesh's work has appeared in leading research forums worldwide.Nilesh holds a PhD, Computer Science from the University of Toronto, and a B.Tech. Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay.

Greg has a successful track record of bringing innovative solutions to the financial industry. In 1997 Greg co-founded 724 Solutions Inc., a wireless software infrastructure provider. He served as the company’s chief executive officer and led its IPO in 2000.In 1983 he founded Footprint Software Inc., a financial software company, which he sold toIBM in 1995. While at Footprint Software, Greg won the 1994 award for Canada’s Best Managed Private Company. In 1995 he won the award for Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 and in 2000 was named Entrepreneur of the Year.Greg holds a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science from the University of Western Ontario and a double major, Biochemistry and Life Sciences from the University of Toronto.He sits on the boards of the Ontario Cancer Biomarker Network (OCBN); NoNo Inc., a company specializing in post stroke neuroprotection; and YYZ Pharmatech, which develops tools, targets, and biomarkers for pharmaceutical companies.

Joe Betts-Lacroix is the CEO at Retro. He previously worked at OQO as a Co-Founder and CTO. Joe Betts-Lacroix attended Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Martin LeBlanc currently works as the Chief Executive Officer for CellCarta. He previously worked at Caprion Biosciences Inc. as the Co-Founder, President, and CEO.

Naval Ravikant is the CEO and a co-founder of AngelList. He previously co-founded Epinions (which went public as part of Shopping.com) and Vast.com. He is an active Angel investor, and have invested in dozens of companies, including Twitter, Uber, Yammer, Stack Overflow and Wanelo.

Sandra MacPherson

Dennis Bennie is a pioneer, entrepreneur and innovator in the Canadian technology industry. Over the past 20 years, Bennie's entrepreneurial management has powered Mission Electronics, Ingram Canada and Delrina. In 1997, he founded the XDL Venture Capital Fund, focusing on information technology opportunities. The $25 million fund hasyielded exceptional returns to date. One of its most noteworthy investments was a 1997 start-up, Delano Technology Corporation (NASD:DTEC). XDL Intervest, a $150 million fund was started in 1999 and is now fully invested. Bennie currently manages an experienced team investing in private equity opportunities as the XDL Capital Group. From 1988 to 1996, Mr. Bennie was CEO of Delrina Corporation, an independent software developer and publisher, which forged the new software categories of electronic forms and PC fax communications. Under Mr. Bennie's leadership, Delrina pioneered the development of PC fax software called WinFax and became a world leader in the communication software market with annual sales revenue exceeding $130 million. Listed on both the Toronto Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, Delrina cultivated a reputation for leadership, growth and profitability, and completed several public offerings. In November 1995, the company was successfully sold to Symantec Corporation for share consideration valued at $560 million. Mr. Bennie entered the world of technology in 1979, when he co-founded Mission Electronics. He drove the expansion of this leading British audio equipment manufacturer to become a dominant force in the high-end stereo market. In 1982 he sold his interest in Mission Electronics and founded Aviva Software, an independent, mass-market software developer. Under his direction, the company expanded its scope to include software distribution and merged with Ingram Micro Inc. in 1986 to become Canada's largest software distributor. Residing in Toronto, Canada, with his wife Laura and three daughters, Dennis is an avid golfer and runner. A member of the World President's Organization, he also regularly serves on various charitable boards including the Toronto Hospital Board.

Rami Essaid is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Finmark, a Venture Partner at IDEA Fund Partners, and an Extended Team Member of Ubiquity Ventures. He was the Co-Founder and Chairman of Distil. Rami helps enterprises embrace the cloud to improve their scalability and reliability while maintaining a high level of security.He attendedNorth Carolina State University where he majored in computer engineering.

Shaz Khan is the Chief Strategy Officer/Co-Founder at Vroozi

Jon Oringer is the founder and chairman of Shutterstock.

Ran Tuttnauer

Collin Terpstra is an allergy specialist.

Claudette is an award-winning Technology Leader with 17+ years of success leading digital transformation, optimizing infrastructure, designing new support approaches to improve service experience. She has led more than 600 IT professionals in the planning, engineering and support of workplace technologies across all BMO branches and office towers.Claudette began her IT career in healthcare at Wellesley Hospital. She later joined the Computing and Telecommunications Division at the Metropolitan Toronto Police Services. Before joining BMO, Claudette spent 4 years at Deloitte where she was a key member of the Technology Management Team.In 2008, Claudette founded Excelovate, a human services company designed to help people and enrich lives through the creation of new products and services. Her work has played a pivotal role in launching the first innovation centre in Aurora, Rap Riderz Innovation Centre.Married and a mother of two, Claudette's commitment to the community is evident in her passion for literacy and everything technological. Claudette has authored five books and in partnership with First Book Canada and other leading corporations, Claudette launched the Black Arts and Innovation Expo (BAIE) as a novel way to celebrate Black History Month. The BAIE promotes diversity and inspires excellence in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics by showcasing the outstanding achievements of current innovators in the arts, entrepreneurship and technology.Claudette is a recipient of a 2014 Green4Good Visionary award and in 2015 she was hailed as a BBPA Exchange - Woman of Honor and among the Top 100 Black Women to watch in Canada.

Lip-Bu Tan is Chairman and Founder of Walden International and has been active in the venture capital industry for the past two decades. Additionally, he introduced and pioneered the U.S. venture capital concept in Asia and contributed towards the promotion of early-stage technology investing in the Asia-Pacific region.Prior to WI, he was VicePresident at Chappell & Co. and held management positions at EDS Nuclear and ECHO Energy. Mr. Tan concurrently serves as President and Chief Executive Officer of Cadence Design Systems, Inc. and has been a member of the Cadence Board of Directors since 2004.He is also a board member of Flextronics (NASDAQ: FLEX), SINA (NASDAQ: SINA), SMIC (NYSE:SMI / HKSE:981), a member of the VC Advisory Board of Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA), serves on the College of Engineering Advisory Board at University of California Berkeley, the School of Engineering Dean's Council at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the School of Engineering Dean's Advisory Board and the Visiting Committee for the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a trustee of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and a member of the Committee of 100.He also served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of San Francisco for 9 years.He holds a B.S. in Physics from Nanyang University in Singapore, an M.S. in Nuclear Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an M.B.A. from the University of San Francisco.

Barney Pell was the co-founder, Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer of LocoMobi Inc. Barney has a long history as a leading technology innovator, product visionary, entrepreneur and angel investor based in Silicon Valley. Barney is known for being an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Mayfield, a top Venture Capital firm, which he left to becomeFounder and CEO of Powerset, which built a natural-language based search engine that read each sentence in Wikipedia and answered user queries in plain English. Microsoft acquired Powerset in 2008 to help create its new search engine, Bing. Barney then served Microsoft as Search Strategist, Evangelist, and Chief Architect for Local Search at Bing, until leaving Microsoft in September 2011 to return to the start-up world full-time.Barney also has active investor, board member, and advisory roles with multiple start-up companies and non-profits across a variety of industries. Barney is Co-Founder, Vice Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Moon Express, a private company building autonomous robotic lunar landers to enable exploration and commercial development of the solar system. This builds on his earlier career managing advanced software technologies at NASA. Highlights of innovations during Barney’s career at NASA include mission critical software to support planning and collaboration for the Mars Exploration Rovers mission; Clarissa, the first spoken dialog system in space; and the development of the Remote Agent, the first AI system to fly onboard and control a deep space probe. Remote Agent is widely considered one of the top achievements in the history of Artificial Intelligence and was awarded NASA’s "software of the year" award in 1999. Barney is also Associate Founder and Trustee of Singularity University (SU), a new university created to educate leaders for life in a future driven by accelerating technological change.Other recent active angel investments and advisory positions include: Getaround, Robotex, Halcyon Molecular, SpaceX, and CrowdFlower. Recent start-ups that have had successful exits include: Appjet (now Google), Aardvark (now Google), Hot Potato (now Facebook), Etacts (now SalesForce.com), Movity (now Trulia), and LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional social network which recently went public after acquiring its hundred-millionth member.Barney received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cambridge University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and his B.S. degree in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and was a National Merit Scholar.Barney is a frequent speaker at conferences and universities. These include keynote talks at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computational Linguistics, Search Marketing Expos, International Semantic Web Conference, World Wide Web Conference, the Informational Retrieval Conference, and panels at SXSW Interactive. Barney has also spoken at the NPA and IPI conferences and has been featured in all major Parking industry magazines.

Dan Schultz

Jacky is dedicated to angel investment and has built up a portfolio of more than thirty startup companies in Canada and the US. His target investments are the early-stage B2B companies with disruptive technologies and business potential in enterprise software, information technologies, MedTech, and Advanced Manufacturing.Jacky has acquiredconcrete business experiences as a successful founder in the startup ecosystem and an executive of Fortune 500 companies over two decades. His remarkable accomplishments range from building startups from scratch to leading a billion-dollar business with the leverage of 14,000 enterprise channel partners. The unique journey has shaped Jacky's outstanding of investing in early startups.Jacky holds the degrees of Mater's E.E. and MBA, and he graduated from CEIBS and The Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Haig Farris is one of Canada's best-known venture capitalists and experts in high-technology start-ups and turn-arounds, with a varied 30+ year history of involvement, commitment, and management. He has a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He is co-founder and former Executive Chair of the Board of Directors of D-Wave, and he isthe President of Fractal Capital, a private venture capital company financing high technology start-ups and resource service technology companies.Previously, Dr. Farris was a co-founder and partner of the Ventures West Management group of venture capital funds (1972-1990). In 2001, he received the British Columbia Technologies Industry Association's (BCTIA) Bill Thompson Award.He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from UBC in 1997 and named A Pioneer of Innovation by the Vancouver Board of Trade in 2001.

Jon Oringer is the founder and chairman of Shutterstock.

Daniel is the Vice President of Product (Demand) at Shopify. He previously worked as an SVP at Salesforce.com, where he drives marketing for Salesforce Work.com, a sales performance management solution that helps Facebook, LinkedIn, Spotify, and other innovative companies align, motivate, and drive the performance of their sales teams. Prior tojoining Salesforce, Daniel was co-founder and co-CEO of Rypple, a social performance management platform acquired by Salesforce in 2012. Prior to Rypple, Daniel was on the founding team of Workbrain, which provided workforce management solutions to Wal-Mart, Citibank, and other large enterprises. Workbrain grew to $100 million in annual revenues before being acquired by Infor in 2007.A sought after speaker on how social media is changing the workplace, Daniel is a contributor to Fortune.com and the Huffington Post. He’s been widely quoted in Wired, the Financial Times, the Economist and Bloomberg Businessweek. Daniel holds a JD/MBA from the University of Toronto and an LLM in Law, Science and Technology from Stanford University.

Ryan Pawell (Founder, Director & Chief Executive Officer) is a Y Combinator alumni, published author and subject matter expert in the areas of fluid dynamics, advanced manufacturing, and biomicrofluidics. Ryan has been invited to present his work by the Australian National Fabrication Facility, White House Cancer Moonshot Taskforce, Air Force,National Institutes of Health, and National Cancer Institute among others.

Carol Leaman is the CEO of Axonify Inc., a Waterloo-based next generation eLearning company that combines gamification with brain science to revolutionize the way companies think about and deliver training to employees.Axonify makes learning stick with personalized, bite-sized information delivered in a fun, rewarding way that drives real learningtransfer and is saving companies millions. Carol won the Fortune Brainstorm Tech Pitch Competition in July 2012 against 4 other early stage technology companies garnering Axonify worldwide recognition as an emerging leader in the eLearning space.Prior to forming Axonify, Carol was the CEO of PostRank Inc. a social media engagement platform company that she sold to Google in June 2011. Carol is a serial entrepreneur and a Chartered Accountant who has been running and advising early stage technology companies for almost 15 years.

Robert Simon is the Sr. Managing Partner, IT Venture Fund at BDC.

Paul Stamets, speaker, author, mycologist, medical researcher and entrepreneur, is considered an intellectual and industry leader in fungi: habitat, medicinal use, and production. His research is considered breakthrough by thought leaders for creating a paradigm shift for helping ecosystems worldwide. He has received numerous awards, including:Invention Ambassador (2014-2015) for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the National Mycologist Award (2014) from the North American Mycological Association (NAMA), and the Gordon & Tina Wasson Award (2015) from the Mycological Society of America (MSA). In 2020, Paul was inducted into the Explorer’s Club. He has been awarded myriad patents in the field of mycology. Paul is the founder and sole owner of Fungi Perfecti, LLC, 
the maker and marketer of the category-leading myco-supplement Host Defense line.

Dr. Milad Alucozai is an Afghan-American neuroscientist, entrepreneur, biotech executive, and global investor with nearly two decades of experience in deep tech, primarily in life sciences. He pushes the boundaries of bioengineering and computational advancements, integrating machine learning and artificial intelligence into biology and medicine.With a strong commitment to commercializing transformative technologies and fostering startup ecosystems worldwide, he is a thought leader and formal mentor for entrepreneurs through organizations like Creative Destruction Lab and the Wyss Institute at Harvard Medical School.Currently, Milad is the head of Bio and Deep Tech at BoxOne Ventures, where he spearheads the firm’s investments in early-stage companies with breakthrough scientific ideas. With nearly 80 early-stage investments, they are recognized as one of North America’s most active venture firms. He is also a Venture Partner at Entrepreneur First, a global fund that has built over 500 companies from scratch with an enterprise value of $10bn. He supports founders with strategy, scaling, business development, securing growth capital, and leadership training, often being their first investor and guiding them from startup inception to IPOs or acquisitions.He started his career in translational neuroscience and multiphysics laboratories before transitioning into founding roles at biotech startups. He is part of the founding team at Mekonos, a San Francisco-based company creating a proprietary cell-engineering platform to support the future of cell and gene therapies. He was also part of the founding team at Corstem, which specialized in machine learning and artificial intelligence software and was later acquired by Circle Cardiovascular, a platform in over 1000 hospitals and more than 40 countries. At Accenture, Milad directed teams of data scientists, designers, and engineers in developing artificial intelligence platforms for global pharmaceutical companies and hospital networks.Milad serves as a Fellow in Healthcare Engineering at the Regenstrief Center. In 2020, he served as an External Advisor to AstraZeneca. He was recognized as a National Science Foundation Scholar and Macklin Fellow at Johns Hopkins Medicine. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in Neuroscience from Purdue University’s Honors Program. As a George J. Mitchell Scholar, he completed his master’s in Immunology and earned his doctorate from the Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health.