Top 45 Energy Angel Investors in Canada in December 2024

Jim Treliving is the Chairman and Owner of one of Canada’s most beloved restaurant chains, Boston Pizza International (BPI)—but that’s just the tip of the iceberg of his accolades. Well-known for his role as the encouraging, savvy, entrepreneurial spirit on CBC’s Dragons' Den, Jim has a history rooted in integrity—one which has led him well inthe world of business. One of Canada’s most successful entrepreneurs, Jim has been at the helm of the Boston Pizza name for nearly 50 years which has received prestigious recognition, including Canada’s 50 Best Managed Companies Platinum Club, Canada’s 10 Most Admired Corporate Cultures, the Henry Singer Award from the Canadian Institute of Retailing and Services and, most recently, the Canadian Franchise Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

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.

Blaine LaBonte

Mohamed Hage is a young entrepreneur with a demonstrated track record of success and over 10 years of experience running software and real estate companies. He has a talent for inspiring passion in employees and an incredible knack for forging connections with experts from a diverse range of specialties. He conceived of Lufa Farms in the early2000s based on his childhood experiences with agriculture and fresh produce in a village just outside of Beirut.

Dickinson, owner and CEO of Venture Communications, a company she grew from a small, local firm to one of the largest independent agencies in Canada, is also the CEO of District Ventures and Youinc.com. Companies all aimed at helping market, fund and grow entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies. She is a two times best-selling author,accomplished speaker and is best known to Canadians as one of the venture capitalists on the award-winning CBC series’ Dragons’ Den.

Ali Rowghani is the CEO of YC Continuity. Previously, he served as the Chief Operating Officer of Twitter, Inc. from 2012 to 2014, where he was in charge of Twitter’s product, design, business development, developer platform, and media teams. He was hired as Twitter’s first Chief Financial Officer and served in that role from 2010 to 2012. Forthe 9 years prior to his time at Twitter, Ali served in several roles at Pixar Animation Studios, Inc., including as Chief Financial Officer and as Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning.Ali holds a BA and MBA, both from Stanford University. Ali is on the Board at Checkr, Lob and Restoration Hardware (NYSE: RH), and is a Board observer at LendUp.

Co-Founder of Global Advisors & CoinShares. Previously JP Morgan, Salomon Brothers & Shell International

Owen Matthews is Executive Vice President at Wesley Clover. In this role, Owen is responsible for strategy and business development activities for the Wesley Clover portfolio, both domestically and internationally. Prior to his position at Wesley Clover, Owen was the founder and CEO of Newheights Software. Newheights was a pioneer in enterpriseunified communication products.As CEO of Newheights, Owen was responsible for all aspects of the business. Achievements worth noting include OEM agreements with major enterprise communication system vendors, carrier equipment manufacturers and direct agreements with telephone companies. Newheights was acquired for $21.6 Million in 2007. Prior to Newheights, Owen co-founded TDC, a web development firm. Owen is an active member on the Board of Directors for Counterpath Corporation and Taraspan.Owen is also passionately committed to the development and growth of Canadian athletes and youth development. He was the co-chair of the Advancement Committee for Canadian Sport Centre Pacific Institute, a $28 million dollar training facility for high performance athletes. He is also active on the board of advisors for the Business school at University of Victoria and Power to Be, a charity founded to enrich the health, education and quality of life for vulnerable youth. Owen studied Computer Science and Psychology at the University of Victoria and joined Wesley Clover in August 2007, following the acquisition of Newheights.

Tim Angus is the President and CEO of BRICKEYE (formerly AOMS Technologies).

Rathmell, a trained biochemist, started working with Lufa Farms as a researcher at McGill’s MacDonald campus. She played a large role in the development of the plant science and growing science that Lufa eventually implemented, including the NFT and drip irrigation systems, the use of biological pest controls, the microclimate and crop rotationsystems, and the selection of crop varieties. Rathmell currently supervises all greenhouse operations as well as research and development

Andrew Lee is Vice President at Sequoia Capital.

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.

Andrew has held a number of director and executive positions for large multinationals and has 30 years of experience in international business. He has a strong background in growing businesses including 17 years as a CEO.From 2003 to 2011, Andrew was CEO of Fonterra Co-Operative Group, New Zealand's largest company. Prior to Fonterra,Andrew served as the President, Chief Executive Officer and director of GSW of Toronto, a manufacturer of consumer durable products and, prior to GSW, Andrew was President and CEO of Tate & Lyle North America Sugars of New York and President of Redpath Sugars in Toronto.Andrew currently runs his own investment company, Canz Capital, is Chairman of the New Zealand Government's economic development agency New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, sits on the Council of the University of Auckland and, in addition to Orion Health, sits on the boards of Bunge Ltd. in New York and Lufa Farms Inc. in Montreal, as well as other advisory and charitable boards.Andrew holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of New Brunswick and a Master of Business Administration from Concordia University.

Frank Hinek

Dylan Taylor is a global business leader, commercial astronaut, thought leader and philanthropist. Currently, Dylan serves as Chairman & CEO of Voyager Space, a multi-national space exploration firm focused on building the next generation of space infrastructure for NASA and other global space agencies.Dylan has been recognized by HarvardUniversity, SpaceNews, the BBC, the Financial Times, Pitchbook, CNBC, CNN and others as having played a seminal role in the growth of the private space industry. As an early-stage investor in more than 50 emerging space ventures, including Axiom, Kepler, York, Astrobotic, LeoLabs, Relativity, and Planet, Dylan is widely considered the most active private space investor in the world.Dylan’s technical background, global business experience and unbridled passion for space make him a unique figure within his industry. As a thought leader and futurist, he has written many popular pieces on the future of the space industry for Forbes, FastCompany, Newsweek, SpaceNews, The Space Review, and Space.com. As a speaker, Dylan has keynoted many of the major space conferences around the world and has appeared regularly on Bloomberg, Fox Business, and CNBC.Dylan has extensive global business experience as both a board director and CEO in several industries, including advanced electronics, finance and real estate. He previously served as a Director for UMB Bank, a Fortune 500 company based in Kansas City and as a mutual fund director for the Jackson Funds where he oversaw assets of $8B across 130 distinct funds. He has also served in the roles of CEO, President and Board Director for multinational companies like Prudential PLC, Honeywell, Colliers and Jones Lang LaSalle. Dylan was recognized as a Fortune 1000 CEO with P&L responsibility in excess of $3B and operations encompassing 15,000 employees in over 60 countries. In addition, Dylan has participated in 4 IPOs over the course of his career. Dylan is a leading advocate of space manufacturing and the utilization of in-space resources to further space exploration and settlement. In 2017, he became the first private citizen to manufacture an item in space when the gravity meter he co-designed and commissioned was 3D printed on the International Space Station. The historic item is now housed in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.Dylan is an explorer of note. On December 11th, 2021 Dylan became just the 606th human to go to space as part of the crew of Blue Origin’s NewShepard Mission 19. Accordingly, Dylan earned his commercial astronaut wings with the FAA and his universal astronaut wings from the Association of Space Explorers.He is also one of only a handful of humans to have descended to the deepest part of the world’s oceans, Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench as part of the Limiting Factor Expedition in July of 2022. In that mission, Dylan descended with pilot Victor Vescovo to a depth in excess of 10,800 meters (35,500 feet) into an area of the Mariana Trench that had never been visited by humans. Dylan is the youngest human to have been to the deepest part of the world’s oceans and crossed the Karman line into Space. Dylan has been a member of the Explorers Club since 2014.Dylan maintains an extensive philanthropic impact on the space industry. In 2017, Dylan founded the nonprofit and social movement, Space for Humanity, which seeks to democratize space exploration and develop solutions to global issues through the scope of human awareness to help solve the world’s most intractable problems. Space for Humanity has successfully sent two citizen astronauts to space via Blue Origin including both the first Mexican-born woman (Katya Echazareta), and first African-born woman (Sara Sabry). Building upon his passion and support for the space industry, Dylan serves as a strategic advisor for both the Archmission and the Human Spaceflight Program and is a co-founding patron of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, which promotes the growth of commercial space activity. Additionally, he is also a leading benefactor to the Brooke Owens Fellowship, Patti Grace Smith Fellowship and Mission: Astro Access.Dylan is the founder and Chairman of Multiverse Media, an integrated global media company focused on science and technology, with an emphasis on space. Multiverse is the parent company of the popular space philosophy website 2211.world as well as the Ad Astra Dinners, a Jeffersonian-style dinner series featuring some of the world’s leading influencers discussing the future of humanity in space. Another subsidiary of Multiverse Media, Multiverse Publishing, publishes books by leading authors including Frank White, Isaac Asimov and Gerard K. O’Neill. Multiverse is also the executive producer of the documentary film, The High Frontier and the forthcoming film, Fortitude. For his influence as a global leader and his commitment to creating a positive impact on the world, Dylan has been honored with numerous personal and professional accolades in recent years. The World Economic Forum recognized Dylan as a Young Global Leader in 2011 and a full member of the World Economic Forum in 2014. That same year he was named a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute. In 2020, Dylan was recognized by the Commercial Spaceflight Federation with their top honor for business and finance, following in the footsteps of 2019’s inaugural winner, the late Paul Allen and subsequent winners Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.Dylan Taylor earned an MBA in Finance and Strategy from the Booth School of Business at University of Chicago and holds a BS in Engineering from the honors college at the University of Arizona, where he graduated Tau Beta Pi and in 2018 was named Alumnus of the year. He is also a graduate of the Global Leadership and Public Policy for the 21st Century program at Harvard University.Dylan and his family reside in Denver, Colorado where he is active locally with Colorado Concern and the Colorado Spaceport. In his spare time, Dylan enjoys hiking, competing in triathlons and spending time outdoors. As a weekend warrior athlete, Dylan has more than 25 top ten finishes and 25 age group wins to his credit, and he regularly interviews world class athletes whom have shown extraordinary resilience as the host of the Legendary Podcast. He is married to legal expert, consultant and author Gabrielle V. Taylor with whom he has two teenage daughters.

Chris Adams - Founder & Managing Director @ Adams Hamilton

Lisa Shields is FI.SPAN’s founder and CEO. FI.SPAN is Lisa’s second financial technology startup - she also founded and led Hyperwallet Systems Inc for 15 years; today it is recognized as a leading global payments processor for business to consumer mass payouts. She is a member of the Canadian FinPay Committee, was named the EY RegionalEntrepreneur Of The Year in 2015 and received a Women in Payments Innovation Award in 2016.A firm believer in inclusive commerce, Lisa is always looking for new ways to unite ecosystem participants for the benefit of end users. She also has a personal interest in the underbanked and speaks frequently and passionately on the importance of low-cost, compliant payments.

Michael Kordyback

Elizabeth Iorns is the Co-Founder, President, and CEO of Science Exchange. She previously worked at Y Combinator as a Part-time partner. Elizabeth Iorns attended the University of Auckland.

Alex Blikstad

Bobby is founder of Form Capital. He completed his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science in the year of 2008 from Duke University.

Mr. LeGresley is a corporate director. He was an executive of National Bank Financial and spent 12 years with that company, most recently serving as Vice Chairman (2006 to 2008). Mr. LeGresley has extensive experience in the financial services industry, including positions at Salomon Brothers Canada (1990 to 1996) and CIBC Wood Gundy (1986 to1990). He also serves as a director of one TSX-listed company and one private company.He received a Bachelor of Applied Science Degree in Engineering from the University of Toronto in 1981 and a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School in 1986.Mr. LeGresley is a graduate of the Institute of Corporate Directors – Rotman Directors Education Program and a member of the Institute of Corporate Directors.

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.

Kevin Shaw

Lane is a passionate advocate of the convergence of creativity and technology, which has fueled his life long journey of entrepreneurship. Regarded as a pioneer of virtual worlds for children as co-founder of Club Penguin and former executive vice president at the Walt Disney Company, he was inspired to shift his focus to the challenges of today’seducation system and co-founded FreshGrade, a learning collaboration tool focused on the challenges facing teachers, parents, and students in the 21st century classroom.The recipient of several leadership awards, Lane continues to give back to the community through his many philanthropic endeavors, mentoring and investing in early stage technology companies, and volunteering on several boards including his recent appointment to the Premiers Technology Council.

Private Accredited Group

Richard Titus currently works as an Advisor to global founders and firms for Andronik Ltd. He previously worked at AIKON as a Chairman of the Board of Directors. Richard Titus attended UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Oscar Plag

Vipul Goyal

Ross Finlay, a Co-founder and Director of the First Angel Network Association has been an angel investor since 2000. He has assisted many companies in raising private equity. Mr. Finlay is a recognized facilitator, senior business consulting professional and strategic change consultant who has an extensive background in public, private andnot-for-profit sectors. He has implemented major business changes in a number of organizations and has experience in conducting organizational reviews in the public/private and the not-for-profit sectors. He has extensive business networks throughout Atlantic Canada. He has been Executive Director of a provincial professional association and President of a national consulting company working with scientific, engineering and technical areas. Since his move home to Nova Scotia, Ross has managed his own successful consulting practice. He returned to the corporate world for a time with PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and SolutionInc Ltd. – a Halifax based software development company. In 2002 Ross was a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Medal for outstanding community service through his efforts in numerous charities.

Michael Deeg

Farzad (Zod) Nazem has been a prolific angel investor and advisor to tech startup companies since his retirement from Yahoo! in 2007. He has invested in more than 60 early stage companies, and sits on the boards of Hand Foundation, and The Nueva School. His area of investment is about two thirds Big Data and Cloud platforms, and one third Healthand Medical. He was the Executive Vice President of Engineering and Chief Technology Officer of Yahoo from 1996 to mid 2007. He helped acquire and integrate over 50 companies and managed over six thousand engineers representing half of the company's employees. Between 1985 and 1996, Mr. Nazem held various software development and management positions at Oracle Corporation culminating in his role as Vice President of Media and Web Server Division. His tenure at Oracle also included membership in the company's Product Division Management Committee, which set overall strategy for Oracle products. Previously, Mr. Nazem was recruited from California Polytechnic State University by Rolm Corporation to be a software engineer in the VLCBX division. At age 19, he earned a B.S. degree in Computer Science with highest honors.

Andrew Perlman is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner at North Equity. He attended The George Washington University School of Business in 1996.

Douglas Gray is the Founder, President and CEO of Graycon Group Ltd. He is a recognized leader in the IT industry and often speaks on how to use IT to achieve business goals, protect the organization and add value to the people and the bottom line. He began Graycon in 1989, with a goal to shift IT from being technology focused to being an enablingfoundation of the business. Since Graycon’s beginnings, Douglas has led the company to support over 1,000 organizations, has gone public and then re-privatized and has built an steadfast IT firm that employs over 170 IT professionals. Graycon has grown to be the reliable and practical choice for IT Support and Solutions throughout Western Canada.While Douglas has a passionate vision around technology solutions that provide clear business value, he also holds an uncompromising commitment to both the Grayconians who have helped make his vision a reality, and to Graycon’s local communities. Graycon Karma, the belief in “do good things and good things happen”, plays a powerful, guiding role in the partnership between Graycon’s clients, staff and local charities. Graycon’s quarter century of success is based on passionate leadership, enabling management, spectacular people and a sincere belief in being part of the community and giving back.

Meltem Demirors is Chief Strategy Officer of CoinShares, an investment firm that manages $750M in assets, and is a trusted partner to investors and entrepreneurs navigating the digital asset ecosystem. Meltem oversees the firm’s managed strategies group and its New York office, and leads corporate development as a board director. Previously, shewas part of the founding team of Digital Currency Group. She teaches at MIT and Oxford, and serves on the WEF Blockchain Council. Meltem leads CoinShares' venture strategy and is an active angel investor, having invested in over 150 companies in the digital currency ecosystem since 2015.

Jean François Grenon brings more than 25 years of expertise in the telecom and wireless space. Prior to forming Vectrad Networks and then NTF-Capital in 2003, Jean-François was Chairman and CEO of Innova Corporation, a company he led folllowing its listing on the NASDAQ.Jean-François graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal andholds a Harvard Business School MBA.He sits on the board of several innovation driven corporations including Inter-Mobile S.A.S, a NexTFund portfolio company.

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.

Elected three times as an Edmonton City Councillor, the Honourable Amarjeet Sohi was elected the Member of Parliament for Edmonton Mill Woods in 2015.Dedicated to improving Edmonton’s infrastructure and livability, Minister Sohi represented the city on the Canadian Urban Transit Association, and has been a strong advocate for light rail transit.He also advocated municipal interests to other orders of government through his delegation to the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association. He has been a prominent leader on municipal and provincial issues, volunteering with Public Interest Alberta, the Centre for International Alternatives, and the Canadian Labour Congress.Minister Sohi has worked tirelessly to promote learning and cooperation among cultural communities by leading the city’s Immigration, Multiculturalism and Racism Free Edmonton initiatives. He has received the Edmonton Interfaith Advocate Award and John Humphrey Centre’s Human Rights Advocate Award for promoting welcoming and socially inclusive communities. As a former member of the Edmonton Police Commission, Minister Sohi believes in building safe and strong communities. He also took a leadership role in creating the Police Chief's Indo-Canadian Liaison Committee, the Punjabi Cultural Association, and the Punjabi Arts Association. Minister Sohi has served as a minister since 2015, and is currently the Minister of Natural Resources.

Max Schmeiser is the Head of Data Science at Twitter.

Peter Poka

34-year-old Manjit Minhas is the co-founder and co-owner of Minhas Breweries and Distillery and a Dragon on Dragon's Den. Though trained as a petroleum engineer, she has become a specialist in brand development, marketing, sales management and retail negotiations, having been recognized for several business industry awards such as PROFITmagazine's "Top Growth Entrepreneur", Top 100 Women Entrepreneurs in Canada, Calgary's Top 40 under 40, Chatelaine Magazine's "Top Entrepreneur Woman of The Year 2011" and The Sikh Centennial Foundation Award 2014.When Manjit Minhas was 19 years old, she and her brother Ravinder scraped together $10,000 to launch their first beer in Alberta. In 2006, they purchased the second oldest brewery in the United States and renamed it "Minhas Craft Brewery." At the time, this acquisition officially made the Minhas siblings the youngest brewery owners in the world.Their brewery in Monroe, Wisconsin is now the 10th largest in North America, and as a brand they produce more than 90 beers, spirits, liqueurs and wines that ship all across Canada and the U.S., as well as overseas to 15 different countries. Minhas Brewery makes all of the Kirkland brand beer for Costco worldwide, as well as all the craft beers under Trader Joes' label in the US. Today they run a group of companies that generated over $155-million in revenue last year.Manjit lives in Calgary, where she was born and raised, with her husband and two young daughters.

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.

Matjažek Horne

George Whitesides is the Co-Founder of Genzyme. He previously worked at Validere as a Member of the Scientific Advisory Board. George Whitesides attended Harvard University.

Diane Wolfenden is the general partner at Archangel Network of Funds.