Top 25 Medical Device Angel Investors in Canada

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.

James Lochrie is an entrepreneur, angel investor, venture capitalist and volunteer. He is the Co-founder of the global fintech company Wave. He is a Partner at Thin Air Labs, overseeing Thin Air Fund 1 and the Capital team. He has worked with thousands of entrepreneurs to help them scale their companies and #BuildWhatsNext.

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.

Paul Geyer, a successful Medtech Entrepreneur and experienced Board member. Over the past 20 years Paul founded and led two companies through their growth phase, in one case to a successful private exit and in the other case through growth as a public company with numerous acquisitions. Both companies have grown to be anchor medical devicecompanies in the Vancouver area, employing more than 350 people.In 1991 he founded Mitroflow International Inc., a tissue heart valve company. Paul grew the company from 9 employees to more than 125 employees in 1999. In 1999 Paul sold Mitroflow to Sulzer Medica, for more than $50 mil. Paul's leadership resulted in Mitroflow growing to more than 200 employees, making it one of the largest medical devices companies in the Vancouver area. In 2001 Paul started Medical Ventures, a new specialty vascular device company where he is currently Chairman of the Board. From its inception to June 2008, Geyer held the position of CEO at Medical Ventures (now Neovasc) and was responsible for raising over $40 million in Equity financing and growing the company’s product portfolio through internal development and the acquisition of 3 other companies. In 2008 Paul began focusing on sharing is expertise to assist other Entrepreneurs to build successful businesses, through his involvement as a mentor or Board member. He also focused on building the local community through his involvement as a Board member of BC technology industry association, along with a number of non-profit community based organizations. Paul is actively engaged as a Philanthropist, as Chairman of the Board of Social Venture Partners Vancouver, involved with Science World, Entrepreneurship at UBC, Project Somos Children’s Village and other organizations.Paul is currently the CEO of LightIntegra Technology Inc., a spin-off from Canadian Blood Services which has developed the ThromboLux technology, used to determine platelet quality for blood transfusions.

Marc G. Bellemare is a Research Scientist at Deepmind.

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.

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.

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.

Andres Pinter is a Techstars Mentor and angel investor based in Los Angeles, CA.

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.

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.

Carlo Perez - CEO @ uknowa

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.

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.

Justin Allport

Edwin Liang - CTO @ uknowa

Sandra MacPherson

Hugo Larochelle is Research Scientist at Google and Assistant Professor at the Université de Sherbrooke (UdeS).

Dr. Gaurav Puri graduated from Himachal Dental College in 2002. Following the same career path as Dr. Dhir, they have worked together their entire careers. As the Chief Dental Officer, Dr. Puri spends the vast majority of this time working in the practices. He routinely works with associate providers to increase their skills and ability. He alsotakes on the most challenging cases.

Dr. Andrew Vellathottam is an individual investor.

Huda is the Founder and CEO of Dot Health, a real-time personal health data platform. With a background in engineering from the University of Toronto and a prolific career at some of Toronto's best known startups including Wattpad, Wave, and Wealthsimple, her latest venture is transforming the way people access and control their own healthinformation for good. Huda's work has been featured in The Globe and Mail, Metro News, CNBC, and Metro Morning. She has been recognized amongst the Top 5 CEOs in Toronto Life and as a Top 25 Women of Influence in 2017.

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.

Yoshua Bengio (PhD in CS, McGill University, 1991), post-docs at M.I.T. (Michael Jordan) and AT&T Bell Labs (Yann LeCun), CS professor at Université de Montréal, Canada Research Chair in Statistical Learning Algorithms, NSERC Chair, CIFAR Fellow, member of NIPS foundation board and former program/general chair, co-created ICLR conference,authored two books and over 300 publications, the most cited being in the areas of deep learning, recurrent networks, probabilistic learning,natural language and manifold learning. He is among the most cited Canadian computer scientists and is or has been associate editor of the top journals in machine learning and neural networks.

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.

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.