Top 15 Venture Capital Angel Investors in Canada

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.

David Tedman first honed his digital pioneering inclinations at the Vancouver Film School, earning his degree in Interactive Media in 2002. Soon after, he founded Novare Res, a multi-disciplinary design company that later merged with Invoke and laid the foundations for his serial successes in product development. Tedman's accomplishments, todate, include incubating memelabs, a leading branded contesting and social engagement platform and co-founding HootSuite, an award-winning social media dashboard, which spun off into its own company after Invoke helped build its first one million user base.Tedman happily splits his time between Vancouver and New York, is constantly thinking of new high-performing business models, and is perpetually looking forward to the next basketball game.

Dave Johnson - Director of Engineering, PhoneGap @ Adobe

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.

Doug Atkin is the Managing Partner at Communitas Capital and Co-Chairman of Z-Work Acquisition Corporation.

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Geoff Entress is a Managing Director and Co-Founder of PSL. He was formerly a venture partner with Voyager Capital and Madrona Venture Group. Prior to PSL, Geoff was the most active angel investor in the region and has invested in over 200 private Pacific Northwest companies during the last two decades.Geoff represents PSL on the Board ofDirectors for JetClosing. He is also a current investor in over eighty private companies in the region and is a board member of Hiya, Meritage Soups, Bonanza, Foodee and LiquidPlanner.Geoff is also a long-time member of the Executive and Screening committees of the Alliance of Angels, the largest angel investor organization in the Pacific Northwest, as well as serves on the advisory boards of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Washington, the Gigot Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Notre Dame and the Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.A former securities lawyer and financial analyst, he has also held positions at Perkins Coie, Jones Day, UrbanEarth.com, Salomon Brothers, The Prudential Home Mortgage Company, Mellon Bank, Priority Investment Management and Duquesne Capital Management. Geoff is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Notre Dame.

Christopher Bissonnette is the President at Pallasite Ventures. Whether it’s as a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer disease therapies, or as an executive in control of investment portfolios and commercial real estate, Christopher has taken an analytical approach throughout his career. This varied experience has given him valuable insightinto Chicago’s most desirable locations for advertisers and a deep understanding of the complex leasing and permitting restrictions involved. As co-founder and CFO of GreenSigns Chicago, Christopher helps ensure that our advertisers and landlords receive the best possible value. As an avid biker and hiker, he helps ensure a high-energy level throughout the GreenSigns’ office.

Patrick Lor is Managing Partner at Panache Ventures. He attended the University of Calgary.

Chris Neumann is the CEO and Cofounder of DataHero, the leading platform for visualizing data from online services. Chris was previously the first employee at Big Data pioneer Aster Data Systems, where he helped create Aster’s innovative Big Data platform. Chris holds an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University and a BS in Computing Sciencefrom Simon Fraser University.

Colin is Chief Operating Officer of PMC-Sierra Inc. Colin is a founder of PMC-Sierra, has served as Vice President, Chief Operating Officer since February 2007. Prior to this appointment, he served as Vice President of Worldwide Operations at PMC-Sierra from July 2004 and Vice President of IC Technology from May1997 to July 2004. Colin is anelected member of the Global Semiconductor Association Board of Directors and serves on the advisory board of the Design for E-Beam (DFEB) initiative. Colin currently also serves on the board of directors for Yaletown portfolio company Redlen Technologies

Riley Keohen

Jonathan is a successful serial entrepreneur with two exits under his belt. He is passionate about helping those who are taking the entrepreneurial path to start, build and grow companies. Prior to GrowLab, Jonathan Bixby was the CEO and a co-founder of Strangeloop Networks, creator of the first network appliance and cloud service foraccelerating dynamic web applications. Under Jonathan’s leadership, Strangeloop raised over $21M in financing, including a Series A round of $11.5 million, one of the largest rounds of private Series A financing for a technology start-up in Canadian history. Strangeloop was selected the Best Employer in British Columbia for a record five straight years (2008 to 2013). In February 2013 Strangeloop was acquired by Radware (RDWR). Read more here.Prior to forming Strangeloop, Jonathan co-founded IronPoint Technology, the largest content management company in the country. As chairman of the board, Jonathan led IronPoint from start-up to successful acquisition by The Active Network (ACTV) in 30 months. Read about it here.Jonathan also served as vice president of sales, at NTS Internet Solutions and helped that company enjoy a five-year growth rate of more than 600 percent and earn placements on the Deloitte & Touche Fast 50 and Fast 500 as well as Profit Magazine’s Profit 100 lists.Jonathan sat on the board of the Vancouver Enterprise Forum, the final jury for the New Ventures BC competition and is a Social Venture Partner (www.bcsvp.com), Jonathan sits on the board of Energy Aware. He is a Business in Vancouver Top 40 Under 40 award recipient.

Mike has a wealth of experience in building and scaling consumer technology companies in private and public markets

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