Transit is a Montreal-based mobile app that turns the chaos of public transportation into a single, legible screen. It aggregates real-time schedules, GPS vehicle locations, and crowdsourced rider data across more than 1,100 cities in dozens of countries, layering in bikeshare, carshare, ridehail, microtransit, and mobile ticketing so people can navigate a city without owning a car. Founded by Sam Vermette and Guillaume Campagna, Transit partners directly with transit agencies who endorse and increasingly sponsor the app for their riders.
Martina Tam is the CEO of Paper, the Montreal-based edtech company that runs one of North America's largest virtual tutoring services for K-12 districts. A Stanford and Wharton alum, she stepped in at the start of 2025 after operator stints at Brightwheel, MasterClass, and Eventbrite, and is now steering Paper's pivot toward its high-impact tutoring program, GROW.
Nicolas Desmarais is the chairman and co-CEO of AppDirect, the San Francisco-based B2B subscription commerce platform he co-founded with Daniel Saks in 2009 out of an apartment at age 23. AppDirect now powers digital marketplaces for thousands of providers across software, telecom, energy, hardware and AI, has raised roughly $750M, and most recently unveiled an AI-led 'everything store' for B2B procurement.
Steve Schultz is a General Partner at Diagram, a Montreal-based venture builder and fund focused on fintech, web3, and climate tech. With over two decades of experience spanning product management, startup operations, and venture investing, he has navigated every stage of the financial technology stack - from building Yahoo! Finance's product strategy to steering Check (a mobile payments startup) through a $360M acquisition by Intuit, to leading Amazon Web Services' landmark partnership with Y Combinator. Now based in Menlo Park, California, he anchors Diagram's US presence and brings a rare combination of operator instincts and investor pattern-recognition to early-stage founders.
Joe Zarrehparvar is the President and CEO of Fresche Solutions, a Montreal-based IT advisory and modernization company specializing in IBM i (AS/400) systems serving 22,000+ global clients. A 30-year technology veteran who built his career at Microsoft, Juniper Networks, and Wicresoft, Zarrehparvar took the helm at Fresche in May 2023 and has since driven a wave of AI-powered modernization tools, strategic partnerships with IBM, and a transition to subscription-based service models - all while championing a platform-neutral approach that lets clients modernize on their own terms.
Greg Isenberg is the CEO and co-founder of Late Checkout, an 8-figure bootstrapped holding company that builds community-first internet businesses. Known as 'The Community Guy' in startup circles, he has two startup exits under his belt (5by to StumbleUpon, Islands to WeWork), hosts The Startup Ideas Podcast (top 0.1% tech podcast), writes a Substack newsletter with 150K+ subscribers, and has built a 500K+ following on X by giving away startup ideas for free. His ACP Framework (Audience-Community-Product) has become a widely adopted playbook for modern founders.
Julien Smith is a Montreal-based serial entrepreneur, New York Times bestselling author, and one of the earliest Twitter users (handle @julien). He co-founded Breather, an on-demand private workspace platform that raised $122M+, and later Practice, a coaching management platform backed by a16z. His 2011 free Kindle book 'The Flinch', edited by Seth Godin, remains one of the most-read Kindle books ever, and his viral blog post 'The Complete Guide to Not Giving a Fuck' is widely credited as the inspiration for Mark Manson's multi-million-copy bestseller. Today he coaches first-time CEOs.