quebec
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Gabriel Tremblay
Gabriel Levesque-Tremblay is the CEO and co-founder of HexemBio, a New York and Berkeley biotech building what it calls the first scalable blood stem cell rejuvenation therapy. A synthetic biologist with a PhD from UBC and a postdoc at UC Berkeley, he is a two-time founder and Y Combinator alumnus who earlier co-founded the cultivated-meat startup Orbillion Bio. At HexemBio he turns aged hematopoietic stem cells young again by passing them through a recreated embryonic 'Synthetic Yolk Sac' before returning them by IV. The company closed a $10.4M seed round led by Draper Associates in April 2026 and is targeting first-in-human trials by 2027.
Philippe Noël
Philippe Noël is the co-founder and CEO of ParadeDB, an open-source Postgres extension that brings Elasticsearch-grade full-text search and analytics directly into the database, eliminating the brittle ETL pipelines companies build to sync Postgres with a separate search engine. A Harvard computer science and economics graduate raised in rural Quebec, he previously co-founded the cloud-browser startup Whist before pivoting into ParadeDB during a contracting stint. In 2025 ParadeDB raised a $12M Series A led by Craft Ventures, with customers including Alibaba, Modern Treasury, and Bilt Rewards.