quebec
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Thrace’s Next Chapter Began With a Friend
A 2025 merger brought two Quebec creative agencies under one name. For Thrace, the pitch is personal: familiar people who can take a brand from its first sketch to the website, brochure and campaign that follow.
At EEB, the Boss Goes Back to School
At Québec’s École d’Entrepreneurship de Beauce, business owners check in for lessons from people who have signed the payroll. Its wager: time away from the company can make the person running it more useful.
District 3 Takes No Equity. Bring Your Time.
At Concordia’s startup incubator, founders keep their shares and face some awkward questions. The real investment is learning what customers will actually pay for.
Laurence Gagnon Beaudoin Makes Personalization Feel Personal
From a student newsroom to Cook it’s growth years and Omy Lab’s personalized beauty platform, the Montreal marketing executive has built a career by listening closely, testing the small things and making technology feel human.
Nicolas Gaudreau Has Spent a Career Turning Digital Disruption Into a Working System
From Bell and Yellow Pages to fashion, outdoor retail and CAA-Québec, Nicolas Gaudreau’s career offers a practical lesson in transformation: make the strategy clear, build the team around it, and turn disruption into something customers can actually use.
Émilie Gagné-Prud'homme Makes the Technical Feel Human
Before she marketed membranes and insulation, Émilie Gagné-Prud'homme worked behind the scenes in theatre and photography. Her career shows how creative production, customer empathy and technical fluency can meet inside one of Canada's most material businesses.
The 107-Year-Old Tourism Bureau That Learned More Visitors Isn’t the Whole Point
Tourisme Montréal once sold motorists a road to the city. After tourism collapsed, it rebuilt the pitch around residents, winter, culture and measurable local value - a useful playbook for anyone marketing a place they do not control.
The Quebec Heater Company That Survived Two Crises - Then Built an 18-Brand HVAC Machine
Innovair Solutions grew from a backyard workshop into a 1,300-person HVAC group by making an unfashionable choice: buy specialists, keep their names, and let the plumbing behind them do the merging. A C$230 million capital package now puts that Quebec playbook under its biggest test.
CAA-Québec Turned a Tow-Truck Membership Into Quebec’s Trust Department
Nearly 1.4 million members buy more than roadside rescue. They buy one familiar number for the messy moments of driving, travelling, insuring a home and keeping daily life moving.
The Ski Shop That Deleted Its Own Stores and Won
In 1984 it was a rental counter on St. Denis Street. By 2016 the last store was gone and the whole company lived online. Here is how two employees bought the place and turned closing stores into the plan.
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.