
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.

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.

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.
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 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.