Flagship Podcast

On this week’s show, we spoke with Isaac Souweine, Partner @ Pender Ventures

Isaac joined Pender Ventures in 2022 to help build the firm’s presence in Eastern Canada. Previously, he was a partner at Real Ventures, where he led a Quebec-focused, pre-seed investment strategy while also serving as General Manager of FounderFuel, the firm’s accelerator. Prior to joining Real, Isaac spent more than a decade as a product management leader in New York, Singapore and Montreal, including stints at Sonder, Frank and Oak, Yahoo and Scholastic. In addition to his work with startups, Isaac is passionate about building communities. 

He is a co-founder of Product Tank Montreal, a longstanding meetup and APM Montreal, a community-based training program. He is also a founding board member of Front Row Ventures, Canada’s only student-run venture capital firm. Isaac is also an active mentor with several accelerators and incubators. He has a BA from Columbia University and an MBA from INSEAD.

On the show, we spoke about: 

• Why Isaac joined Pender Ventures

• The history of Pender Fund

• The investment thesis and focusing on profitable growth

• What does resilience mean for a startup 

• Isaac’s thoughts on Generative AI  

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On this week’s show, we spoke with Anick Beaulieu, CEO @ C2 MTL

Anick's strength is to link great ideas to business results. Her knack for understanding the business goals of current and future partners leads her to build meaningful, long-lasting partnerships for C2. Through her deals with tech and financial institutions such as IBM, Facebook, ElementAI, RBC and more, she has set the partnership bar to a new high, and proved herself to be key to C2's broad local and international network. Always a team player, Anick brings results to the table, and successfully inspires her team to aim higher, incorporate winning strategies, and inspire new ways of thinking. To her, intrapreneurship is the name of the game. 

On the show, we spoke about: 

• Taking over the reigns of C2 MTL during a tumultuous period

• The power of creating meaningful experiences

• C2’s business model 

• Highlighting the creative talent of Montreal

• Maintaining the culture of creativity in the organization

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On this week’s show, we spoke with Joseph Khoubbieh, Head of M&A @ Valsoft.

Joe holds an undergraduate degree in Finance from HEC Montreal as well as the CFA designation. He began his career at the Bank of Montreal as a research associate in the portfolio management team. He then spent 3 years at Dundee Capital Markets in Sales and Investment Banking before joining a Montreal-Based hedge fund as a portfolio manager. He helped start and grow the wealth management division of the business before joining a single family office as the lead portfolio manager – public and private equity.

On the show, we spoke about: 

• Joseph’s background

• Investment thesis of Valsoft

• The power of vertical software companies 

• The secrets of M&A over 75 acquisitions

• Value creation strategy at Valsoft

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On this week’s show, we spoke with Jade Doucet Martineau, Co-Founder & CEO @ Puzzle Medical. 

Jade is co-founder and CEO of Puzzle Medical Devices where she developed a minimally invasive heart pump for patients with advanced heart failure.

Founded in 2018, Puzzle Medical Devices is dedicated to improving patient outcomes through the development of a percutaneous heart pump for patients with advanced heart failure. The device’s modular design allows for safe implantation to support both renal and cardiac function through 4mm-pumps anchored in parallel in the descending aorta

On the show, we spoke about: 

• Origins of Puzzle Medical and the challenge of heart failure

• How their device treats patients

• Jade’s personal motivation

• Plan for the $34M Series A they just raised 

• Personal lessons Jade learned so far

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On this week’s show, we spoke with Marie-Pier Corbeil and David Corbeil, Co-founders @ RVE.

Marie-Pier holds a Master of Arts in Educational Technologies from Concordia University, Marie-Pier Corbeil also has more than 10 years of experience in service design in the academic field and in the electrical industry.

Thanks to her great analytical and organizational skills, she has developed a proven method allowing on the one hand to facilitate the addition of charging infrastructure for electric vehicles to multi-unit residential buildings and on the other hand to ensure the smooth running of the daily operations of the company. Marie-Pier also runs the consumer information branch, murbly.com.

David holds a bachelor's degree in business administration and a strong interest in transport electrification, David has been interested in the issues facing home charging since 2011. In 2015, he co-founded RVE by putting his knowledge of electricity to good use , when he invented the very first electric vehicle charge controller.

Today, David leads a team of 30 employees with the vision of transforming home charging. He is an undeniable reference in the charging industry and strives daily to guarantee the success of the company and the well-being of its employees.

On the show, we spoke about: 

• State of EV adoption today

• The infrastructure challenge for EV

• Launching RVE and how they transforming charging at home

• Their go to market strategy 

• The global opportunity for EV home charging  

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On this week’s show, we spoke with Jeremi Lavoie, CEO @ AFX Medical

Jeremi Lavoie is Co-Founder and CEO of AFX Medical. He was General Manager, Car2go group since 2013. He was legal counsel for Enercon from May 2012 to May 2013. He worked as litigation attorney at the Attorney General of Quebec from May 2007 to August 2010. AFX Medical is an applied AI software company specializing in the detection of brain lesions in neuroimaging for oncology. Every year, thousands of brain tumors are missed on brain imaging because of the limitations of human cognition, leading to delayed cancer treatment. With automated detection, its mission is to make cancer diagnosis and treatment faster and more precise.

On the show, we spoke about: 

• State of cancer research and technological progression

• Open source vs. closed source

• How AFX Medical is spearheading brain cancer detection

• The challenge of going to market in the healthtech sector 

• How their algorithm is enhancing decision making, not replacing it

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On this week’s show, we spoke with Sophie Forest, Managing Partner @ Brightspark Ventures  and Alan MacIntosh, Founding Partner @ AgeTech Capital

We discussed giving back with TechAide

Sophie has been involved in the Canadian Venture Capital Industry more than 25 years. She worked early in her career for Caisse de Dépot et Placements for seven years, managing a large portfolio of VC investments internationally with assets of close to one billion $. Since 2003, Sophie has been a managing partner with Brightspark, an early stage venture capital firm. Sophie was involved in a number of successful VC backed companies including Touchtunes, Servicesoft, Think Dynamics, Protecode, Radian6, Jewlr and Hopper. Sophie is also a Board member of Centech in Montréal and is an independent Board member for Interac inc.

As a venture investor, Alan co-founded GSM Capital, the first global wireless venture fund, with notable investments such as Saraïde (acquired by Infospace) and Paypal. As a founding partner in Acta Wireless, he chaired OZ Communications (acquired by Nokia), co-founded Millennial Media (NYSE: MM, acquired by Verizon AOL) as well as Real Ventures, Canada's leading source of capital for game-changing entrepreneurs and a driving force behind emerging tech ecosystems. Alan contributes to his community as Chairman of the OSMO Foundation (Maison Notman House), in the formation of Startup Montreal, Cofounder/Ambassador of TechAide, Advisory Board Member of AI4GoodLab and Advisor to Kids Code Jeunesse. A native of Scotland, keen cyclist and lifelong skier, Alan holds a BSc (Hons) in Offshore Engineering from Heriot-Watt University and an MBA from INSEAD.

On the show, we spoke about: 

• State of technology in Canada today 

• The inception of TechAide

• The power of community and Centraide’s impact

• Making a difference in people’s live

• How tech companies can get involved 

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On this week’s show, we spoke with Fahd Ananta, Investor @ Roach Capital

Fahd is an investor at Roach Capital, a firm he founded. After founding and selling his own Canadian tech companies and spending years working as a product lead at major tech firms like Shopify and Snap — the company behind Snapchat — Ananta launched Roach Capital in 2019. 

Roach represents a continuation of Ananta’s angel investment efforts, which involved providing startups with early capital and helping them with product strategy. Additionally, he says the early-stage fund has an opportunity to put portfolio companies “on the radar” of some of its larger and better capitalized VC investors.

Prior to launching Roach Capital, Ananta co-founded a pair of Toronto-based startups: Chime, a notification aggregator and calendar app that was acquired by HubSpot in 2013 and Tab Payments, a restaurant curation, reservation, and payments app that was acquired by United Kingdom-based Velocity in 2015.

On the show, we spoke about: 

• His path to becoming an investor
• Why he started Roach Capital 
• Difference between good and great products
• Providing guidance to founders
• What it takes to succeed in a startup

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On this week’s show, we spoke with Mai Duong, Co-Founder @ Swab The World 

Mai Duong is a Canadian leukemia survivor of Vietnamese descent.  Mai has over 20 years of experience in communications and media strategy under her belt in top advertising agencies in Canada. She led a group of talented strategists on clients such as Red Bull, General Motors, Coke and many others.

In 2013, Mai was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia and needed a stem cell transplant but she faced the grim reality of not finding her match because of her Vietnamese background. Her friend launched the campaign Save Mai Duong with the help of colleagues in advertising to find her compatible donor.

In October 2018, she co founded Swab The World Foundation with the mission to tackle the major problem of ethnic minority under-representation in the national stem cell registries. 

On the show, we spoke about: 

• How she battled leukemia and had to find a stem cell donor
• Galvanizing the media and finding a way to save her life
• Launching a charity in order to increase the awareness of stem cell donation and diversify the donor registry 
• The strategy behind growing Swab The World 

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On this week’s show, we spoke with Philippe Beaudoin, Co-Founder & CEO @ Waverly.

Philippe is a venture scientist constantly looking for ideas that can improve society. He is the CEO and cofounder of Waverly where they’re building a discovery engine for your better self. Prior to that he co-founded Element AI and was a software engineer at Google.

On the show, we spoke about: 

• The state of natural language research and AI more generally
• Launching Waverly to tackle the issue of content recommendation
• Different business models they are exploring
• Integrating Chat-GPT in their product
• Creating a multiplayer experience in the future

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