At Best Startup Canada we track over 100,000 Canadian startups and over 500,000 people who hold key positions in these companies. We use this directory of startups to highlight top employees, founders and board members we think deserve more appreciation than they are currently getting.
This list showcases the top British Columbia based CEO’ operating in the SaaS space. If you think a CEO’ is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on editor@beststartup.ca.
The individuals on this list have been included because of exceptional performance in one of the following categories:
- Innovation – Operating as a key part in an extremely innovative business or startup.
- Growth – Operating as a key figure in the growth and upscale of a market leading business or startup.
- Management – Showing exceptional management skills.
- Societal impact – Putting their business on the map for their positive societal or environmental impact.
Our Data – We source our data from OSINT (open source intelligence) and public directories such as Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
Damir Hot
CEO & Founder of Canalyst
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About Canalyst: Canalyst is the leading destination for public company data and analysis.
Rakesh Soni
Co-founder, CEO, & Board Member of LoginRadius
Rakesh is a startup enthusiast, a tech entrepreneur, and an engineer. He is currently working as the Co-founder and CEO of LoginRadius, a SaaS company securing over one billion digital identities worldwide.
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About LoginRadius: LoginRadius is a SaaS based CIAM platform offering Customer Registration Services, Profile Data Storage, SSO, and more.
Kia Rahmani
CEO & Founder of Optix
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About Optix, Share Desk: The platform for coworking spaces and flexible offices
Sean Hinton
Founder, CEO of SkyHive
As an experienced global business leader with an MBA from Queen’s University, Sean possesses substantial expertise in skills development and is considered a thought leader on the Future of Work. With the mission of combating poverty and unemployment through the use of exponential technology, Sean strives to set a positive example for other entrepreneurs that a successful business can be built in a way that truly helps people.
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About SkyHive: SkyHive is an artificial intelligence technology that drives rapid reskilling of workforces and communities across the world.
Robert Kirstiuk
Co-Founder and CEO of Freshline
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About Freshline: Freshline is an eCommerce & fulfillment SaaS software made for perishable food. We work with food suppliers and enable them to sell online.
Adarsh Pallian
CEO of Trippeo
Adarsh Pallian is COO at SoleSavy.
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About SoleSavy, Trippeo: Trippeo Technologies develops a mobile application that automates business expense management process for business travelers.
Greg Smith
Co-founder, CEO & Instructor of Thinkific
Greg is passionate about education. His past experiences as a securities lawyer and teacher fuelled his desire to use technology to improve the learning and teaching experience. Greg has taught thousands of students online and in person. His latest addictions are learning new kiteboarding tricks and playing euro boardgames.
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About Thinkific: Thinkific is a software platform that enables entrepreneurs to create, market, sell, and deliver their own online courses.
Greg Malpass
Chief Executive Officer of Traction on Demand
Greg founded Traction on Demand, a Burnaby-based cloud technology consultancy and software development firm, in 2006. His original intention was to serve a small number of clients by helping them unite their sales and marketing teams; however, Traction has since grown into a nationally-recognized brand with offices and 250+ employees across North America. It is now ranked as one of the continent’s fastest growing technology companies. Greg’s commitment to workplace culture and community has landed Traction on Demand on Canada’s Top 10 Best Places to Work list for the past three years. Additionally, Traction is a current finalist for Deloitte’s Best Managed Companies in Canada. Individually, Greg has been recognized for both his unconventional leadership style and expertise in cloud computing and data. In 2013, Business in Vancouver named him one of the Top Forty Under 40, awarding him once again with CEO of the Year in 2016.
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About Traction on Demand: Traction on Demand is North America’s largest dedicated Salesforce consulting firm delivering cross-platform solutions and SaaS products.
Laurie Schultz
Founder, President & Chief Executive Officer of ACL Services
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About ACL Services, Allocadia, Boast.AI, The Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, UserZoom: ACL Services is an enterprise governance software powered by data automation for audit, compliance, and risk management.
Ivan Levchenko
CEO of iGMS
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About iGMS: iGMS is an all-in-one vacation rental management software for Airbnb/Booking.com/VRBO/HA management companies and property managers
James Riley
CEO of Lightspark
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About Lightspark: Lightspark is software company that provides SaaS based engagement, e-commerce and rebate management tools to make energy efficiency easier.
Kristine Steuart
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Allocadia
As CEO and Co-Founder, Kristine Steuart leads the Allocadia team in realizing their vision of a world where marketers make every dollar count. To rally behind their mission, Kristine is focused on building a world-class team and a culture of radical transformation + we’re in it together. Kristine Steuart and her twin sister Katherine Berry co-founded Allocadia in 2010 after experiencing first-hand the difficulty in gaining insights into marketing investments and measuring marketing performance. Kristine has led Allocadia from a bootstrapped start up with a handful of customers to a global organization with hundreds of enterprise customers worldwide who manage billions of dollars in marketing spend in Allocadia, $30m in venture funding, and partnerships with marketing cloud leaders like Oracle, IBM and Marketo. With a radically better way to plan, budget and optimize their marketing investments, Allocadia’s enterprise software is helping propel marketers on a journey they have embarked upon: leading in their companies by driving real business impact. Kristine is a speaker at local and global events, and writes a CMO Leading in Change blog series. Kristine was named among the Top Forty Under 40 by Business in Vancouver, the Top 10 Women in Tech to Watch in 2015 by inc. magazine, and one of BC’s top 35 most influential women in business. Allocadia has also received recognition as one of the Top 100 Tech Companies in BC and was awarded the 2015 Gartner Cool Vendor for CRM Marketing Applications.
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About Allocadia, BC Tech Association: Allocadia empowers marketers to run marketing more effectively by providing them with greater control over their marketing investments.
Dan Zitting
Managing Director & CEO of Diligent
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About Diligent: Diligent is the largest GRC SaaS provider, with 1M users, across 23,000 organizations, valued at $7B+ and $500 million+ in revenue.
Jesse Chen
CEO CoPilot AI
Jesse is an ex-EA entrepreneur and the co-founder, CEO of CoPIlot AI. Jesse was involved in shipping 12 titles during his time at EA on the core FIFA team. Jesse has over 20 years of experience in the software industry and led the development and growth of CoPilot’s AI.
CoPilot AI is a SaaS company based in Vancouver, Canada in the AI Sales Enablement space. The company uses AI and dynamic video technology to help sales teams automatically target qualified prospects on social media, initiate one-to-one conversations, and surface timely sales opportunities without requiring any content marketing, spam emails, or advertising. The company’s vision and mission is to humanize the way businesses connect with their targeted audience at scale. Customers have connected with over 3.3M prospects in 2022 through CoPilot AI. With an AI engine trained on 8M conversation threads doubling every 8 months, CoPilot AI is becoming the leading sales, marketing and recruitment prospect platform.
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About CoPilot AI, WealthBar: CoPilot AI is a SaaS company that uses A.I. and rich social data to connect businesses with customers in a whole new way.
Daniel Domachowski
Co-Founder & CEO of Circus
CoFounder/CEO @CircusHR – Cutting the HR headache for film & TV. #CanadianScreenAward nominated Producer (#HelloDestroyer, #TIFF16).
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About Circus: Powering studios, behind the scenes.
Ali Tajsekandar
Founder & CEO of Wishpond
Ali Tajsekandar is a Founder & CEO at Wishpond.
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About Wishpond: Wishpond is an all-in-one marketing suite that enables users to generate and nurture leads.
Charles Lavigne
Co-founder, CEO of LlamaZOO Interactive
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About LlamaZOO Interactive: LlamaZOO is changing the way the world sees data by helping enterprises analyze and visualize big data in its real-world context.
Mark Masongsong
CEO & Co-Founder of UrbanLogiq
Mark Masongsong was a political and government staffer for over a decade, including as an advisor to two Ministers of Health in British Columbia. He bring detailed experience in understanding the priorities of government and working with government planners. He earned his pilot’s license at the age of 17, and has served as a director to international development and environmental charities, and was awarded a Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal in 2003. BA, Simon Fraser University
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About UrbanLogiq: UrbanLogiq provides a data analytics platform that makes city planning faster, cheaper, and more accurate.
Serge Salager
CEO of Visualping
Serge began his career in marketing at Procter & Gamble in Europe, He then joined Nestle’s $1.5 billion corporate VC firm after completing his MBA at Harvard Business School. He moved to Vancouver in 2012 to become the CEO of a small TSX listed tech company. In 2013, Serge took this company private and, after its sale in 2015, he founded two tech start-ups in Vancouver: Retarget Links and Visualping.
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About Visualping: Automated website change alerts for consumers and enterprise with more than 1.5 million personal and business users in all verticals.
Clayton Brown
CEO and Founder of Keycafe
Clayton’s inspiration for Keycafe came when he had key exchange struggles as an Airbnb host. He observed a simple solution while living in a European walkup for several years – residents dropped their key with the downstairs cafe to get them to friends and family. Clayton is responsible for Keycafe’s vision, strategy and growth. Prior to Keycafe, Clayton worked as a principal at a family office in Vancouver and as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. He has over $2 billion in private equity and new venture transaction experience. During his university training, Clayton studied Symbolic Systems and won awards for software and algorithm design. He earned his MBA, BS, and BA from Stanford University.
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About Keycafe: Keycafe provides global consumer and enterprise SaaS software and IoT key exchange systems for intelligent property access management.
Michael Stephenson
Founder, CEO & Chief Happiness Officer of PayrollHero
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About addy invest, OutsourcingThingsDone.com, PayrollHero: PayrollHero is a startup aimed at streamlining payroll and time and attendance tracking for iOS devices.
Marcus Charalambous
Chief Executive Officer of Expression
Marcus is the founder & CEO of Backbone, one of Canada’s leading web development companies, and EXPRESSION, an innovative cloud-based web development platform that empowers coders and creators to deliver amazing digital experiences. He believes the power to utilize and communicate through the web should be accessible to everyone and that each digital experience should build strong relationships. He can often be found discussing his experiences in web dev and building cloud-ready infrastructure.
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About Expression: XPR is developer platform that lets you build anything online and works as your digital OS to connect the digital world for your customers
Steve Anderson
Founder, CEO, Chief Strategist of New/Mode
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About New/Mode, OpenMedia: A multi-channel advocacy platform to activate supporters, reach decision-makers and win cause campaigns.
Ash Esmaeili
Co-founder & CEO of Aimsio
Afshin is a passionate computer scientist and researcher with focus on innovation where science and technology meet. He has years of experience in implementing heuristic optimizations and highly interactive multi-agent systems. As a Principal Researcher at the University of Calgary, he lead a team of developers in creating state of art visualizations. As an entrepreneur he was involved in development of a recommendation system for a small startup company where he pursued lean startup concepts. In 2013, Afshin co-founded InVistaWare.
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About Aimsio: Aimsio improves managerial, operational, and financial processes by strengthening communications between the office and the job site.
John Carter
CEO & Founder of Vonigo
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About Vonigo: Vonigo provides SaaS business management software for mobile services companies.
Will Fraser
Founder and CEO of SaaSquatch
Will Fraser is CEO and co-founder of SaaSquatch. At SaaSquatch he works with some of the world’s largest companies to build digital growth channels that touch millions of people around the globe.
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About SaaSquatch: SaaSquatch is a provider of referral and loyalty platform to businesses with thousands to millions of customers.
Jad Jebara
President & CEO of Hyperview
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About Hyperview: SaaS for IT infrastructure management
Travis Kirton
Founder, Chief Executive Officer & Director of Flow
Travis currently serves as the Founder and Director of Flow. Having worked at pioneering institutions such as the Ars Electronica Futurelab and the Banff Centre for the Arts, Flow is the culmination of a career spent at the cutting-edge of interaction, design and culture.
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About Flow, Slant Design + Marketing Inc.: Flow provides an animation tool that allows designs to be instantly animated and translated into ready-to-use code.
Sami Asikainen
CEO and Co-founder of Carbon Trainer
Sami Asikainen is the CEO and Co-Founder of Carbon Trainer.
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About Carbon Trainer: fitness, hardware, consumer, saas, ai
Marc Kuo
Founder & CEO of Routific
Marc Kuo is Founder & CEO at Routific.
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About Routific: Routific is a route optimization solution that helps delivery businesses plan more efficient routes, saving them time and up to 40% on fuel.
Naveen Nand
CEO, Co-Founder of WalletCard
Naveen is an experienced salesman and a passionate businessman. He boasts a wealth of knowledge in the health and safety industry. In 2008, Naveen had successfully started and operated a North American safety training company. His business has pursued new and innovative methods of safety training by incorporating a cutting edge on-line training platform. He is also a director for a non-profit group that is highly regarded in the material handling industry. Naveen is both practical and inventive with his start-up skills and is always forward thinking with business strategies.
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About WalletCard: WalletCard is a digital platform for effectively tracking and managing workplace safety & certification requirements.
Dale Dubberley
CEO and Founder of Drive Business Intelligence
Dale Dubberley brings a unique blend of technology retail and restaurant experience to Drive CX. Growing up with a family retail electronics business, she started her career as a systems analyst and technology consultant. After a trip to Thailand, where she fell in love with Thai food, she opened a chain of Thai restaurants and manufacturing facility in Canada. Early on, she realized that the path to growth was to “tap into” what customers really wanted and how well her team members were delivering on that. She quickly built a loyal clientele, winning “Best Thai” awards for many years. Bringing customer, team, marketing and sales trends into a single dashboard, became an “early warning system” for management actions. Problems were identified and resolved quickly, before they impacted the bottom line. Turning CX insights to actions created predictable sales growth of 20% annually and 2-3 x industry average profits.
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About Drive Business Intelligence: Customer retention SaaS to help restaurants increase sales by acting on customer insights
Jon Voigt
CEO, Co-founder of Agility CMS
I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of Agility CMS, a Headless Content Management System with a content first approach to digital content distribution. We focus on bringing flexibility and ease of use to the world of app and website development or any other digital destination. I’m also a husband, father and big believer that the key to our success is our ability to adapt and change as this world unfolds. It is the ability to be Agile that allows us to be ready for the fast paced environment that we all live in. I run a podcast called Agile Living, An Entrepreneurs Journey that focused on because able to handle this changing work and I’m building a community of digital leaders who define their success by being able to adapt and keep up with the fast pace of the world today.
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About Agility CMS: Agility CMS is a Headless CMS focused on JAMStack solutions. Build faster, build easier.
Craig Arnatt
CEO / Partner of InsureCert
Craig Arnatt is CEO and founder of InsureCert, the marquee shopping cart & policy issuance system of the insurance industry. As a programmer, Craig has worked on the core team developing the API framework for InsureCert’s blockchain enabled policy underwriting engine.
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About InsureCert: Super easy cloud-based sales software that brings true customer convenience, ease of use, converting more sales and driving online growth.
Jason Morehouse
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Checkfront
With over a decade of professional IT experience behind him, Jason has been immersed in e-commerce since its conception. He is a self described Technical Architect and Linux evangelist. Prior to founding Checkfront Inc, he played a key role in building several successful e-commerce companies, including Netconcepts, Vendorama, and Revenuewire. He has lived and worked in Toronto Canada, Auckland New Zealand, and now calls Victoria, BC home.
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About Checkfront: Checkfront offers online booking services for tours and activities, rentals, and accommodations.
David MacLaren
Founder & CEO of MediaValet
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About MediaValet: MediaValet stands at the forefront of the enterprise, cloud-based, digital asset management industry.
Greg Ford
CEO & Co-Founder of TalentClick
I have co-founded three companies and invested in a small handful. My expertise and interests are in psychology, media, and learning, which can lend itself to human resource related applications, eLearning for the workplace, corporate storytelling, or digital media.
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About TalentClick: Predictive analytic assessments measuring risk-based personality traits to hire and train better employees.
Matt Lister
CEO & Co-Founder of CloudAdvisors
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About CloudAdvisors: CloudAdvisors is one of the top InsurTech solutions in North America, powering the next-generation of Employee Benefit Advisors.
James Pinto
CEO of SwiftLaunch
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About SwiftLaunch: The Ultimate Platform for Killer Technology Roll-outs and Astonishing Customer Success.
Mirek Pijanowski
Co-founder and CEO of StandardFusion
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About StandardFusion: A cloud-based GRC SaaS platform for information security teams at small, medium, or enterprise organizations.
Marnie Larson
CEO of StarGarden
With over 20 years of experience in the software industry, Marnie specializes in human capital management, payroll, human resources and time and attendance solutions. Her previous positions at StarGarden include COO, Manager of Operations, and Product Consultant. Marnie received an MBA from Simon Fraser University and holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Commerce from the University of British Columbia. She has served on the boards of Simon Fraser University’s MBA Alumni Association and the Wired Woman Society, where she worked towards setting the overall direction and strategy for the organizations.
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About StarGarden: StarGarden HCM delivers a better way to manage your entire employee life cycle from hiring to retiring.
Paul Stephenson
Founder & CEO of 47 Insights
Founder & CEO of 47 Insights. Advising software and publishing subscription businesses on marketing and growth strategies since 1995. Creator and host of SaaS Marketing Insights podcast.
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About 47 Insights: Marketing consultancy specializing in helping SaaS and subscription businesses to grow
Paul Stephenson
Founder & CEO of 47 Insights
Founder & CEO of 47 Insights. Advising software and publishing subscription businesses on marketing and growth strategies since 1995. Creator and host of SaaS Marketing Insights podcast.
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About 47 Insights: Marketing consultancy specializing in helping SaaS and subscription businesses to grow
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