Meet Our Team

Dr Ian Burgess

Founder, President

Co-founder of Validere; Board member at Validere, Cquesta, NEXT Canada;  VP at Pioneer Fund; Y Combinator alum (S16); Harvard PhD (Applied Physics)

An alum of University of Waterloo’s co-op program, Ian Burgess, experienced firsthand the impact of apprenticeship-based learning and strong mentors early in his career. As both an academic and as a business leader, he has seen very-early-career students achieve extraordinary outcomes when given impactful work, really high expectations, and strong mentorship.

Andrew Zhang

Solutions Architect

Solutions Architect at Ascendance Foundry; Founding Engineer & Product Owner at Retainly; Queen's Startup Summit Winner; Queen's University Computing Honours,

Solutions Architect at Ascendance Foundry. Founding Engineer at Retainly. Queen's Startup Summit Winner. Andrew is a full-stack developer and Queen's University alum who builds at the intersection of product, engineering, and business strategy. A "Swiss Army Knife" professional dedicated to owning the product lifecycle from scope to ship.

Expert Network

Our Fellows and clients are supported by a network of experts in AI-native development, data science and business leadership who teach, mentor, and directly elevate client projects. Our Expert Network supports Fellows and our clients through:

Teaching weekly workshops, where a member of our Expert Network teaches them valuable insights from their domain of expertise.

Regular office hours to support them in their projects, learning and career growth.

Direct support on client projects, where the direct input of their expertise significantly enhances the project outcome.

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Work With Us

Meet Some Of Our Experts

Dr. Yinan Zhang

Chief Investment Officer at QED Asset Management. Fmr Head of Asia Quantitative Research at Morgan Stanley, Harvard PhD (Applied Physics)

Pierre Magnan

Seasoned executive, investor. Fmr President at Parkland International & Sol Petroleum, Partner at Gowling WLG

Dr. Misha Askerka 

Lead data scientist at Alpaca, built the analytics team at Validere, ClearCo; Yale PhD (Computational Physical Chemistry)

Mark Le Dain

Senior leader in finance and corporate development. Chief Revenue Officer at Fuelled, fmr VP Corp Dev. at Neo Financial

Luisa San Martin

Senior ML engineer at Waabi. Research Engineer on the autonomous vehicles team at Uber.

Adam Weinstein

Built the full software for Validere’s Y Combinator demo-day prototype as a first year co-op student. VP Operations at Validere 9 years later.

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Scout

Lead Automation Architect

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Hi there! I'm Scout, your Automation Architect. I help businesses save time through smart automation. What manual task is slowing you down today?

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