SAMUEL BRUNEAU

CO-FOUNDER, TAIGA MOTORS

Shortly after graduating from engineering in 2015, Sam co-founded Taiga Motors with two fellow McGill students. Combining their passion for electric vehicles developed during their time as leaders of the McGill Undergraduate Electric Vehicle Design teams and their love of winter sports, Taiga was launched with the mission to electrify powersports and accelerate sustainable access to the great outdoors. Taiga embarked on a journey to bring to market an electric snowmobile that wouldn’t compromise between performance, cost and sustainability. Two years later, Taiga has grown to a team of 14 people pushing the limits of electric vehicle engineering and is just weeks away from officially unveiling the world’s first production electric snowmobile.

ARI RAMDIAL

CO-FOUNDER, RHODIUM LABS

Ari is the CEO of Rhodium Labs, a Montreal based R&D firm focused on distributed systems and computational finance. At Rhodium, Ari works with large clients in the insurance, finance and military sectors. He is also the founder of venture backed stealth mode startup working to solve fundamental issues in blockchain security, privacy and scalability. Ari completed both his undergraduate and masters degrees in electrical engineering at McGill University. His area of expertise is mathematical modelling and embedded multi-agent systems, which basically means he spends his time thinking about how to make computers deal with quasi-rational humans. He’s also obsessed with reading and dogs.

MICHAEL GRADEK

CO-FOUNDER, BUSBUD

Michael Gradek co-founded Busbud in 2011, and serves as CTO. His team and he are focused on delivering the software and systems that power the world’s largest supply of bookable bus inventory and the products and APIs that allow customers and partners to consume it. He completed a Computer Engineering degree from McGill University, and is a Microsoft veteran and patent holder who has worked on MSN.com, Start.com, Internet Explorer, the Bing search engine and Windows 10. He’s happily married and a proud father of two.