Meet our team
Meet our team
Ehsan Mirdamadi,
Partner & CEO
Ehsan draws on 18 years of enterprise computer networks, storage and cloud infrastructure experience. He was the founder and CEO of one of the largest and the first cloud computing companies in Canada, Cirrus Tech Ltd.
He is also a serial entrepreneur, an active angel investor and a mentor at many technology companies. Ehsan holds a BSc in Computer Science from York University.
Sina Sadeghian,
Partner & Fractional CTO
JP Rosevear,
Partner & Fractional CTO
JP leverages 20 years of industry experience in startups and large enterprise companies with significant experience in a wide spectrum of industries including leadership roles at adtech startup Polar as well as leading teams at Novell and Mozilla. JP brings a strong focus on scalable, repeatable technology development processes to NuBinary.
Alireza Sharifi,
Partner & Fractional CTO
Alireza is a software engineering PhD from the University of Waterloo. His research interests include Machine Learning and Security. Alireza applies software engineering theory and practice to solve industry problems. Alireza brings years of experience in software consulting including vulnerability consulting at TELUS Labs, where he researched and analyzed remotely accessible applications including web, DNS, and proxy servers. As a CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional), he has helped many companies to comply with security and privacy standards and regulations.
Yousuf Khatib,
Director of Business Development
Yousuf is a serial entrepreneur who has leveraged his recruitment, networking and sales experience to help grow teams to penetrate new markets globally. In 2017, a cold email would land him an opportunity to co-found Global Skills Hub (GSH). For the past four years GSH has been supplying senior technical talent from abroad to the Canadian Ecosystem including clients like Loblaw Digital, Versapay and TWG/Deloitte Digital. When the pandemic hit, Yousuf shifted his focus into recovery projects knowing that skilled immigration could play an important part. He is passionate about helping entrepreneurs succeed by bridging access to world class resources at Nubinary. Yousuf has a young family of three kids (twins!) and his wife jokes daily that they learned sales from him way too early.
Alyssa Mariano,
Operations Manager
Alyssa has years of experience as a project manager in telecommunications and fintech, where she handled projects in paid public Wi-Fi, AI model for marketing, and credit card sales. Aside from being an entrepreneur, Alyssa is an abstract painter who sold high-end paintings worldwide. She leads the overall management of NuBinary’s operations while embracing strategy, design, and performance improvement to create the organization’s highest level of efficiency.
Ayesha Moeen,
Hiring Manager
A Physics major and a University of Waterloo graduate, Ayesha banked on her analytic and strategic school of thinking to pursue a career as a project manager in a digital marketing agency (based in Dubai), where she juggled several marketing projects and later, as a social media marketer in an international educational consultancy. Charting unnavigated territory, a north facing moral compass, creativity, compassion, a problem solver, tenaciously driven, and empathy - is the dose of delicious reality that you will get to experience when one interacts with her. What Ayesha bring to the table is a passionate zeal to bring interesting and turn of the century projects to life, which at the end of the day, she would look forward to celebrating with the team.
Mario Meyer,
Fractional CTO
Mario is a 15 years experienced technology leader with solid background in infrastructure, software development, governance and strategy. He has passages from startups to big companies in diversified verticals like technology, telecom, education, manufacturing and O&G. Every step of the way Mario has led technology teams to deliver the higher possible value to each company’s business through innovation, re-imagination and team building. Mario holds an BSc in Computer Sciences from PUC-Rio / University of Alberta and an MBA in Strategic Management from FGV with an Entrepreneurship course from Babson College.
Boken Lin,
Fractional CTO
Boken is a serial entrepreneur with over a decade of experience starting, operating, and scaling technology startups. He has built teams that are behind a wide range of successful products from consumer apps to enterprise hardware. Boken is specialized in building agile teams that are focused on converging to product market fit as quick as possible.
Angelo Berios,
Fractional CTO
Angelo is a seasoned technical leader with over 20 years experience building software and leading engineering teams. Having focused much of his career on helping early stage startups progress from conception to acquisition, he understands the importance of testing a startup's hypotheses early and utilizing real-world data to feed into future iterations of a product. His experience spans a wide range of verticals ranging from real estate, events/social, commerce, media, education, finance, and ad networks.
Arpan Paul,
Fractional CTO
Arpan is an accomplished technology consultant with 15 years of experience in software development and strategy. He has a proven record of solving difficult and complex business issues through the application of value driven and innovative technology. He's worked on a wide variety of tech initiatives in industries spanning media entertainment, health, telecom and video streaming. He is passionate about leveraging creative IT strategies and insights enabling customers' successful growth and transformation. He holds a masters in computer science from Louisiana Tech University.
Dave McKay,
Fractional CTO
Dave is a Fractional CTO and Decentralized Architect. He has over 35 years of experience in the software industry. His current focus is on systems designed around the new paradigm of decentralized trust systems like blockchain and self-sovereign identity. Dave is currently a Partial Load Professor at the George Brown College Blockchain Development Program, Identity Architect at Northern Block, Fractional CTO at Artcryption and the Technical Lead at the Ryerson Cybersecurity Research Lab. Past positions include Vice President of Engineering at VitalHub, Vice-President New Product Initiatives at TransGaming and Vice-President of Technology at New Media Architects.
Sutha Tharma,
Fractional CTO
Sutha has over 15+ years of managerial and leadership success in software, cloud and technology operations working with small and large organizations. He is fascinated by tales of individuals with small ideas having a huge impact on the society and has always dreamt of being part of such an endeavor himself. Sutha has an eye for innovation and has built talented teams to create and deploy cutting edge technologies, scale solutions and build revenue streams. Sutha holds a Masters in Computer Applications and has a keen interest in how technology can be used to improve social well-being in the way we live, work and communicate.
Paul Harapiak,
Fractional CTO
Paul Harapiak has enjoyed decades of adventures in the software industry. He's enjoyed the ride with a couple "basement startups", including BlueGill's bill presentment product, which grew to a $250M sale to Checkfree. He's worked in a variety of domains, including capital project management, internet traffic shaping, insurance, banking, manufacturing, and underground mining (with a shovel). Paul has slung a lot of code over the years, but in the last 20 years has spent more time as engineering lead, chief architect and consultant, working to improve the functioning of software teams, and the quality of their products. Most recently he has focused on transforming aging applications into the scalable AWS world. Paul lives in the Waterloo region with a his wife Deborah, where they enjoy watching their five daughters making it in the grownup world. (Don't get him started about cycling.)
Sonal Bagga,
Fractional CTO
Sonal has software engineering experience of over 2 decades in companies like Goldman Sachs, Motorola, Jet.com, Boston Consulting Group with softwares ranging from embedded cellphone applications, .NET, Node.JS, React JS based web applications and platform engineering in various cloud systems. She started her career as a software engineer, has a Master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University and has headed startup engineering teams as CTO for various ventures taking them from the 0-1 stage and also in more mature software engineering practices leading 2nd iteration projects to improve software stability and reliability. Her industry experience is in but not limited to fin-tech, health-tech, marketplace and e-commerce businesses.
Glenn Korban,
Fractional CTO
Glenn is a technical executive with over 20 years leading teams and driving technology projects - primarily in web development and content management. Most recently, Glenn has been the co-founder and CTO of FlashVote, which reinvents community input, providing scientific community preference data for local governments. His career experience includes both enterprise and startup environments spanning a variety of verticals including local government, energy, digital advertising, counter-intelligence, and others. Glenn holds a B.S. (Eng) from Cornell University is a former officer of the US Air Force.
Mehdi Karimi,
Fractional CTO
Mehdi has a PhD in cybersecurity from UBC and the best paper top-tier conference award winner on dependable systems and networks. He has 15 years of experience in high-tech and fin-tech industries from delivering research and development in large firms to onboarding security and privacy compliance in startups. His forte is innovation and engineering for security and automation platforms. Mehdi has been a leader in driving top-notch work and managing engineering teams up to 100. He holds two patents in application security as well as numerous publications in IEEE and ACM societies. Between 2009 and 2021, Mehdi had had R&D collaborations at Intel, GE, MDA, Sierra-Wireless, and Sophos; where he had materialized first-class proposals into production. His innovative post-silicon code coverage solution is still being used at Intel since 2009. Nowadays, Mehdi's main focus has been addressing optimized solutions for distributed computer systems and networks such as AWS and Azure cloud as well as providing CIA measures for SaaS and PaaS platforms such as CMS.
Hussain Sheikh,
Fractional CTO
Hussain has over a decade of experience building teams and software for a wide range of applications, from live streaming video engines, to consumer games. Having served as a CTO at multiple startups, Hussain has a keen eye for building strong foundations, be it for products in terms of architecture and customer-driven roadmapping, or an engineering team, in terms of recruiting, culture, and retention. Hussain holds a BSc from the University of Waterloo in Mechatronics.
Isadora Barros,
Senior Full-stack Software Engineer
Isadora is a senior full-stack software engineer and has worked developing software for the past 8 years. In the past 2 years acted as Tech Lead in two projects. She participated in a mentorship program in her past company which helped developers to grow in their careers and also is passionate about initiatives to empower women in tech like Pyladies and Rails Girls. She holds a BSc in Computer Science from UFPE - Brazil / Coimbra University – Portugal.
Silas Pedrosa,
Senior Full-stack Software Engineer
Silas is a senior full-stack software engineer and has been designing, leading and developing products for the past 7 years. He co-founded a software firm which not only brought to market a handful of their own products, but also helped other small and big companies to design and develop their own projects. Silas is a very adaptable professional who can be a full-stack engineer and work in variety of technologies. Always looking at the big picture, Silas drives his work focusing on value delivered to people. Silas holds a BSc in Computer Engineering from UFPE - Brazil / Lund University - Sweden.
Derek Galbraith,
Full-stack Software Engineer
Derek is a web application professional with over 7 years experience. He has been a full-stack developer working with PHP, Laravel, React,= and MySQL. Derek has worked on commercial web applications for GM, Mazda, Mercedes, Toyota and many others. With a focus on improving load times, responsiveness, load management and scalability. Derek has a Bachelor's and Master's Degree in Computer Engineering from McMaster University.
ADVISORY BOARD
ADVISORY BOARD
Aïko Thurlow,
Advisor
Aïko is the CEO and Founder of InFounders, an organization that runs masterminds for entrepreneurs. She also hosts monthly Mastermind Express events for a community of 20,000 entrepreneurs in Toronto, enabling them to discover the power of peer collaboration.
Aïko has been active in the New York and Toronto startup space. She has mentored hundreds of entrepreneurs and is closely knit to the local entrepreneurial community, lecturing at universities and participating in the organization of events such as Propelify (one of the largest NY innovation events), Startup Weekends, and the Women Techmaker Conference.
Steve Gilpin,
Advisor
Steve has been an entrepreneur since the mid 80’s, starting or co-founding 4 companies. In 1993 Steve co-founded Centtric Marketing Systems, a technology driven marketing services company. Since that beginning, the company evolved into a technology and marketing services company with a strong focus on the life and health insurance industry. Steve and his partner sold their business to one of their former clients.
Steve then embarked on a new ‘career’ as an angel investor. In the past number of years he has invested in a number of different start-up companies. Steve is a strong believer in investing time as well as money and serves on the board of some of his companies, and provides regular advice to others. In 2012 Steve was recognized as the Golden Triangle Angel Network’s 2012 Angel of the Year, and he currently serves on GTAN’s Selection Committee and Board of Directors.
Benton holds many awards for teaching as well as community development in the investment ecosystem. He serves as a board member for multiple ventures and is a volunteer for various non-profit organizations.
Sector Interests:
Education, Digital Publishing, NLP and Machine Learning, IoT, Social Ventures, Intelligent Cars and Transportation Networks.
Jesse Moeinifar,
Advisor
Jesse is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Viafoura, servicing over 600 media, broadcast and entertainment brands worldwide, and powering more than 1.5 billion interactions across 250 million active users. Viafoura enables content providers to better build, manage and monetize their content, audience and data in real-time.
He is a serial entrepreneur with previous successes spanning a range of industries including finance, real estate, digital media and technology. Assembling teams of smart individuals passionate about solving challenging problems is what Jesse attributes his successes to.
Frank is a well-known coach/mentor/investor who has worked with founders across Canada as well as with companies from Brazil, India, the Caribbean, and Australia. He developed The Artful Science of Pitching™ to reflect a practical combination of his knowledge and experience from multiple perspectives including:
- Entrepreneur (co-founder: Powernoodle, Global Music Depot, Katapult Business Solutions ) with:
- Deep operations experience having performed in five different C-type positions at various companies – chair, CEO, CFO, CIO, Chief Strategy Officer, and
- Strong fundraising performance having directly raised over $40M while in C-roles;
- Angel investor with a robust portfolio (2011 Golden Triangle Angel Network (GTAN) Angel of the Year);
- Investment committee member (Laurier Start-up Fund);
- Coach/mentor/educator (frequently invited by Propel ICT, Venn, Founder Institute, MaRS, Guelph Accelerator Centre, and various universities & colleges; EIR at Communitech; member NACO Academy); and an
- Active contributor to the start-up ecosystem (2013 GTAN Community Builder of the Year; significant contributor to A Practical Guide to Angel Investing (Gedeon, Steven A., NACO Academy, 2016; coach to several program cohorts including Commuitech’s Hyperdrive, Rev, and Fierce Founders and the JEDI (Joint Economic Development Initiative) program’s support for Aboriginal entrepreneurs in New Brunswick; chaired pitch competitions in Montreal, Quebec City, various cities in Ontario, Banff, and Vancouver).
Prior to his past dozen years in the start-up ecosystem, Frank’s foundation comes from 15 years at IBM and 10 years at Bank of Montreal (BMO) in a variety of roles in Canada and the US including technical, technical sales, consulting, and executive roles. He is a past director of: Powernoodle, Top Hat, Mii Corp, GTAN, and Angel Investors Ontario, and a past governor of Wilfrid Laurier University.
In the delivery of The Artful Science of Pitching™, Frank focuses on developing and continuously improving pitch content, flow, and delivery to attract investment or partners or for selling. Frank’s unique approach uses the pitch to gain insight into a company’s strategy, technology, and operations which enables him to uncover and help solve deeper misalignments in the company. Much more than a pitch coach, Frank’s personalized methodical approach and attention to detail have earned him a reputation for delivering high value advice and guidance to founders (all stages) and accelerators (all industries).