It is a cold February morning as I make my way from Pearson to Union Station on the UP Express, then up Bay Street to Amar Varma’s office. There is no logo on the door, no reception desk, nothing about the place that announces importance. Inside, Amar is finishing a meeting. He gives me a small wave, unhurried, then asks if I want to grab lunch.

If you know Toronto tech well, Amar Varma requires almost no introduction. His name runs just beneath the surface of many of the city’s most important stories: Xtreme Labs, Mantle, early investments, pivotal introductions, the standards that shaped how a generation of builders learned to build. For years, he has been one of the most impactful people in Toronto tech without ever becoming one of its loudest or most publicly legible figures. One person I spoke to described him as “sort of the king of Toronto.” Another put it more bluntly: what people don’t realize is that he was carrying Toronto tech on his back.

That is the paradox of Amar. His influence becomes obvious the moment you start tracing it, but from a distance, it can be strangely easy to miss. It lives in companies, in methods, in people, in the connective tissue of an ecosystem that was smaller, scrappier, and less certain when he first began helping shape it. He is the kind of figure people in the know talk about with a certain look, as if naming someone whose importance should be more widely understood than it is.

To understand what Amar is building now, and why he matters, you have to go back. You have to go back to a city in India in 1937, where a boy named Nityanand was starting his story.

In the busy streets of Muzaffarpur, northern Bihar, 1937, the air carried the scent of ripening litchis and the clatter of carts on unpaved roads. The British Raj still ruled India, and the rhythms of life were set by seasons and temples and the far-off whispers of a world beginning to unmake itself. This is the world that Nityanand Varma, Nitya, to everyone who knew him, was born into.

He was ten years old when India gained its independence in 1947, and old enough to understand that independence and stability were not the same thing. The partition that followed cleaved the subcontinent into two nations and displaced upwards of twenty million people. Muzaffarpur was far from the epicentre, but the ripples reached everywhere.

“Post-partition life was challenging for my dad,” Amar would tell me. “There was lots of corruption. It was hard for him to build a life there.”

So Nitya left. In the late 1950s, following an older brother who had become a professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, he crossed the Atlantic and made his way to a young university in a small Ontario city still defined by portable buildings and ambition: the University of Waterloo, class of 1964. Its first graduating class had been only four years earlier. Nitya would go on to earn two more master’s degrees, in civil engineering and management science.

He returned to India to marry Shashi, an arranged marriage that, by all accounts, became a genuine partnership, and the two of them celebrated with a trip around the world before coming back to Canada. Regina first. Then Montreal, where Nitya worked for SNC-Lavalin, the engineering firm.

In 1975, in Montreal, the youngest of the three Varma children was born: Amar.

Amar Varma spent the first two years of his life in a hospital. He had been born with Hirschsprung’s disease.

Hirschsprung’s disease is a rare congenital condition in which nerve cells fail to develop in parts of the large intestine, preventing the body from moving waste normally. Untreated, it becomes life-threatening almost immediately. It is typically treated with surgery, but the basic approach, and much of the lifelong management that follows, has changed less than one might expect over the last half-century.

When his first child was born with the same condition many years later, it would eventually lead to a significant donation and research at SickKids.

But first, Ottawa.

The family left Montreal when Amar was not yet two, driven partly by the René Lévesque government and the anglophones’ exodus that followed. Over 130,000 English-speaking Canadians left Quebec between 1976 and 1981. Sun Life, Bank of Montreal, and many more moved to Toronto. The Varmas moved to Nepean, a quiet western suburb of Ottawa, in the 1980s.

“In Ottawa at that time, you had a highly educated middle class, government research, Nortel, a strong working class culture and a love of the outdoors,” Amar recalled. “It was an era in Canada that created ambition and building.”

He grew up there the way kids grew up in suburbs in the 1980s: outside, loud, part of a loose confederacy of neighbourhood children held together by proximity and summer. His closest friend, Josh Raha, became so embedded in the Varma household that he was effectively an unofficial fourth child. They watched Eddie Murphy Raw approximately thirty times (if not more), they had rented it illegally, a detail Josh recalls with specific fondness, and were dedicated fans of the WWF, the Hulk Hogan era.

“In middle school, he was always the leader of the group,” Josh said. Not the loudest. Not the most aggressive. Just the one people naturally organized around. That quality, the gravity of calm authority, would show up again and again across the next four decades, in boardrooms and offices on Bay Street, Silicon Valley and beyond.

Amar would later say his high school class was the strongest he had ever seen: NHL players, doctors, lawyers, musicians, actors, a future Forbes list member, and a Rhodes Scholar.

He arrived at the University of Waterloo in 1994 at his full adult height, somewhere around six foot three.

“I was the same height I am now, but was 127 pounds soaking wet”, Amar said, laughing.

Waterloo’s engineering program in the mid-1990s was intense in the particular way that technically difficult programs are intense: the work was hard, the students were serious, and the culture rewarded focus over almost everything else.

Amar was one of them. He was also, unusual for an engineering student, an athlete on the varsity volleyball team. “Not many athletes in electrical engineering, but Amar was on the volleyball team,” Mark Gilbert, a classmate, recalled.

Only a small fraction of Amar’s class did sports or anything outside of school. He gravitated to the well-rounded ones, the ones who were pushing hard in one of the most competitive engineering programs in Canada, but who also played, joked, drank, gambled at low stakes, and stayed grounded. High achievement and ease in the same person. That combination would define how he built every company that came after.

“The ’99 Waterloo grad class is one of the greatest of all time,” Arif Janmohamed told me.

He may be right. The class produced an unusual density of talent, people who would go on to help shape Silicon Valley, Canadian tech, and venture capital over the next two decades.

What made the class of ‘99 so dense with talent? Timing, mostly. They were graduating into the peak of the dot-com boom and out the other side of the crash. New technology shifts were arriving fast. Canada in the late nineties was a place where being an entrepreneur was still unusual enough to feel like a choice rather than a default.

The list is impressive. Chamath Palihapitiya would go on to Facebook, Social Capital and All-In Podcast fame. Sanjay Beri founded Netskope. Arif Janmohamed spent nearly two decades at Lightspeed Venture Partners before leaving to start his own fund, Duration Ventures. Herman Paek would go on to lead Kijiji Canada and digital at Loblaw. John Lam helped validate the GeForce 256, the world’s first GPU, at NVIDIA. Rakesh Malhotra sold his company to EY. Mark Gilbert built a long career at Microsoft before founding Zocks.

“Mark should have been the CTO of Microsoft,” Amar told me.

When Bill Gates visited the University of Waterloo in 2005, he noted that Microsoft had hired about 360 Waterloo graduates and more than 1,100 co-op students, and that in some years it hired more people from Waterloo than from any other university in the world. By then, Waterloo’s co-op program was already establishing itself as one of the most respected technical talent pipelines anywhere.

Amar’s first co-op was in the federal government. His next two were at Newbridge Networks, the Ottawa networking company run by the legendary Sir Terry Matthews. Amar fondly remembered Terry handing out mugs emblazoned with “$1B in Sales” as motivational objects.

Then he went to ATI Technologies, the graphics chip company later acquired by AMD. “Things at Newbridge took two years,” Amar said. “At ATI, they took two months.” The difference in pace was revelatory. He was working on graphics processors at the moment the GPU was beginning its transition from a niche gaming component into a foundational computing technology.

Meanwhile, the Internet Bubble was inflating in real time. Herman Paek remembers being in school and watching people start companies, actual companies, with funding and press coverage and impossible valuations, while still in their twenties. They graduated in 1999, one year before the crash. They walked out of Waterloo into a gold rush that was already starting to buckle.

The whole crew went west.

In the late 1990s, for young engineers with Waterloo degrees and restless ambitions, the Bay Area was the place to be. The gravity was irresistible, not unlike that of Waterloo grads today.

Amar went. So did Chamath, Arif, Herman, Sanjay and others from the cohort.

Arif Janmohamed remembers a ski trip to Verbier with Amar just before going to the valley in Switzerland. Amar told him, with complete confidence, that he could handle the blacks and the double-blacks. He was, Arif notes, wrong. “He was overconfident,” Arif said. It was an early glimpse of a trait that would show up again and again: Amar’s instinct to move toward things before he had fully de-risked them.

Herman and Arif remembered quarter-stakes poker games with the group almost every night once they were in the Bay Area. “It was a very natural relationship, hanging out five nights a week,” Herman told me. Everyone was young, working hard, and still orbiting the same Waterloo friendships. Amar and Herman were at a startup that did not succeed, a detour that eventually sent Amar back to Toronto.

There were early signs of success. Arif remembers buying an Acura Integra around that time, and Amar buying a BMW, a purchase Arif remembers eyeing with some envy.

Amar also returned to Toronto for a role at VenGrowth, one of Canada’s largest venture capital platforms and an important early backer of the country’s technology ecosystem. It was there that he began learning the craft of investing.

Toronto was not yet the centre of gravity it would later become, but for Amar, it offered two things the Valley no longer did: proximity to home and a clearer lane to build something of his own.

Anand Agarawala, who previously co-founded Spatial, met him around this time when Amar was at VenGrowth investing, and even then, his ambitions were bigger. Anand remembers Amar saying, “I won’t be here for long.”

The next phase of his career would define him.

Sundeep “Sunny” Madra grew up in Windsor, a border city and auto town not especially known for producing Silicon Valley types.

Without Sunny, there would be no Xtreme.

“Sunny and I grew up two blocks apart in Windsor,” Rakesh Malhotra told me. They did not know each other then, but Rakesh would later end up in Waterloo’s class of ’99.

Sunny left for Ottawa to study computer engineering at the University of Ottawa, graduating around 2001. He spent around six years at Cisco Systems as a hardware engineer before encountering Pivotal Labs and the methodology that would inspire what came next.

“Amar and Sunny talked more between themselves than either of them talked to their wives,” Herman Paek told me.

Both Sunny and Amar were Canadians in the Valley, both watching Pivotal Labs from a distance, both starting to feel that the way Rob Mee was building software was something that needed to exist in Canada. It was Sunny who introduced Amar to Rob. He saw what Pivotal had built first, and he believed it was powerful enough to clone.

“Amar is one of the unique people in technology,” Sunny told me. “Software, hardware, investing, monetizing, built companies, sold companies. He has done it all. Worn all the different hats.”

Xtreme was always split between Toronto and San Francisco, Sunny and the customers in the Valley, and Amar holding down the Toronto side.

“There is no job too big or small for Amar,” Sunny said. “And he has done a good job integrating the people he works with into his personal and family life.”

Sunny’s own career would later include another string of headline-making moves, further proof that the Xtreme orbit produced builders who kept resurfacing at the centre of major technology shifts.

The iPhone launched on January 9, 2007. Steve Jobs stood on a stage in San Francisco and described it as “an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator”, three devices in one, and most of the tech industry received this as either interesting or important, depending on their position. A small number of people received it as a signal, a starting gun, the announcement of a wave.

Amar Varma was one of them.

To understand how that instinct turned into Xtreme Labs, though, you have to understand the model he and Sunny were drawing from.

Pivotal Labs, founded in San Francisco by Rob Mee and Sherry Erskine, had built a reputation around a distinctive way of making software: pair programming, test-driven development, rapid iteration, and close client collaboration. It was less a traditional services firm than a system for teaching teams how to build better software. That model left a deep impression on Sunny and Amar. They saw in it something worth bringing to Canada and to mobile.

Sunny had approached Rob directly. Could they clone it in Canada for mobile? Rob said yes. Amar and Sunny gave him equity in Xtreme Labs even though they didn’t have to. Rob viewed it as good for the ecosystem.

“Amar is anti-Silicon Valley,” Rob said. “Not cutthroat, not ruthless. Supportive and collaborative.”

By November 2007, Amar and Sunny had founded Xtreme Labs. Their thesis was specific and, at the time, genuinely contrarian: mobile was coming faster than most people understood, and the companies that would need to build for it were going to need help. Xtreme would provide that help, using a culture and methodology borrowed from Pivotal and applied to the new terrain of the smartphone.

Farhan Thawar, now VP and Head of Engineering at Shopify, remembers Amar trying to recruit him at The Keg on York Street in 2007. Amar had built a golf simulator on his BlackBerry; swing the phone, and the club would swing. Farhan thought it was dumb. A couple of years later, he joined anyway.

In practice, Xtreme’s method was simple but demanding: developers worked in pairs, wrote tests before code, merged constantly, and built software in tight feedback loops with clients sitting beside them. None of these ideas were new in Silicon Valley. In Toronto, applying this level of discipline to mobile, they felt radical.

Chris Ye, the founder of Uken Games, used Xtreme’s office space after an angel investment from Amar. He attended the Xtreme’s demos and modelled his own company’s practices after what he observed. “If you wanted to stay in Canada and build a tech startup at that time,” he said, “Xtreme was the place to be! The alumni from that era were all super successful.”

To hear people describe the Xtreme office at its peak is to hear them describe a place that felt more like a live system than a workplace. Developers sat in pairs. Clients were in the room, not on the other end of an email chain. Demos were done live, in public, with nowhere to hide if the product did not work. Young Waterloo co-ops came through and immediately understood that this was a different standard. It was intense, but it was also magnetic. For a generation of Toronto builders, walking into Xtreme felt like glimpsing the future before the rest of the city knew it had arrived.

“As a first-time founder in the early Toronto scene, Amar and Xtreme Labs were a tentpole. Walking through their office was a rite of passage for builders like me, a way to feel the energy and see with my own eyes that making it happen here was possible. Amar always led with a helping hand and encouraged me with our work on Jet Cooper. I knew we were on the right path when we eventually landed a mutual client. Both companies were ultimately acquired months apart as the market shifted,” Satish Kanwar told me.

The Xtreme alumni network remains one of the deepest in Toronto tech. Scroll through enough founders and executives in the city and, sooner or later, Xtreme Labs tends to appear somewhere in the background, either directly in their work history or indirectly in the culture they absorbed from it.

Alongside Xtreme, Amar and Sunny ran Extreme Venture Partners, a seed fund investing in the same wave the operating company was riding. Many of EVP’s bets were on early mobile and consumer software, including BumpTop, which sold to Google, and Rypple, which sold to Salesforce. The same conviction that drove the founding of Xtreme also shaped the fund’s portfolio construction. By the early 2010s, EVP had become one of the best-performing seed-stage funds in the country.

Karamdeep (Karam) Nijjar, now a partner at Inovia, met Amar and Sunny in 2009. He had a front-row seat to what they were building. “What people don’t realize,” Karam told me, “is that Amar and Sunny were carrying Toronto and KW tech on their backs.”

Xtreme had the hottest co-op jobs out of Waterloo. Amar and Sunny spent disproportionate amounts of their time mentoring younger founders, investors, and operators. Karam describes the attitude as “infinite pay it forward.”

“You’d drop by the office,” Karam said, “and you wouldn’t know what the next two to twelve hours would bring. Amar would be chatting with someone from Apple. Then the NBA. Then a senior CIBC executive would walk in.” The conversations would roll into restaurants, into late nights, into investments, introductions and partnerships that wouldn’t show up on any deal sheet.

“I am not sure what would have happened to Toronto tech without Amar and Sunny,” Karam said.

Anand Agarawala put it plainly: “Such good pickers. Betting on mobile early. High conviction.” That is the right word. In 2007, mobile was still a thesis, not a consensus. The App Store did not yet exist. Amar was betting on the wave before most people could see it clearly.

Chamath Palihapitiya, Amar’s long-time friend from the Waterloo class of 1999, invested $20 million in Xtreme in 2011. He would later describe it publicly as “a Pivotal Labs for mobile”.

By October 2013, Xtreme Labs had become the premier mobile development firm, its client list spanning American Express, CBS Sports, Facebook, Mercedes-Benz, NCAA, Twitter, and a range of Fortune 500 brands across retail, entertainment, and financial services. The company had 300 staff. It had built apps used by tens of millions of people. It had incubated a cohort of engineers and product managers who would go on to define Canadian tech for the next decade.

Pivotal, by this point, was itself a different and larger animal. EMC had acquired Pivotal Labs in 2012, and in March 2013, Pivotal Software was formed as a spinout backed by a $105 million investment from General Electric. The new Pivotal was no longer a boutique consultancy. It was a platform company with cloud infrastructure ambitions, and it needed mobile expertise it didn’t have.

In October 2013, Pivotal acquired Xtreme Labs in an all-cash transaction. The price was reported at $65 million, not including stock incentives for Xtreme’s staff of 300. Rob Mee, who was by then CEO of Pivotal Software, recused himself from the decision entirely. The relationship was too personal. The equity he had given years earlier had become a conflict that integrity required him to step away from the decision.

Chamath’s framing had been right: Xtreme had cloned Pivotal’s methodology so faithfully that Pivotal itself eventually bought it back. The company that had been built explicitly as a Canadian Pivotal was now folded back into Pivotal, absorbed into the thing it had studied and replicated.

Amar’s public statement at the time was characteristically forward-looking. “The convergence of mobile, social, big data, and cloud is driving extraordinary change in the enterprise,” he and Sunny said jointly. “To help customers win in this new era, Pivotal is enabling the creation of modern software applications that leverage big and fast data, on a single, cloud-independent platform.” The eyes were already on what was next.

The deal closed, and Amar stayed on briefly. Around that time, Russ Jones told me, he bought a penthouse in downtown Toronto from Phil Kessel, the former Maple Leafs winger. When I asked Amar why he had chosen an apartment when I had assumed he would own some stately Rosedale or Bridle Path house, he said he liked the simplicity of it. Even his taste in real estate is laid back.

“The first exit is always the best exit,” he said later. “You experience a high from the excitement, and then you’re brought back down to everyday life. Despite this, it’s an unforgettable experience and always holds a special place in my heart.”

Amar became GM of Mobile, helping define and scale Pivotal’s enterprise mobile push into a business doing more than $100 million in revenue. It also gave him a close look at operating inside a much larger company, an experience that would matter later.

It was a tumultuous era for Pivotal during this time. It was a random mash of things at that time, with multiple acquisitions, Scott Yara, a venture partner with Sutter Hill Ventures, who worked with Amar at that time at Pivotal, told me.

Xtreme Labs no longer exists today.

But the culture remained: the standups, the pair programming, the demos, the standard. It dispersed into dozens of companies across Toronto and beyond.

Farhan Thawar described pair programming as transformative in the way good methodology often is: it makes the invisible visible, forcing developers to articulate decisions they would otherwise make silently and alone. The idea remained important enough in Farhan’s own career that versions of it still show up at Shopify today.

“Pair programming is a secret weapon. If you’re not doing this yet, try implementing it in your team’s workflow. It doesn’t just improve code quality; it forces intense collaboration and leads to faster unblocking.” Farhan said.

Xtreme’s impact on Toronto tech has faded from public memory, but it shows up everywhere when you look closely. Shopify uses methods developed there. Alumni have gone on to found, lead, invest, and operate across the Canadian tech scene. Founders I spoke with throughout this profile kept circling back to Xtreme as the place where the standard was set.

As Mark Gilbert put it, only half-jokingly, “Amar is sort of the king of Toronto.”

Xtreme’s story also brushes up against Tinder’s. Dinesh Moorjani, then SVP of Mobile at IAC and later founder of Hatch Labs Inc. (Tinder’s owner), met Amar in Barcelona and was struck by what Xtreme had built. Xtreme first worked with IAC as a mobile development partner, then invested in Hatch Labs, where Amar joined the board. “Without Amar,” Dinesh told me, “I may not have started Hatch.” In Dinesh’s telling, there may well have been no swiping right without Amar Varma somewhere in the background.

Amar and Dinesh formed a close friendship during that period and have remained part of each other’s lives since. Dinesh later invested in Autonomic and became an early backer of Mantle; Amar, in turn, became an LP in Dinesh’s fund, Time Zero Capital. The relationship kept compounding, as Amar’s relationships often do.

At Pivotal, Amar had been the executive sponsor on the Ford account, travelling to Detroit regularly and spending real time with the company in person. From that vantage point, he could see the gap up close: Ford understood that the future of the car was changing, but the infrastructure needed to build it did not yet exist. He was not the only person who saw the opportunity, but he was one of the people who recognized earliest that the gap was real, urgent, and worth building around.

As Sunny Madra later explained it to me, Autonomic emerged from work already underway around that problem. There was work done through Jim Hackett, then a Ford board member who would later become Ford’s CEO, at IDEO. With Pivotal’s permission, Sunny and others around him began ideating in the company’s Palo Alto office. Amar was part of that circle from the start, bringing the perspective he had developed from being inside the Ford account and seeing the problem firsthand.

The founding team took shape from there, with Sunny as CEO and Amar as COO, alongside a small group of early collaborators and engineers from their broader Pivotal and Xtreme orbit. The first version of the product was built in Palo Alto: a telemetry platform initially designed for a handful of greenfield lab projects.

The thesis was connected vehicles, not the cars themselves, but the infrastructure layer that would allow them to communicate, be managed, and deliver services that did not yet exist. It was Xtreme’s logic applied to a different domain: the wave is coming, the infrastructure does not exist, so build it. The Transportation Mobility Cloud, as they called it, was designed to connect vehicles, mass transit, pedestrians, city infrastructure, and service providers on a single open platform. It was ambitious in the way only real conviction can make ambition seem reasonable.

Just as important, he had spent enough time with Ford’s executive team to understand both their capability and their anxiety: the double awareness of a company that knew the ground was shifting but was not certain it could move fast enough.

Karam Nijjar saw the Autonomic playbook as something close to a gold standard of building. “Work with a customer, see their problem, build it with them, and sell it to them,” he said.

Inside Ford, Amar had seen the same pattern that shows up in large incumbents over and over: people at the top could see the wave, but the organization beneath them was not designed to move at that speed. That was the opening. Autonomic was not simply a product of connected vehicles. It was a bet that one of the world’s largest car companies would need outside help to build the future quickly enough.

Ford acquired Autonomic in January 2018 for an undisclosed sum. Amar became COO of what would become Ford X, the automaker’s accelerator for outside innovation. He spent three years inside a $180 billion institution, learning what it felt like to build from the inside out, to have a CEO’s support one day and organizational politics the next, to understand that the difference between revolutionary innovation and incremental improvement was not usually a technology gap but a conviction gap. “You have to have the CEO infinitely excited and positive,” he said. “Because if there’s no support at the CEO level, you might as well not do it.”

He left in 2021. He had built infrastructure for mobile. He had built infrastructure for social. He had built infrastructure for connected vehicles. He was looking for the next thing.

Amar met his wife Anna Perevezentseva at work. “It’s not the most dramatic story,” Anna told me. “Like any long-term relationship, it’s had its challenges, but I think we’ve built something solid over the years and are now raising a wonderful family together.”

“Amar is generally very good at compartmentalizing different areas of his life,” Anna told me. “If something is happening at work, he rarely brings it home. He also tends to process things internally rather than talk them through right away. When something is genuinely off, he usually becomes a bit quieter and more introspective as he works through it. He’s very intentional about not letting outside pressures affect our home environment.”

What comes up, again and again, when people describe Amar is not one trait but a pattern. He is generous without being performative, calm without seeming detached, and ambitious without making other people feel used. The wording changes depending on who is talking. The underlying picture does not.

A former Waterloo classmate caught up with him years after graduation. Amar made time, then promoted the classmate’s product in an alumni group chat. There was no expectation of anything back. That kind of story surfaced over and over in my conversations.

“He doesn’t induce stress,” Dinesh Moorjani told me. “He helps relieve it.”

Nihal Mehta put it differently: “He makes other people feel seen, makes other people feel loved. Amar is very human, with a high IQ and EQ. If you need a conversation, he is always there.”

The same steadiness shows up in how people describe him as an operator. Rakesh Malhotra, who has known Amar since Waterloo, framed it through years of working with him: “Amar is the zen guy. Running a company has lots of ups and downs, but Amar has never lost his temper. I’ve never seen it.” Brian Murray, who invested in Mantle through Craft Ventures, made the same observation from a different angle: “Amar is never frantic. He is always calm and sees the big picture.” Scott Yara, who worked alongside him at Pivotal, sharpened the point further: “Amar is who you want to be in a foxhole with. He has courage, he is not afraid of challenges, and pressure doesn’t rattle him.”

There is also the constant element of Amar as a connector. Mark Gilbert described him as “a great connector in a very sincere way.” He told me about introducing a friend named Jason to Amar; Jason called afterward to say Amar was the most amazing person he had ever met. Later, Amar reintroduced Mark to Arif Janmohamed, who would go on to back Mark’s company, Zocks. The introductions kept multiplying.

Zain Manji, the founder of Lazer Technologies, put it more casually: “He is for the people. He will always help founders and push them to achieve big things.” Mike McCauley of Garage Capital has seen the same instinct sharpen rather than fade with success. “Money does one thing to people,” Mike told me. “It makes them more of who they are.” In Amar’s case, more success has meant more time for emerging managers, founders, more guidance, and more capital deployed behind people he believes in.

Sanjay Beri, his Waterloo classmate now running Netskope, pointed to the trait that ties all of this together: “Amar is always looking forward, into the future. Thirsty for what’s next.” Gavin Sherry, who co-founded Autonomic with him, sees the same instinct as a form of contrarianism. Amar tends to see the opportunity differently from the people around him, and often earlier.

“When Amar becomes interested in something, whether it’s tennis, nutrition, or even Duolingo, he becomes obsessed with it,” his wife Anna told me. “But what stands out to me is that, unlike a lot of people who dive into things intensely and then move on quickly, he tends to sustain it. It becomes part of his routine and something he continues to build on over time.”

The same qualities people described in conversation, discipline, generosity, and consistency, also show up in how Amar has chosen to give.

In June 2019, SickKids announced a $3.5 million gift, $1.75 million from Amar Varma, matched by the SickKids Foundation, to establish the first chair in biomedical informatics and artificial intelligence at a Canadian children’s hospital. Anna Goldenberg would hold the chair. The focus would be on AI-assisted prevention: using machine learning to predict deterioration in ICU patients before it becomes catastrophic.

Amar’s connection to SickKids was not new. His son had undergone surgery there for Hirschsprung’s disease, the same condition Amar had been born with. When Amar looked at the technology being used to treat it, he found it almost unchanged from what had been available when he was a baby in Montreal. The medicine had improved. The infrastructure around it had not.

“Philanthropy was something Amar started early,” Karam told me. “He made it a central tenet. This isn’t something you do in your sixties.”

“Amar is someone who makes things happen,” Anna Goldenberg said. “He enables people who are capable of doing things. Any time there was an issue I was facing, not always technology, sometimes changing policy, creating new pathways for AI, Amar was a huge part of that. Communication, support, time, advice, and voicing his opinion.”

She paused. “He is a visionary.”

Russ Jones, the former CFO of Shopify, told me he and Amar had spent years comparing notes on philanthropy. It was not common in Canadian technology, Russ said, to be so invested in the practice of giving. Russ himself, through the Jones Family Foundation, has donated $10 million to the Ottawa Hospital Foundation. He counts Amar among the small group of Canadian builders who treat philanthropy as part of the job.

Amar would join the SickKids Foundation Board of Directors in 2025.

The instinct to give back didn’t come from nowhere. It came from his father.

Nitya had arrived in Canada in the late 1950s with eight dollars in his pocket. He had spent the rest of his life giving quietly.

Amar’s largest gift outside of SickKids landed at the place his father had loved most.

The Varma Family Professorship in Robotics and AI at the University of Waterloo was endowed with $1 million, connecting the institution across two generations: Nityanand graduated in 1964, Amar in 1999. “To the extent that robotics can make human life better, we want to support that as a family,” Amar said.

The gift was as much about Nitya as it was about the institution. Waterloo had given Nityanand his first Canadian foothold. Six decades later, the Varma name was associated there in perpetuity. Amar had taken the foundation his father had laid and built a permanent monument to it.

“He was very happy that I ended up at Waterloo,” Amar said.

Nitya passed away shortly before Amar’s fiftieth birthday in 2025. It was the first major milestone of Amar’s life without him.

Gavin Sherry told me Nitya’s death had landed hard. At the birthday party, Amar was visibly moved in front of the room. “Amar is very authentic,” Gavin said. “He is not afraid to share his feelings and emotions.”

“What moved me,” Anna Perevezentseva told me, “was the sheer number of people who came, not out of obligation, but because they genuinely care about him. There were friends from every stage of his life. Early years in Ottawa. College. California. Our life in Toronto. The fact that he’s maintained meaningful relationships across all those chapters was incredibly powerful to see. I think it says a lot about the kind of person he is that people not only stay in his life, but show up for him that way.”

Almost everyone I spoke to for this profile was in attendance at that birthday.

“I thought he should be retired by now,” Chris Ye said.

He was starting again, this time with more pattern recognition, more scar tissue, and more conviction than ever.

Mantle began with Amar’s own problem. After fifteen years as an angel investor, LP, GP, and board member, he had made nearly every mistake possible in managing private assets: transcription errors, omissions, small inaccuracies that compounded into real money.

“Amar sees ideas and makes them realities,” Russ Jones told me.

“The existing software wasn’t terrible,” he said. “But it often wasn’t good enough, especially when it came to workflow. People would rush to input data they thought was correct. Most times, small errors weren’t a big deal. But sometimes they had serious consequences and couldn’t be fixed after they were made.” He was describing himself. He built Mantle because he needed it, and it didn’t exist.

The problem was straightforward. Cap tables are among the most important records a private company maintains, and among the most error-prone. They begin as simple spreadsheets and, over time, become dense, fragile systems shaped by financings, option grants, transfers, secondaries, and legal edge cases. Existing software, Carta above all, had built a strong position, but Amar believed the market had moved, and the workflow had not.

Amar looked at this and saw what he’d seen before: a wave, an infrastructure gap, and an incumbent that had built a good moat around the wrong thing. “Carta has created a great moat,” he said, with the tone of someone genuinely giving credit before explaining why it doesn’t protect them. “They’re the number one player in the space. In my opinion, there’s no number two yet.”

“I was asking what my ownership exposure was to private company X,” Amar said. “I had to go through a bunch of work, was I direct? Did a company sell to them? Which funds were on my end? Which rounds were they in? If you can’t answer what your cost basis is for these private assets and what your actual value is today, there’s a reason for that. There’s a lot of friction. We’re trying to eliminate a lot of that friction.”

The team he assembled drew on fifteen years of working relationships. Co-founders Dwayne Forde and Amit Jethani were engineers and product builders who had already been through the grind at Xtreme and Autonomic and knew what it meant to work to Amar’s standard of care. When I toured Mantle’s office, I got to speak with Dwayne. He told me that out of the roughly 30 employees, the vast majority are from Xtreme, Pivotal and Autonomic days.

Nihal led the seed round through Eniac Ventures. On the final due diligence trip to Toronto, Nihal noted that the Mantle team were some of the best product and engineering folks he had seen, and that the team would take a bullet for Amar. Friends came in alongside: Russ Jones, Dinesh Moorjani, and Farhan Thawar invested. David Sacks, Bill Lee, and Brian Murray at Craft Ventures invested. Sierra Ventures, Leaders Fund, and VaynerFund joined. The investors did not need convincing. When Amar started Mantle, Brian said, it was a no-brainer to get involved. The seed round closed at $10.5 million.

Under the cap table framing, Mantle is building something larger: an AI-native equity management platform. The wedge is concrete: the same legal documents that founders, lawyers, and CFOs spend hours manually transcribing into spreadsheets, SAFEs, option grants, share certificates, side letters, Mantle’s AI can ingest in seconds. A workflow that once took hours of legal back-and-forth becomes a single upload. That can sound incremental until you consider how often the process occurs, and how often the manual version produces errors that compound into real money.

The product has expanded outward from there. In December 2024, Mantle partnered with Nasdaq Private Market to integrate cap table data directly into NPM’s secondary liquidity infrastructure, letting private companies run tender offers without the usual data-wrangling. Mantle was an early adopter and reference implementation of the Open Cap Table Format, an industry data standard designed to make cap tables portable across platforms, a quiet but pointed move against the lock-in that incumbents like Carta have historically depended on. In 2025, Mantle launched free SAFEs with built-in e-signatures and a free Starter tier for early-stage founders.

“If you’re hiring your first employees or raising initial capital, you should have a cap table tool that meets you where you’re at,” Amar said when Starter launched. The strategic logic is straightforward. Carta’s moat is being first. The way to compete is to get there earlier, with a product that doesn’t punish founders for growing.

By Mantle’s fourth anniversary in late 2025, the company had hundreds of product deployments and a customer base spanning startups, law firms, and limited partners. It is not yet at Carta’s scale. It does not need to be. Amar has built infrastructure businesses before. The pattern, every time, has been to find the wave early, build the rails, and let the customers come.

When I was at the Mantle office, the company was growing faster than the space could hold it. They had taken over half a floor of a Bay Street building and were already outgrowing it. While I was there, Amar was huddled with his co-founders, working through the seating arrangements to slot in more desks and figure out how to fit more people. It is the kind of problem every scaling company eventually has, and Mantle was right in the middle of it.

What stood out in the office was not noise or swagger but concentration. Amar did not have the energy of a theatrical founder performing urgency for the room. He moved more quietly than that, dropping into conversations with co-founders, asking pointed questions, listening closely, then moving on. The effect was less command-and-control than steady pressure. Nothing about it looked frantic. Everything about it suggested a company trying to move quickly without losing precision.

Amar is already known for a lot: Xtreme, Autonomic, the investments, and the helping hand behind multiple companies. Mantle is still too early to belong definitively on that list. But the pattern is familiar. He has found another wave, another infrastructure problem, and another moment that fits the instincts he has been refining for three decades. It may yet become the biggest thing he has built.

“People sometimes underestimate how much Amar is actually thinking about things,” Anna said. “He approaches his work the same way he does anything he gets into; he becomes a bit obsessed with it. Even when it seems like he’s not focused on it, I know his mind is still working through it in the background.”

Brian Murray described Amar as a skilled Jenga player, someone who taps lightly at the blocks and finds the weak points, who understands the difference between the pieces that are holding everything up and the pieces that only look like they are.

What I’d want this story to capture,” Anna told me, “is that everything he has achieved is the result of consistent, disciplined hard work. From the outside, people sometimes attribute success to luck. But what I’ve seen behind it is years of effort and focus that most people never see. That quiet, behind-the-scenes work is a big part of who he is.”

Nihal Mehta, who has watched him for fifteen years and played thousands of hours of tennis against that nasty serve and net game, put it simply: “The best is ahead of him.”

A few hours later, we are back at the same restaurant, now over dinner and a drink. We talk about everything: his friends, his family, his ambitions. At one point, I ask him, point-blank, how he wants to be remembered.

He does not seem to be thinking about that yet. He is still too busy building.

Amar’s phone lights up; his kids are FaceTiming him to ask when he will be home. We make a quick exit back into the cold Toronto night, where a snowstorm is brewing. Amar pulls his coat tight and puts on his toque and disappears into the storm, already on to whatever comes next.

Thank you to everyone who contributed insights, quotes and feedback to make this profile possible.

Anand Agarwala, Anna Goldenberg, Anna Perevezentseva, Arif Janmohamed, Bram Sugarman, Brian Murray, Chris Ye, Dinesh Moorjani, Dwayne Forde, Farhan Thawar, Gavin Sherry, Herman Paek, Josh Raha, Karamdeep Nijjar, Mark Gilbert, Mike McCauley, Nihal Mehta, Rakesh Malhotra, Rob Mee, Russ Jones, Sanjay Beri, Satish Kanwar, Scott Yara, Shane Parrish, Sunny Madra, and Zain Manji.

At The Hard Part, I’ve mostly focused on Canadians building in Canada.

But after three years of digging, researching, and asking, “Where’s this founder from?” I kept finding the same thing: Canadians are everywhere.

OpenAI. Uber. Databricks. Slack.
Some of the most iconic tech companies in the world have Canadian fingerprints all over them.

There’s a running joke I have with friends:
Say the name of a well-known tech company, and I can probably name a Canadian who helped build it.

From founders and early engineers to C-suite execs and VC firms, Canadians have quietly shaped nearly every major tech company and trend of the past 20 years.

This isn’t about brain drain. It’s a spotlight.
A reminder that the next OpenAI, the next Databricks, the next $100B company?
It could start with someone from Waterloo, Calgary, or a tiny town in Saskatchewan.

And I know I’m missing people. That’s the best part.
Drop names in the comments. This list should grow forever, and I will do updated articles over time.

Just How Many?

📌 “Waterloo has been the number one place we hire from in the world.”
—Bill Gates

• 828,000+ Canadian-born immigrants lived in the U.S. as of 2023

• ~1,762 Canadian tech workers leave for the U.S. each year

• One VC’s internal data pegged 40,000–50,000 Canadian university grads working in U.S. tech

• A basic LinkedIn search (Bay Area + CEO/founder title + UBC, Queen’s, McGill, etc.) pulls up thousands of results

This isn’t a trickle. It’s a pipeline.

The Big Ones

🇨🇦 The University of Toronto AI Mafia

• OpenAI (Valued at $300B)
  Co-founded by Ilya Sutskever (Toronto). Helped invent AlexNet. Was OpenAI’s Chief Scientist and is now co-founder of Safe Superintelligence (SSI), which already has a rumoured $32B valuation.

• xAI (Raising at $200B)
  Jimmy Ba (UofT prof and Hinton protégé) co-founded Elon Musk’s AI company.

• Anthropic (Raising at $170B)
  Chris Olah (UofT + Google Brain). Co-founded Anthropic, after stints at OpenAI and DeepMind.

📈 Total value created by Canadian AI founders:
$700B+

Elon, Technically 🇨🇦

• Attended Queen’s, holds a Canadian passport, and his mom’s from here

• His companies include:
  • Tesla – $925B
  • SpaceX – $400B
  • xAI – $200B
  • Neuralink – $8.5B
  • Boring Co – $7B
  = ~$1.5T in value

Also: Shivon Zilis, Neuralink exec and mother to two of Elon’s children, is Canadian.

Marketplaces

• Uber
  Founded by Garrett Camp (Calgary).

• Instacart
  Apoorva Mehta (Waterloo). Got into YC by sending beer via Instacart to Garry Tan.
  Now building Cloud Health Systems ($200M valuation).

• Lyft
  Rajat Suri was a co-founder of Zimride, which became Lyft.

Infra & Data

• Databricks
  Co-founded by Matei Zaharia (Waterloo) and Reynold Xin (Toronto).
  Matei also created Apache Spark. Databricks is now worth $62B.

• Cloudflare
  Co-founded by Michelle Zatlyn from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.
  Market cap: $65B+

The Others

• Slack – Stewart Butterfield (Lund, BC). Sold to Salesforce for $28B.

• Notion – Ivan Zhao (UBC). Valued at $10B.

• Faire – Marcelo Cortes (Waterloo). Built Cash App, now helping lead the $12.6B company.

• PagerDuty – Founded in 2009 by Waterloo grads: Alex Solomon, Andrew Miklas, Baskar Puvanathasan.

• Roblox – David Baszucki (Winnipeg). Market cap: $76B.

• New Relic – Lew Cirne (Port Hope, Ontario). Taken private for $6.5B in 2023.

• Swarm Technologies – Founded by Sara Spangelo. Acquired by SpaceX for $524M.

• Aurora - Founded by Chris Urmson. Market cap: $10B.

Greatest Angel Ever

David Cheriton

• In 1998, Larry and Sergey met on his front porch.

• He and Andy Bechtolsheim wrote the first check to fund Google.

• Cheriton’s $100K investment is now worth an estimated $10B–$15B.

• Co-founded:
  • Granite Systems (sold to Cisco for $220M)
  • Kealia (sold to Sun Microsystems)
  • Arista Networks (IPO’d, now worth ~$100B)

• Waterloo named its CS school after him.

Canadian C-Suite Talent

Canadians are running the show across US tech:

• Sukhinder Singh Cassidy (Xero CEO)

• Andréa Mallard (Pinterest CMO)

• Burt Podbere (CrowdStrike CFO)

• Michel Protti (Meta Chief Privacy Officer)

• Jenny Gonsalves (Lyra Health CTO)

• Sonalee Parekh (Asana CFO)

• Adrienne Down Coulson (Rakuten COO)

• Emily Dancyger King (Lime CPO)

• Michael Scarpelli (Snowflake CFO)

• Amit Agarwal (ex-Datadog President)

• Andrew MacDonald (Uber President & COO)

• Chris Rogers (Instacart CEO)

• Avlok Kohli (AngelList CEO)

• Jeff Skoll (ex-Ebay President)

• Rob Burgess (Board: Adobe, NVIDIA)

• Dan Gill (Carvana CPO)

• Alex MacDonald (ex-NASA Chief Economist)

• Rob Lloyd (ex-Cisco President)

• Praveer Melwani (Figma CFO)

• Patrick Spence (Board: SNAP & ex-Sonos CEO)

• and many more

Sleepers

• James Hamilton (AWS)
  Architect of Amazon’s infrastructure scale. Called the “brain behind AWS’s data centers.” Helped shape cloud as we know it.
  

• Jonathan Abrams (Friendster)
  Founded the first social network in 2002, before MySpace or Facebook.
  David Baszucki (Roblox) was an early investor. When Abrams demo’d Friendster, Baszucki was blown away by seeing his social graph visualized.
  Friendster peaked at 111M users.
  In 2010, Facebook bought Friendster’s patent portfolio for $40M.
  

• James Gosling
  Invented Java. Born in Calgary. Worked at Sun, Google, and AWS.

Canadian VC Power

Canadians aren’t just building companies—they’re funding them too. From seed to IPO, Canadians are everywhere on the cap table.

💰 Firms Founded by Canadians

• 8VC – Alex Kolicich – $6B AUM
  Backed: Anduril, Cognition, Saronic, Asana, Flexport

• DCVC Bio – John Hamer – $4B AUM

• Notable Capital (formerly part of GGV Capital) – Scott Bonham – $4.2B AUM at time of 2024 split
  GGV split into Notable (U.S.) and Granite Asia

• Bedrock – Geoff Lewis – $2B AUM
  Backed: OpenAI, Rippling, Flock Safety, Vercel

• Afore Capital – Gaurav Jain – $500M AUM

• Mithril Capital – Co-founded by Ajay Royan with Peter Thiel in 2012
  (AUM not publicly disclosed)

• Also, Garry Tan, now President of YC, was born in Winnipeg and lived there until age 10.

📊 VC Firms With Canadian GPs or Investors

Alphabetical, and everywhere

Canadians are scattered across the venture stack—from top-tier seed funds to crossover and growth:

a16z, Alta Park Capital, Aspenwood Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Bedrock, Buckley Ventures, Coatue, Craft Ventures, DCVC Bio, Dragoneer, Eclipse, General Catalyst, GGV Capital / Notable Capital, Greylock, ICONIQ Capital, Insight Partners, IVP, L Catterton, Lightspeed, Madrona, NEA, Pioneer Fund, Position Ventures, Roar Ventures, Sequoia, SoftBank, Sound Ventures, South Park Commons, Spark Capital, Thoma Bravo, Tiger Global, xFund

It might be easier to name the firms that don’t have Canadian involvement.

Canadian Early Builders

• Chamath Palihapitiya – Joined Facebook in 2007

• Jeff Mallett – Became President & COO of Yahoo! when it had just 11 employees

• Canadians were early at Slack, Uber, Instacart, Figma, Stripe, Airbnb, DoorDash

Founders Building in the U.S.

A few quick shoutouts to more Canadians building in the US

• Substack - $1.1B valuation

• Clay - $2B valuation

• EvenUp - $1B valuation

• Augment - $1B valuation

• …and teams behind:
  Augment, Magic, Shepherd, Super.com, Patch, Railway, Pilgrim, OpenPhone, Re, Revyl, Power, Agora, Mintlify, Dexa, Circleback, Poppy, Datacurve, Landbase, Flexpa, Finni Health, Ollama, Hedgehog, Spade, Uniblock, Pebble v2, Vapi, Valstad, Nox Metals, OffDeal, Fable Security, Solcoa Industries, Sentradel and thousands more.

Final Word

This list isn’t complete, and that’s exactly the point.

Canadian talent is embedded at every layer of U.S. tech.
From the first check to the billion-dollar IPO. From side projects to superintelligence.

If you’re a young founder in Canada reading this:
They started where you are. Now it’s your turn.