Technology is a big generator of global billionaire fortunes, and many of those entrepreneurs hold Canadian citizenship.
But many young wunderkinds in the Canadian tech scene follow a pattern: They were raised in Canada, educated in Canada, but then moved to Silicon Valley and hit it big.
That’s not universal, of course. Tobias Lutke, founder of Shopify, moved to Canada as a child and stayed. Mark Leonard and Serge Godin established successful tech firms and remain in the country.
Athas Kouvaras, partner and Toronto-based portfolio manager with Richter Family Office, says key elements of the tech environment are still missing here. Canada has research expertise in artificial intelligence, particularly in Toronto, Montreal and Edmonton, and ample energy resources to fuel high tech’s mighty need for power. But there hasn’t been much development in the way of chip and cloud technology. And big successful models like Shopify are too few here, Kouvaras adds.
The United States provides a better tax regime and access to big capital markets, he says.
Kouvaras sees some incentives for future tech entrepreneurs to stay, including the recent announcement of an AI strategy by the federal government and the quality of life Canada can offer. He advocates for more aggressive incentives, including lower taxes, to attract high tech.
On the positive side, he says Canada shouldn’t discount its multiculturalism as an attraction for new entrepreneurs. In the past three years he has spoken with three young private equity entrepreneurs of Middle Eastern backgrounds, and they were planning to move to Canada. A couple of them had experience at Canadian universities. “All three of them, for family reasons, were more comfortable culturally moving to Toronto than the U.S., including one individual who had no ties here and was Ivy League-educated.”
While the richest of the rich may largely live beyond our borders, Canada offers successful tech firms, investors and entrepreneurs.
From a wealth advisory and investment perspective, tech leaders have some exceptional characteristics, says Kouvaras. More than other sectors, they can be broken down into two camps: the natives who are immersed in their niche, and the MBA crowd that views tech as a business opportunity.
Those differences influence decisions regarding wealth generation and investment diversification, he says. “Our job as a multi-generational, long-term wealth management firm is focused on diversifying that capital to some extent and providing some governance structure and framing around how they make investments.”
Will the vast fortunes being made now survive into future generations?
Kouvaras says some of these new billionaires aren’t yet in the family mindset. When they arrive there they will have to relinquish some control and listen to other professionals.
This Canadian Family Offices list of rich Canadian tech leaders is a bit different than others that have been published. We didn’t include cryptocurrency moguls. And we made some judgments on Canadian connections; in most cases, our list includes individuals who have been documented to have not just Canadian citizenship but have lived here, even if it was just long enough to earn a university degree.
That’s why Joseph Tsai and Ling Tang, who appear on many Canadian lists, aren’t here. Their connections to our country beyond holding citizenship haven’t been reliably reported on.
The estimated fortunes listed below lean heavily on Forbes’ richest list, which are based on known holdings of public traded investments and research on private sector ownership.
Christopher Olah
Chris Olah’s fortune took a sudden jump this year as his firm Anthropic headed into a public offering. On June 4, Forbes estimated the 33-year-old Olah’s wealth at US$15.5 billion.
Olah is a co-founder of Anthropic, which builds large scale AI systems and describes itself as being “dedicated to securing (AI’s) benefits and mitigating its risks.” Claude is the Anthropic AI chatbot.
Born in Toronto, Olah attended the Abelard School, a private school for the gifted, before attending the University of Toronto. He left U of T without earning a degree but later received a Thiel Fellowship to pursue independent research.
He worked at OpenAI and Google Brain before joining Anthropic and now resides in San Francisco.
In May, Olah was asked to speak at the Vatican at the official presentation of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on artificial intelligence and human dignity.
David Cheriton
Known as the “professor billionaire,” David Cheriton, 75, was born in Vancouver and grew up in Edmonton. Forbes pegged his fortune at US$10.2 billion in early June.
An early investment in Google, as well as the founding and sale of his own firms, helped vault Cheriton, who is known for his frugal lifestyle, into the billionaire heights.
Cheriton earned degrees from the University of Waterloo and the University of British Columbia, and he has donated lavishly to both schools. The David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at Waterloo received a $25 million donation for graduate studies and research.
Cheriton moved to the U.S. in the early 1980s to teach at Stanford University in California. He lives in Palo Alto, Calif. He is divorced and has four children.
Tobias Lutke
A mainstay of Canada’s e-commerce sector, Tobi Lutke is co-founder and CEO of Shopify, which helps retailers set up online shopping arms. Forbes estimated his wealth at US$10.1 billion in early June.
The German-born Lutke, 45, started coding at age 12 and entered a computer programming apprenticeship at 16. He moved to Canada in 2003.
He founded Shopify in Ottawa in 2006. The firm, which went public in 2015, generated $9 billion in revenue in 2024.
Lutke enjoys driving racecars. He is married, has three children and lives in Toronto.
Leonid Boguslavsky
Tech venture capitalist Leonid Boguslavsky, 74, has relatively little connection to Canada beyond a Canadian passport and a brief stint teaching computer science at the University of Toronto in the early 1990s. Forbes estimates his fortune at US$8.8 billion.
The Russian-born Boguslavsky developed system integration software. His firm, LVS, was bought in 1996 by Price Waterhouse for $10 million, and he stayed on at the company (now known as PwC) as a managing partner.
As a venture capitalist he invested in a number of firms, including the Russian search engine Yandex, which achieved major success.
In 2022, Boguslavsky, who lives in Italy, denounced the Russian war in Ukraine. An avid triathlon participant, he released a statement to a triathlon publication attesting that he “moved from Russia to Canada as a young man to work as a University Professor, and it was from there that he started an investment career that has turned into a global portfolio of successful businesses … Leonid has no political ties to Russia.”
Daniel Nadler
Toronto-born Daniel Nadler, 43, has made his US$7.6 billion fortune in artificial intelligence.
Nadler did his undergrad studies at the University of Toronto before heading to Harvard for a PhD. His career in AI began while he was a PhD student when he founded Kensho Technologies, a machine learning firm that was acquired by S&P Global in 2018 for US$550 million.
In 2022, he co-founded OpenEvidence, a medical search engine and AI resource for doctors, which reached the US$12 billion valuation mark in 2026. OpenEvidence is free for doctors, making its money through advertising.
Nadler is a published poet and has dabbled in financing films, including Palmer and Motherless Brooklyn. He lives in Surfside, Fla.
Garrett Camp
Garrett Camp, 47, is best known for co-founding the ride-share giant Uber. Forbes estimated the Calgary-born entrepreneur’s wealth at US$4.9 billion in May.
Camp and three colleagues founded the search engine StumbleUpon in 2001 while Camp was still at the University of Calgary. He received his B.Sc. in electrical engineering that year and went on to receive his M.Sc. also at U of C in 2005. His research focus was collaborative systems, evolutionary algorithms and information retrieval.
StumbleUpon, and Camp, moved to Silicon Valley in 2006. Camp still lives in California.
He co-founded Uber in 2009. In 2014, he founded Expa Labs, a tech venture company investing in and spinning off new firms. He is reported to be in a long-term relationship with Eliza Nguyen.
Mark Leonard and family
Torontonian Mark Leonard has built a sizable fortune with Constellation Software Inc., an umbrella investment firm that acquires and holds small, specialized software firms.
The 70-year-old entrepreneur’s fortune was estimated at US$3.1 billion in May by Forbes.
Leonard rarely gives interviews and rarely has been photographed. A Globe and Mail article from 2025 described him as “tall and powerfully built, like a linebacker, with a deep voice and British accent.”
Leonard earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Guelph and an MBA at the University of Western Ontario.
He founded Constellation in 1995 and owns an estimated seven per cent of the multibillion-dollar firm, which invests in niche business software around the globe. Leonard stepped down as president in 2025 and as a member of the board in March this year.
Family details are scant, but Leonard’s son Damien helms his own venture capital firm, Pinetree Capital.
Michelle Zatlyn
Originally from Prince Albert, Sask., Michelle Zatlyn, 46, is a co-founder of Cloudflare Inc., an Internet security and cloud network firm. Forbes estimated her wealth at US$2.9 billion in early June.
Zatlyn earned her undergrad education in chemistry and business at McGill University, with a plan to become a doctor. She pursued her MBA at Harvard and held an internship at Google.
Zatlyn worked as a product manager at Toshiba and was a founding team member of the Canadian firm Achievers, a provider of employee recognition and rewards software.
In 2009, Zatlyn and two classmates from Harvard founded Cloudflare. By 2024 the company was earning $1.7 billion in revenue. It has 17 offices worldwide and boasts on its website that 38 per cent of Fortune 500 companies are Cloudflare customers.
Zatlyn is married with two children and lives in San Francisco.
Serge Godin
Tech pioneer Serge Godin, 77, founded the information technology and consulting firm CGI in 1976 in Quebec City. He is still active on the firm’s board. By 2024, CGI was in 40 countries and had more than 94,000 employees. Forbes estimates his fortune at US$2 billion.
Godin was born in Shipshaw, Que., a village north of Montreal. His father owned a sawmill. Godin developed an interest in computers, earning a diploma in computer science and an MBA from l’Université Laval in Quebec City.
From its beginning in Godin’s home basement, CGI has grown to be one of the largest IT firms in the world, acquiring scores of companies along the way and serving business, government and military clients.
Godin lives in Montreal. He is married with two children. His daughter Julie is chair of CGI’s board of directors.
Alex Shevchenko
Grammarly co-founder Alex Shevchenko is originally from Ukraine. He earned his MBA at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management in 2006 and holds Canadian citizenship.
Forbes estimated his wealth at US$1.9 billion in June.
Shevchenko launched Grammarly with colleague Max Lytvyn, who also holds Canadian citizenship, and Dmytro Lider. The trio’s earlier startup was MyDropbox, a tool that detects plagiarism.
Grammarly is worth about US$8 billion. Shevchenko, the firm’s product lead, once told the Rotman School publication Insights Hub that as an English-as-a-second-language speaker himself, he witnessed how people can miss opportunities because they struggle with communication.
Grammarly was founded to apply artificial intelligence to help people communicate accurately and clearly. Shevchenko lives in San Francisco.
Kathy Kerr is a veteran online and print journalist who, as a newspaper reporter, editor, and now freelance writer has covered the Canadian business and financial scene for more than three decades. Kathy has contributed to Canadian Family Offices for four years and has also written for The Globe and Mail,the Real Estate News Exchangeand various commercial business publications. She also comments on Alberta politics for TV, radio and online publications.
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