Afraj Gill is President and Co-Founder of Zown, the Canadian home-buying platform now selling in California, and the person who recruited Stability AI into On Deck before Stable Diffusion existed.
Worth knowing
He has taken Canadian companies into new markets repeatedly, negotiating the first North American city partnership for a dockless bike-share and now opening California for a real estate product built in Canada. He knows the operating side of hypergrowth from the inside, having helped Stability AI's executive team scale after a $100M round.
Story
Afraj grew up into the Queen's University commerce program, wrote a national opinion column for The Globe and Mail while he was still there, and spent 2014 at Google's headquarters on the Special Projects team. He co-founded Dropbike in Toronto in 2017 and led it into multiple markets in under six months, starting with a pilot in Kingston, Ontario that made it the first smart bike-share to partner officially with a North American city. A stint running ventures at RBC followed, then three years at On Deck, where he co-headed the Scale program as the community grew to 300 people.
Highlights
- Co-Founder, Zown: $300M+ in Canadian transactions, 250+ homebuyers, California launch 2025
- Co-founded Dropbike; raised from Haystack and Trucks VC, early backers of Instacart and D…
- Partner and Co-Head of Scale, On Deck (2021-2023), backed by Founders Fund
- Entrepreneur in Residence, C100, 2023-2025; Director, Ventures, RBC, 2020-2021
- BCom with First Class Honours, Queen's University; elected Senator for 23,000+ students
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