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Lisa-Marie Assenza

Co-Founder and CEO · Impacked

Lisa-Marie Assenza built Impacked, the first venture-backed B2B marketplace for primary packaging, out of a sourcing problem she kept hitting as a global brand manager at Unilever.

Worth knowing

She knows how packaging actually gets sourced, from the brand side and now from the supplier side, and she has raised institutional money from US funds to build a marketplace around it. She is useful on finding suppliers, moving a product line to more sustainable materials, and what it takes to sell software into an old-line industry. Consumer brand founders and marketplace builders should write.

Story

Lisa-Marie studied business at Ivey at Western, got her first look at consumer packaged goods through a customer development internship at Loblaws, and spent years at Unilever in brand roles across Canada and the US, including St. Ives, Vaseline and naturals new business development. Along the way she took a graphic design degree at Parsons. In 2020 she left to start Impacked with co-founder Natasha Trueman, betting that primary packaging deserved a real marketplace rather than a chain of phone calls. From New York, she now runs the company, and part of the work is pushing the industry toward more sustainable materials.

Highlights

  • Co-Founder and CEO, Impacked (2020-present)
  • Raised $2.5M seed led by TenOneTen Ventures; $3.3M total (2022)
  • Seed backers include 2048 Ventures, FJ Labs, Quiet Capital, SpringTime Ventures
  • Forbes 30 Under 30, Enterprise Technology (2024)
  • HBA, Ivey Business School, Western University; design degree, Parsons

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