Michael Coombs

Worth knowing

He has built and run the finance function at venture-backed companies from FP&A through Series B fundraising, and he did leveraged finance and restructuring deals on the banking side before that, so he knows how both the operator and the capital provider read the same numbers. He has also done corporate planning at the scale of a global semiconductor manufacturer.

Story

Michael studied physics and then computer science at Acadia, and spent his first years out of school as a software architect at DWL in Toronto. Finance came next: an MBA, then investment banking at UBS and RBC working on leveraged finance and restructuring. He moved to the operating side at GlobalFoundries, where he ran company-wide quarterly planning and scenario modelling for its manufacturing sites before taking the CFO seat for its Mainstream business unit. Corporate FP&A roles at JUUL Labs and NEXT Trucking followed, then finance leadership at Ripcord, the Hayward robotics company digitizing documents. From 2023-2026 he served as CFO of Certn.

Canadian story

Grew up in Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia. Moved to Toronto to work as a software developer, then to Chicago Booth for business school. Came to the Bay Area in 2005, worked on Wall St. and then in tech finance since. Latest roles were CFO in Series B tech startups.

Highlights

• CFO, Certn (Victoria, BC) (2023-2026)
• Executive VP, Finance at Ripcord (2021-2023)
• MBA in Finance, Accounting and Entrepreneurship, Chicago Booth
• BSc (Hons) Physics and BCS Computer Science, Acadia University