Rade Kovacevic

Worth knowing

He has built an industry from nothing twice: founding the trade associations that organized Canadian cannabis before it was legal, then leading one of its largest companies through national scale. He now knows where the real bottlenecks sit in real-time GenAI video and voice, and he backs and advises climate and energy companies with his own capital.

Story

Rade studied at the University of Guelph and started out at the Medical Cannabis Centre of Guelph, a company later acquired by Canopy Growth. He rose to Senior VP and Managing Director for Canada, then to President and Chief Product Officer in July 2019, and along the way founded the two associations that gave the industry its first organized voice. He left Canopy in 2020 and turned to climate and energy, co-founding the carbon reduction company Invert and backing disruptive companies through his own investment vehicle. In 2023 he started over in a new field, co-founding PolarGrid in Ottawa with Henry Chen and Sev Geraskin to attack inference latency, the constraint holding back real-time AI.

Highlights

• Co-Founder & CEO, PolarGrid, edge AI inference (2023-present)
• President & Chief Product Officer, Canopy Growth Corporation (2019-2020)
• Co-Founder and board member, Invert Inc., carbon reduction
• Board member, BluWave-ai, AI for energy grid optimization
• Founder, Cannabis Canada Association; Harvard Business School GMP