Vartika Manasvi is the first woman entrepreneur from South Asia to receive a Canadian startup visa, and now runs the startup practice at MaRS Discovery District.
Worth knowing
She has founded two companies and sold both, one of them a Calgary-built platform that helped Canadian employers hire technical talent from global markets without the usual bias in screening. She also pools angel capital for founders working on digital identity and the decentralized internet, and she has worked markets from Bengaluru and Dubai to Singapore and San Francisco.
Story
Vartika quit her job in December 2015 to build Imeyou, a hyperlocal social network in Bengaluru, as a side project. She sold it in 2017, spent a year as Entrepreneur in Residence at NVIDIA, and in 2018 moved to Canada on a startup visa backed by the Government of Alberta through Platform Calgary. From Calgary she built StackRaft, a global tech talent platform, and landed its first customer at Communitech's True North event in Waterloo, the city she now calls home. StackRaft was acquired by a Los Angeles venture studio. She has since coached founders at Communitech and through Zone Learning at Toronto Metropolitan University, and today she works with startups at MaRS while running an angel syndicate for digital identity and decentralized internet companies.
Highlights
- Runs Sovereign Internet and Identity, a community-run angel syndicate
- Completed a fund thesis with VC Lab, Cohort 5
- Startup coach, Zone Learning, Toronto Metropolitan University, 5+ years
- Mentors founders through DMZ, Communitech, NASSCOM and Seedstars
- MBA; 18+ years in tech entrepreneurship
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