Forum Ventures® was started from a place of helpfulness, with the mission to make the B2B SaaS journey easier, more accessible and successful for early-stage founders.
We invest in early-stage SaaS founders first, and their companies second. We treat our community with immense respect, integrity, honesty, and inclusivity. We are humbled daily – we know we don’t know it all – and we stay open to learning, to different and new ideas, and to growing together. We're passionate about helping founders and we mean it when we say founders come first.
Michael Cardamone was one of the first 30 employees at Box in a BD role and then led partnerships at AcademixDirect. After 6 years in operating roles, he launched Forum Ventures. He is also an angel investor a dozen companies, including in the seed round of Flexport.
Taylor Walker is our Head of People where she helps build and support our team with the resources necessary to stay engaged and healthy. She works with our portfolio founders building talent and HR strategy, as well as operations support. Previous to Forum, Taylor built out people and talent functions at Atomic VC Canada, and SaaS scaleup, Auvik Networks.
Olivia O’Sullivan is the Head of Platform at Forum Ventures. She builds communities, connections and resources that help early-stage founders go from zero to sustainable. Olivia joined Forum Ventures from Dow Jones where she managed Product & Innovation Strategy.
Steph is a community driven Brooklyn native that has joined Forum Ventures from the NYC public sector. They are an award winning researcher that worked closely with various public officials building equity driven initiatives through public/private partnerships. At Forum Ventures, Steph brings that mission driven attitude to uplifting underestimated and underrepresented founders, as well as supporting portfolio founders through their time in our program.
Dani is focused on supporting our founders and their surrounding ecosystem to ensure the Forum community is connected and thriving. Prior to joining Forum, Daniela was an operator in ed-tech start-ups
James Murphy is Forum’s General Partner, and was the Co-Founder of Robly, a marketing automation platform based in New York City. James is an active angel investor and advisor to numerous early stage SaaS startups.
Maia is a partner and Managing Director at Forum where she works with SaaS founders from inception to scale. She has spent over 20 years founding, building and scaling award-winning SaaS products for Entrepreneurs and SMBs at places like LexisNexis, Pitney Bowes and most recently at Shopify, where she helped found, launch and scale their Shipping and Fulfillment products from inception to 60%+ merchant adoption and $Bs of transportation spend.
Alexis Clarfield-Henry is a B2B SaaS marketing specialist who spent 12+ years in the advertising industry before joining Unata, a Toronto-based B2B tech startup, as an early employee and the first marketer.
Jonah Midanik has spent the last twenty years at the intersection of marketing and technology as a serial entrepreneur in Canada. Jonah has been lucky enough to have several different lenses on the founder journey from bootstrapping, to launching new corporate divisions, and raising 8 figures of venture capital.
Paulina focuses on building and nurturing our investor community in order to make the best possible matches between investors and our portfolio companies. Paulina joins us from Microsoft, where she spent the last 2+ years leading community, investor and partnership initiatives for the Microsoft for Startups Program.
Bocar sits at the intersection of investing and working 1:1 with portfolio founders through the early stages of building, including go-to-market, founder-led sales, and fundraising. As part of the founding team of the Enterprise product at Hootsuite, Bocar helped the business grow to over $150M+ and 2,000+ employees in under seven years.
David is an Investor at Forum Ventures and focuses on sourcing, evaluating, and executing investment opportunities for the firm. He enjoys surfacing incredible SaaS businesses in the earliest stages of their development and partnering with them to help accelerate their growth. He brings over 5 years of experience in the software investment, market research, and management consulting space.
Alice leads the process of transforming concepts into companies by designing and validating solutions and helping our founders translate insights into product. Prior to joining Forum, Alice was a business designer and strategist in a venture studio.
Sid is helping launch and grow B2B startups. Prior to joining Forum, Sid was the founder of Broca, an AI SaaS startup. He has also consulted for and led growth at dozens of early-stage SaaS startups. He has a passion for all things AI and technology.
Neal Sarraf is a Managing Director and Partner at Forum Ventures. He focuses on pre-seed and seed investments and works alongside portfolio founders, supporting their 0 to $1M ARR journey. Neal experienced this journey first-hand as the Co-Founder of First Resonance, a manufacturing SaaS business where he raised $20M+ in venture funding and grew the team to 40+ employees.
Teija is Forum Studio’s Head of Design. She is a storyteller focused on creative direction, brand, web and product design for the tech industry for the last decade. Teija has worked in the corporate world of Capital Markets Technology, led and managed teams, and served as Partner and Creative Director at a boutique full-service design agency in Toronto.
As Head of Technology, Karthik is responsible for turning ideas into useable concepts. Karthik has over 2 decades of product engineering experience in the Tech sector. Prior to Forum, Karthik served as the VP of Engineering at Zuva.ai and over the past two decades, he has been a co-founder at Pixibo and a Full Stack Engineer at Getty Images, Travelocity to name a few.
Naomi Goez is an Investor at Forum Ventures who is focused on deal origination, evaluation, and execution. She is a former supply chain operator who began her career in the fashion industry, managing Western Hemisphere production and sustainability initiatives at Centric Brands, and later navigating the fundraising process at a pre-seed stage circular brand. She received her MBA at The Wharton School, while working as an MBA Associate at Alpaca VC, and is passionate about promoting diversity in the ecosystem as well as supporting underrepresented founders and investors alike.
Maggie is a B2B marketing professional with experience in fast-growing companies, developing and implementing integrated marketing plans to drive awareness, acquisition, and leads. Maggie will be working to reach and attract the best early-stage SaaS founders in the world.
Rei Tran has experience in management consulting and technical product management at Accenture and Palantir, and she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. She's worked for many different clients in her professional career, and has been on the executive teams of 3 non-profits in the Bay Area.
Nia supports founders by building and activating our Alumni network of 500+ founders, as well as our communities of mentors, corporate innovators, partners, operators and more.
Navid joins us from Goodwin where he was an Associate on their Venture Capital and Startup team. He brings great experience working with both startups and VC funds at one of the most reputable law firms in the industry.
Carmen joins Forum Studio’s Talent team to focus on founder recruitment and early-stage hiring strategy and execution. She has spent the last 10 years building relationships in talent acquisition and customer success.
Dallas is helping launch and grow B2B startups. Prior to joining Forum Dallas was leading early-stage programs at Co.Labs a Saskatchewan-based incubator helping founders go from idea to revenue. He is also a Co-Founder of Leo Prestte, a brand and content design agency.
As a Venture Analyst, Alejandro plays a part in initiating, identifying, and assessing prospective investment opportunities. Before joining the Forum team, he served as a junior investment analyst at BDC Capital's Seed and IT Venture Fund, and working with Fidelity Investments. Moreover, Alejandro offers distinct insights of a founder, having co-founded a venture, Viable Ads.
Ammar comes from a background of innovation and ideation. Prior to joining Forum's Studio, he was the Director of Idea Lab at Magnet Forensics and prior to that the Technical Lead at Sonova Innovation Lab. In both roles he led teams in exploring and validating novel concepts, transforming them into successful and impactful solutions.
Ellie Bof, Finance Manager, joins us after 13 years leading Accounting and Operations at Canadian Iceberg Vodka Corporation, bringing a wealth of finance best practices, knowledge and experience from an equally highly regulated industry to Forum.
Alex leads the development of several initiatives to support the broader investment team. Most recently, Alex was a software engineer at Hive, and before that, he worked in sales at People Data Labs. Alex has a B.S. in Business from the University of Southern California.
Joe is a Product Designer in Forum’s Studio. Prior to joining Forum, he worked in a variety of design fields. He started his career in Advertising as an Art Director for many years and then moved into the Interior Design field, where he had his own design firm. Wanting to combine his passion for tech with design, Joe has most recently pivoted his focus to Product Design.
Whitney Sales has helped startups grow for 15+ years and is considered an expert in entrepreneurial selling and building early-stage sales teams. She is the creator of The Sales Method, a systematic process to help startups identify their target markets, launch products to market and scale sales quickly and successfully.
We work hard, but more importantly, we love to have fun, connect, and collaborate together!