Davender Gupta (B.Eng., M.Sc.)

Senior Strategy Consultant

Mr. Gupta’s passion is to guide high-performance entrepreneurs and teams to develop the clarity, the confidence and the discipline to successfully execute on their ideas.

His first 15-year career as a military aerospace engineer in the RCAF led to a second career, experiencing first-hand the startup boom of the late 1990s. He then pivoted into a third career as a Venture Catalyst and Entrepreneurial Leadership Coach, helping hundreds of startups and scaleups across Canada to transform their ideas into impact. His current focus is on helping technology companies define and execute effective go-to-market and scaleup strategies.

Mr. Gupta is especially effective at helping entrepreneurs define and validate the business model around their innovation. He is a pioneer and a leader in popularizing the Business Model Canvas tools and Lean Startup methodologies through programs he developed such as Startup-Académie 101 and FastTrac TechVenture Québec, as well as participating as a mentor, facilitator and coach for many events in the tech startup community across Québec and Eastern Canada. In 2013, Davender was named as one of “Canada’s Top Ten Rockstar Mentors” by Startup Canada and Futurpreneur Canada. Davender is also active on a provincial and national level in developing innovation and entrepreneurship policy.

Among his many qualifications, he holds a B.Eng. (Engineering Physics) from Royal Military College of Canada, a MSc (Imaging Science) from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and is also a graduate of the world-renowned Entrepreneurship Development Program from MIT-Sloan School of Management. He is currently completing an Executive MBA at McGill University-HEC Montréal.