Jackie Wylie - CMO, Boosted.ai
Twice, Jackie Wylie has helped a company change what it sells. At Amino, she led the shift from a consumer healthcare navigation app to an enterprise B2B business, building the marketing function from scratch along the way. Textio came next. As CMO, Wylie ran the marketing strategy behind its move from recruiting software to a performance management platform. Growth was the job at Middesk. There, she scaled ARR 2.5X and grew quarterly pipeline 4X through channel experimentation. She joined Boosted.ai as CMO in May 2026, marketing agentic AI to hedge funds, asset managers, and institutional investment platforms. Before those roles came Microsoft, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Smartsheet, where she led product marketing teams responsible for ABM and sales readiness.
Tony Hocevar - CMO, Una AI
Few CMOs hold a Professional Engineering license. Tony Hocevar does, along with an MBA and a Certified Management Consultant designation. His current job keeps him in finance software. Una AI, where he has been CMO since April 2025 after a year as its fractional CMO, sells budgeting, planning, and forecasting built for the AI era. At Vena Solutions, a cloud FP&A vendor, his demand generation programs supported 80% year-over-year ARR growth. He also took the company through marketing due diligence with several venture capital firms as it raised C$110 million. Achievers hired him as CMO in 2019. He rebuilt the global marketing team, led a rebrand, and ran win and loss interviews with customers and prospects to lift win rates. Hocevar has lived and worked in Singapore and the U.S.
Joanna Balkowski - VP Marketing, Rezolve Ai
Joanna Balkowski arrived at Rezolve Ai through an acquisition. She spent four years as VP of marketing at GroupBy, running demand, brand, and product marketing for an AI-first search and product discovery platform built on Google's Vertex AI Search for Retail. Rezolve Ai later acquired GroupBy. She has been its VP of marketing since March 2025. That was not her first exit. Angoss Software, where she headed product marketing in predictive analytics, was acquired by Datawatch. DMTI Spatial, her previous employer, went to Quadient. In all, she counts four companies she has guided through acquisition. Building from zero is a pattern too, and Balkowski created the marketing team at both Searchspring and GroupBy.
Lada Leitsius - CMO, StartupSoft
Lada Leitsius started as a journalist. She wrote for Vysoky Zamok for four years, then worked as news editor and editor in chief at Uzvar.info and as a digital content manager in Kyiv. Qubstudio moved her into brand work. She joined as a brand and communication strategist in 2019 and later became its marketing team lead and creative director. Since June 2023, Leitsius has been CMO of StartupSoft in Toronto, where her work covers marketing research, branding, and pipeline acceleration. A freelance brand consultancy runs alongside it. Through that practice, she has advised more than 50 businesses on marketing, branding, and growth. Off the clock, she illustrates and dances bachata.
Ruth Zive - CMO, Voices
Long before she ran marketing for a voice company, Ruth Zive directed development and marketing at the Speech & Stuttering Institute, a nonprofit serving adults and children with speech-related disorders. Voices hired her as CMO in February 2025. The company helps large brands adopt ethical, human-centric voice solutions as voice-first AI emerges. Zive's path there included founding MarketingWise, a content agency for B2B companies, which she ran as CEO for three years. Blueprint Software Systems brought her on as VP of marketing in 2014 and made her CMO in 2017. Two more CMO roles followed, at Ada from 2018 to 2022 and at LivePerson until January 2025. She also advises Novisto. Toronto is home, and weekends often mean baking challah or heading to the cottage.
Lorena Magee - CMO, Echoworx
Lorena Magee calls herself a marketer/coder hybrid. She earned the description over 11 years at Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, where her work moved from creative services to international trade to integrated marketing campaigns. Her career began far from security software. In the 1990s, she trained sales teams on digital prepress and printing systems for Linotype-Hell on Long Island, then built a sales channel for SoftQuad's web authoring software in the Greater Toronto Area. Echoworx hired her in 2015 to run content marketing. A year later, she was VP of global marketing. She became CMO in October 2022. Echoworx now serves clients in 30 countries through more than 5,000 business, public sector, and institutional deployments.
Bhavna Wadhwa - CMO, Zafin
Bhavna Wadhwa came to marketing by way of engineering, consulting, and private equity value creation. At Zafin, she started on the transformation side in 2022, directing the integration of an acquired business and supporting a high-return divestiture. Product marketing came next. As SVP of enterprise transformation and marketing delivery, she built the company's positioning, competitive intelligence, and sales enablement capability. She became CMO in April 2024, following Nordic Capital's acquisition of Zafin. Her repositioning work moved the company from banking software provider to AI platform company for regulated institutions, including the launch strategy for Zafin AIOS. The mandate goes past marketing. Wadhwa works with the CEO, executive team, and board on corporate strategy. She also championed Zafin's founding participation in the SickKids AI initiative. Her work with analysts and media supported recognition such as CNBC's World's Top Fintech Companies and Celent Luminary status in Retail Banking.
Noosh Baratpour - Co-Founder & CMO, Formaloo
Code came first for Noosh Baratpour, then marketing. She approaches go-to-market as a system to instrument and test. Formaloo, which she co-founded in 2020, grew from zero to more than 35,000 businesses in over 80 countries using its no-code platform for forms, approval workflows, client portals, and AI-powered tools. Baratpour built the marketing function herself. She also assembled a partner ecosystem of more than 200 and made community-led growth a primary acquisition and retention channel. Community is an older thread in her work. In Tehran, she co-organized TEDxTehranWomen, the first TEDxWomen event in the Middle East, with a team of more than 60 volunteers. She also led Startup Weekend Women. The DMZ named her one of its Women of the Year in 2023.
Fahad Muhammad - VP Marketing, Clariti
Fahad Muhammad was the first marketing hire at Daylight, then called FormHero. Within four months he had a team of six. Revenue grew 159% year over year on the strength of one-to-one and one-to-few ABM programs. A new partner program added more than $2 million in pipeline and $219,000 in revenue in six months, and Quadient later acquired the company. At TealBook, he launched two products, rebuilt the team, and moved go-to-market to the same ABM model. TealBook ranked third on Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 list of Canada's fastest-growing companies. Supplier.io acquired it in April 2026. Muhammad counts three exits in his career, along with more than $475 million in pipeline and $267 million in revenue. He joined Clariti as VP of marketing in January 2026.
Sarah Chapman - CMO, Canada, Manulife
On January 1, 2027, Sarah Chapman becomes Manulife's Global Chief Marketing & Customer Experience Officer, joining the executive leadership team and taking responsibility for brand, marketing, and enterprise customer experience for more than 37 million customers. The promotion follows six years of widening roles. She arrived in 2020 as global chief sustainability officer, leading ESG strategy and reporting. In 2023, she became CMO of Manulife Wealth and Asset Management. Today, Chapman is CMO for Manulife Canada and global head of digital transformation and customer experience. Her path to Manulife crossed three continents. Between 2010 and 2015, she lectured in marketing and strategy at the University of Technology Sydney, co-authoring more than 15 peer-reviewed textbooks, articles, and case studies, and led regional corporate affairs, marketing, and brand strategy for Hitachi in Tokyo. Consulting roles at Cause Consulting in Boston and Deloitte followed.
Built From Scratch, Then Scaled
Many of these careers include a moment of starting from nothing. It might be a first marketing hire, a team built from zero, or a company founded outright. Pipeline, ARR, and revenue targets appear alongside brand and positioning on most of their records. The routes in vary just as much, from engineering and newsrooms to consulting firms and sales territories. That range gives Toronto's software and financial services companies a marketing bench with unusually varied instincts.