PRINCIPAL // BUILD FUTURE
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Saurabh Suri
AI Lead, Red Brick Labs · Co-founder, Build Future
Co-founder of Red Brick Labs, an AI-native consulting agency upskilling teams across Toronto.
Co-founded Build Future as the community arm, previously organized the OpenAI Codex meetup at Shopify that drew 800+ signups.
HOST // BUILD FUTURE
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Robleh Jama
Co-founder, Boom Vision · Co-founder, Build Future
Long-time Toronto tech community builder and co-founder of Boom Vision. Has been running Build Future events alongside Saurabh.
On the current AI era: "the most fun, fast-paced era I've ever seen."
DEMO // AI SYSTEMS
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Vladimir Druts
Founder, Horizin.ai
4x founder · "The Augmented Human." Previous ventures: Hush (Canada's fastest-growing sleep brand, Forbes 30 Under 30), FRWRD Skincare, and FocusMe (featured BBC).
Attended the 2017 Asilomar AI Principles Conference.
DEMO // GTM OUTBOUND
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Yusuf Ahmed
Founder, Zevenue
Founder of Zevenue, a B2B SaaS sales development agency started after a 2020 layoff.
Builds AI-powered outbound systems for early-stage startups (2–200 employees) using Clay. Queen's University, Toronto.
DEMO // MARKETING OPS
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Adam Frank
Head of Marketing, Rootly
Head of Marketing at Rootly, the AI-native on-call and incident management platform trusted by LinkedIn, NVIDIA, Canva, and Grammarly. $15.2M raised.
Comes from deep on-call operations background · AI meets reliability.
DEMO // CREATIVE XR
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Josh Maldonado
Senior Producer · Creative / AI / XR
Senior producer bridging creative, product, and engineering across XR, AI, and digital products. Co-runs CTRL+SHIFT, a Toronto creative tech event series. Background spans Web3 (Space Jam, DC Comics drops at Palm NFT Studio) to AI-driven interactive work.
DEMO // AGENCY OPS
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Ebad Khan
Managing Partner, Process Plus Marketing
Managing Partner at Process Plus Marketing, a 23-person Toronto marketing services firm. Prior roles at Blackbaud and TELUS.
MBA in Technology & Strategy, McMaster University. Agency-side perspective on practical AI adoption.
DEMO // AI TOOLS
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Reza Khadjavi
Founder & CEO, Motif
Founder & CEO of Motif, an AI-powered creative platform. Former engineering lead with a product and startup background across multiple ventures.
Presented a live demo of AI-driven creative workflows at the event.
DEMO // AI IMAGE TOOLS
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Marwan Genena
Team Ideogram · AI Image Generation
Ideogram is the AI image platform built to nail text in images, scaling ad creative for paid media without the usual production bottleneck.
Marwan and Tom showed how Model Context Protocol (MCP) lets agents like Claude call Ideogram directly to generate, edit, and remix images. No manual prompt-copying. The agent handles the full creative loop.
DEMO // AI IMAGE TOOLS
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Tom · Ideogram
Team Ideogram · MCP Integration
Co-presented the Ideogram MCP demo with Marwan. The focus: how marketing, sales, and GTM teams will increasingly work inside AI agents, with specialized tools like Ideogram handling the domain-specific creative work those agents need.