Ottawa, September 25, 2025 — Invest Ottawa (IO) is proud to announce that Michelle Younes, Director of Venture Programs, has been recognized as one of Toast’s Top 25 Women in Tech, an honour celebrating women leaders who have made significant contributions to the Canadian technology industry.

Michelle is a transformational leader who has significantly advanced Ottawa’s technology community through scalable programming, inclusive leadership, and community building. She designed and launched the IO Venture Path—a suite of programs that has guided more than 1,300 startups and scaleups through various stages of growth.

To date, IO Venture Path companies have collectively raised over $1.7B in capital and created over 5,200 jobs.

Impact at Invest Ottawa

Under Michelle’s leadership, the IO Venture Path has flourished—becoming both a household name in the local startup community and a gold standard for innovation centres across Canada.

In addition, Michelle has played a key role in:

• Driving gender parity among advisors, increasing women’s representation by over 40%.
• Introducing customer success metrics tracking and achieving an average Net Promoter Score of 74.
• Designing and deploying key services, including peer groups, leadership development training, and tailored programming for underrepresented founders.

Driving Growth Through Founder-First Leadership

Guided by a founder-first mindset, Michelle focuses on removing obstacles and unlocking opportunities that enable startups and scaleups to succeed. She has served as a trusted sounding board for countless founders, offering actionable ideas and perspective in pivotal moments. While her role has evolved to be intentionally more strategic, Michelle remains deeply engaged in the community, frequently moderating panels, attending networking events, and contributing to Ottawa’s startup ecosystem.

Michelle leads with humility, empowering her team and creating opportunities for others to shine, including mentoring numerous team members in advancing to senior roles. Through her empathetic yet performance-driven leadership, she continues to inspire excellence, all while balancing the demands of senior leadership with the responsibilities of motherhood.

Invest Ottawa congratulates Michelle on this well-deserved recognition and thanks her for her ongoing dedication to founders, her team, and the broader community.

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About Invest Ottawa

Invest Ottawa is the lead economic development agency for knowledge-based industries in Canada’s Capital Region, facilitating economic growth and job creation in Ottawa. Guided by a vision to help realize Ottawa’s full potential as a globally recognized, innovative, inclusive, and future-ready city, Invest Ottawa delivers venture development, global expansion and talent programs and services that catalyze the growth and success of entrepreneurs and firms.

These include small business training, mentorship, acceleration for technology firms, foreign business and investment attraction, local business retention and expansion in targeted sectors, commercialization and marketing Ottawa’s diversified economy and high quality of life. Invest Ottawa is also the manager of Bayview Yards, Ottawa’s innovation hub and one-stop business acceleration shop, and founder and operator of Area X.O, the R&D complex for next-gen smart mobility, autonomy, and connectivity technologies. Since 2017, Invest Ottawa has supported and delivered $3.7 billion in GDP impact, 29,343 jobs, and $622 million in government revenues.

www.investottawa.ca