Patricia Thaine is the Co-Founder & CEO of Private AI, a Microsoft-backed startup who raised their Series A led by the BDC. Private AI was named a 2023 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum and a Gartner Cool Vendor. Patricia was on Maclean’s magazine Power List 2024 for being one of the top 100 Canadians shaping the country. She is also a Computer Science PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto (on leave) and a Vector Institute alumna. Patricia is a recipient of the NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship, the RBC Graduate Fellowship, and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship. She is the co-inventor of one U.S. patent and has 10 years of research and software development experience, including at the McGill Language Development Lab, the University of Toronto’s Computational Linguistics Lab and Department of Linguistics, and the Public Health Agency of Canada.