The six hottest players in Toronto’s digital industry

Toronto’s burgeoning digital industry has plenty of power players. These six are some of the most influential among them.

IVAN YUEN, 36 AND ALLEN LAU, 45,
Wattpad
Some one billion stories are read every month on Yuen and Lau’s innovative social media platform. It’s like YouTube for fiction, with writers posting stories, often in serial form, and responding to reader feedback. Margaret Atwood debuted an essay on the site in September.

JOHN BAKER, 36,
Desire2Learn
His e-learning software company has 10 million users, including NASA and Accenture, and 800 employees in offices in Australia, the U.K., the U.S. and Brazil. New Enterprise Associates and OMERS have provided $80 million in financing, the most of any tech company in Canada.

MATT GOLDEN, 43,
Golden Ventures Partners
In 2000, Golden left a law career to become one of Toronto’s leading early-stage venture capitalists, with a specialty in mobile technology. Today, he manages $20 million in total capital and oversees 14 companies. He led the investment in SocialDeck, a mobile social gaming company; two years later, Google snapped it up.

KUNAL GUPTA, 28,
Polar
Gupta’s company has created apps for 400 clients, including Sports Illustrated, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and TC Media. Now he’s changing the way advertisers reach readers online: he declared the banner ad dead and is pushing native advertising: sponsored articles that mimic editorial.

JOHN ALBRIGHT, 55,
Relay Ventures
Albright oversees $500 million in capital. He pulled off 12 deals in the past 14 months, most prominent among them a $6-million investment in The Score’s mobile app, which has 4.5 million users; Bionym, a wearable technology company started by two U of T scientists; and TouchBistro, a popular point-of-sale software.

Photographs: Yuen and Lau courtesy of Wattpad; Baker courtesy of Desire2Learn; Golden courtesy of Golden Venture Partners; Gupta courtesy of Polar Mobile; Albright courtesy of Relay Ventures