Dawn Umlah (She / Her) Email & Phone Number

Halifax Regional Municipality, Ns, Ca

I lead companies and investors through significant business inflection points - typically around growth, turnaround and exit. I am the person brought in when there is complexity, uncertainty, and/or a new direction the company wants to go in, but isn't quite sure what they should do. Working with leadership I get up-to-speed quickly, assess the current situation, figure out a course of action and a plan to move forward and make it happen. I help venture-backed founders become the company builders and people leaders their company needs them to be. I immerse myself in understanding the founder, help them to deeply understand themselves and others, decipher where their gaps are and develop a personalized roadmap to ensure they are growing faster than their company. I also develop a roadmap for high performance company design that is designed to amplify the founder's impact.

Ashburn, Virginia, Us

Kirkland, Us

Halifax, Ns, Ca

3D BioFibR has solved the problem of making high-quality biofibers using a proprietary, scalable process which is already at least 600X more efficient than current technologies. To date, the problem of manufacturing high quality biofibers at scale has limited the industrial applications of these bio-materials. With their ability to scale production of extremely high quality biofibers that have the biophysical and biochemical properties of natural biofibers, they seek to transform the bio-materials market.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Oakland, Ca, Us

Led the company to a sale to GitHub.

Oakland, Ca, Us

npm is the package manager for JavaScript, serving modules to over 10 million developers around the world, and providing enterprise solutions to companies that depend on secure and efficient delivery of JavaScript applications.

Dartmouth, Ns, Ca

Spring Loaded Technology developed the world's first bionic knee bracing technology to enhance the strength and power of the leg muscles. By increasing leg strength, the technology can be used in a wide range of applications including: mobility assistance, fatigue reduction, injury prevention, injury rehabilitation, and performance enhancement.As COO, I was responsible for production, supply chain, finance, customer success, people ops, legal, IT, admin and towards the end of my tenure, sales. I was the first non-founding leader in the company and took the company from an engineer-built prototype to an in-market, repeatable product built on-demand by production technicians. I co-created and implemented an in-house sales order to ship system, managed a founder exit, secured and managed mission critical supplier relationships and built a cohesive middle management team that was able to take over after my departure with ease.

Working hands-on with a few high potential portfolio companies implementing initiatives and partnerships and discovering and testing my next opportunity -> creating my own startup or taking a leadership role at an existing start-up.

- Oversaw the IT fund and identified attractive seed and early-stage investment opportunities. - Led or co-invested in over ten investments ranging from $50k - $1M in cheque size, with round sizes ranging from $250k - $5M across many markets and tech spanning machine learning, AI, quantum, marketplaces, digital health, marketing, gaming, energy storage, wind turbine, enterprise, D2C, B2B and held 10 board seats.- Managed all aspects of the investment review, approval and closing cycle, and worked hands-on with portfolio companies to assist in accelerating their growth, achieving milestones and securing additional financing.

Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Ca

Waterloo, Ontario, Ca

Finance Business Partner for strategic alliances (business development, strategic partnerships and corporate development), developer relations and covered the multi-media vertical in value added services. Finance lead on the team to develop a new partnership model with the top mobile gaming companies and the first revenue generating acquisition.

DHX Media (now Wildbrain) is a leading independent entertainment company. During my tenure, the company underwent an IPO on TSX and AiM in 2006, two years post incorporation and followed with a growth by acquisitions strategy. The company went on to achieve a market cap of $1B. I was instrumental in the IPO process, transitioning the company and subsequent acquisitions from privately held to public, completing six acquisitions and being the main point for due diligence, post-acquisition integration and managing the companies' teams and internal operations through several growth transitions.

Cma

Education record

Vc & Private Equity

Mba

Bba, Accounting