Canada welcomes thousands of highly skilled immigrants every year. Many arrive with decades of international experience, postgraduate degrees, and specialized skills—yet struggle to find opportunities that match their expertise.
Meanwhile, 80% of Canada’s businesses are SMEs and startups, but these businesses struggle to attract top talent due to low brand awareness, limited hiring budgets, and a lack of connections with immigrant professionals.
“When I immigrated to Canada in 1997, my family had to move to Whitehorse just to find work. I thought we had left the struggle behind, but even in 2025, skilled immigrants still face the same challenges. BReady exists to change that.”
– Usha Srinivasan, CEO & Founder
With 20+ years in talent development and startup incubation, Usha has worked at Frost & Sullivan, MaRS, and Brampton Venture Zone by TMU. She saw firsthand how immigrant professionals and growing businesses struggle to connect. That’s why she built BReady—a platform designed to remove bias, create meaningful connections, and make hiring faster and fairer for everyone.
Immigrant job seekers on the platform
Employers actively hiring
Are BIPOC
Are immigrants
Are youth (under 30)
Job placements secured
Inaugural Board of Directors
Usha Srinivasan was the Founding Director of Brampton Venture Zone at Toronto Metropolitan University. In this role, Usha was responsible for developing and leading a new TMU-led incubator in the downtown Brampton Innovation District supported by the City of Brampton. She also founded the BReady Talent platform that supports BIPOC and new Canadians to find meaningful employment, which has now been spun out of TMU as a not-for-profit she leads.
A recognized leader in the Canadian innovation community, Usha Srinivasan has built some of the sector’s most unique service offerings for startups over the last 15 years. Before BVZ, she was VP of Partnership and Talent with Elevate Tech Fest. She has also co-founded many startups, including one in the foodtech space, “Hauschef”, a main street French bakery and a vintage reggae record label – Sid Buck Records. She is also a recent Angel investor and LP on a fund focused on BIPOC entrepreneurs, Flair Ventures.
As an early MaRS Discovery District member, she rose to VP of Venture & Talent Programs, leading teams dedicated to nurturing and developing Canadian entrepreneurs’ talents through diverse programs. Before MaRS, she was a Research Manager with the global market intelligence firm Frost and Sullivan, working with multinationals in the Environment, Water and Building Technologies space.
Usha is a graduate of Stanford’s LEAD Corporate Innovation program. She holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental microbiology from the University of Bristol and a PhD in environmental sciences from Abertay University in Dundee. She was an NRC postdoctoral fellow at the USEPA and an NSERC Fellow at the University of New Brunswick.
Grace Lee Reynolds is CEO of MaRS, leading the organization through its next phase of growth and impact. With nearly 30 years of experience in the public, private and philanthropic sectors, Grace is passionate about fostering economic potential and social impact through innovations and placemaking.
Grace has been a key leader at MaRS for more than a decade, previously serving as CFO of MaRS Discovery District and president of MaRS Discovery Enterprises. She played a pivotal role in transforming MaRS into a globally recognized innovation hub, helping develop and scale the 1.5-million-square-foot MaRS Centre, driving its social purpose business model and advancing early-stage investment funds and innovation programming.
Beyond MaRS, Grace served as CEO of Toronto Artscape, a social enterprise operating unique spaces and programs for creatives across Toronto. Prior to that, she spent 15 years in finance leadership roles at major Canadian academic hospitals, including SickKids Foundation and University Health Network, where she worked across clinical operations, corporate services and fundraising. She began her career in the entrepreneurship services group at Ernst & Young.
Her diverse interests span the intersection of science, technology, arts and inclusive innovation, reflecting her belief that Canada needs robust infrastructure to drive economic well-being for future generations. Grace’s extensive background includes expertise in strategy, finance, fund and partnership development, commercial operations, and people leadership in both scaling enterprises and large complex organizations.
Jaipaul Massey-Singh is a seasoned entrepreneur and executive with over 25 years of diverse experience across sectors including manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, and cannabis. He has founded and successfully exited startups in healthcare and food technology, demonstrating a consistent drive for innovation and excellence.
In addition to his entrepreneurial ventures, Jaipaul has held senior leadership positions in various regulated industries, where he has been instrumental in bringing novel products to market through consumer insights and strategic execution.
In December 2023, Jaipaul was appointed CEO of the Brampton Board of Trade, bringing his extensive leadership experience to the organization. Under his guidance, the Board aims to foster growth and community impact, leveraging his proven track record in operations, finance, and human resources.
His commitment to community is evident through his active involvement serving on boards, mentoring, and volunteering in initiatives championing diversity and inclusion, social innovation, and expanding opportunities for marginalized populations.
Outside of his professional endeavors, Jaipaul is an avid cyclist, book enthusiast, and enjoys culinary explorations.
Shoaib Ahmed has over 7 years of experience in the Micromobility and transit sectors as CEO of SCOOTY. Previously, Shoaib has been working with executives and change makers to develop their programs and leadership potential at Ryerson University since 2011. In 2017, he co-founded the Ryerson Leadership Lab, where his work in developing leadership programming focused on public issues that sparked action and developed people at all ages and stages. At Ryerson he headed Strategic Projects in the Office of the President and has served as Special Projects Assistant to the Vice President of University Advancement. He founded SCOOTY in 2019 with the aim of building micromobility that specifically extends the reach of transit, and ever since then has been building SCOOTY and leading the charge to demonstrate micromobility best practices and policies in Canada. Shoaib has an M.B.A. in Global Management; a B.Comm in Management and Entrepreneurship from Ryerson’s Ted Rogers School of Management; and has studied at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Shoaib is also a graduate of York University’s Smart Mobility Technology Accelerator. In April 2025, Shoaib will be awarded the King Charles III Coronation Medal for his contributions in Entrepreneurship, Education and Technology and Community Development.
Thelma Reuff is a seasoned human resources executive with 20 years of experience driving people strategy and organizational culture across diverse industries in Canada and the United Kingdom. She currently serves as Vice President, Talent and Culture at Futurpreneur, a national non-profit dedicated to providing young aspiring entrepreneurs across Canada with loan financing, mentorship, and resources they need to start or buy a business.
Since joining Futurpreneur in 2020, Thelma has led transformative HR initiatives that foster inclusive, high-performing workplaces. She is deeply committed to building environments where individuals can thrive and organizations can scale with purpose.
Prior to her role at Futurpreneur, Thelma held a pivotal HR leadership position within a Pan-Canadian education organization. Thelma earned her Master of Arts degree in Human Resources from Westminster University in the UK, complemented by a Bachelor’s degree from Oxford Brookes University. She holds the CHRP designation with the Human Resources Professionals Association (HRPA) and is also a certified leadership coach.
BReady would not exist without TMU’s Office of Zone learning, which supported the program’s initial incubation. In addition, the City of Brampton’s funding of Brampton Venture Zone, the Ontario government funding through Brampton Board of Trade, and the GTAA’s uplift grant all placed a critical role in the formation of BReady. Apart from the programs, BReady’s AI-enabled talent matching platform was originally developed for TMU by 316.ai, a startup company incubated in BHIVE. BReady.ai would not exist without these mavens who believed in our vision.
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