Ray Walia is one of four individuals who will be inducted into the BC Innovators Hall of Fame this year.
Walia co-founded and is CEO of Launch Academy, one of Western Canada’s leading tech incubators. His company has incubated more than 6,000 entrepreneurs from over 100 countries. Three hundred of them have reached seed and series A funding, collectively raising more than $2.5 billion dollars.
“He's a real networker and a connector,” said Jill Tipping, president and CEO of BC Tech, which launched the BC Innovators Hall of Fame in 2023. “He runs a tremendously successful private-sector-funded incubator and the Traction conference—the first conference to really bring world leading speakers and thinkers and technology to British Columbia.”
Launch Academy was founded in 2012 by Walia, Roger Patterson and Jesse Heaslip, who were working out of a co-working space in early 2011.
The three decided to start their own space in premises offered by Growlab co-founder Mike Edwards. It began with 12 desks and, within 12 months, the venture had moved to a 12,000-square-foot facility to accommodate demand.
Walia ended up running most of the incubator’s activities, eventually becoming Launch Academy’s CEO.
Fast forward 12 years and the company is now one of the most popular incubators in Western Canada. Walia also founded a venture fund and co-founded Traction—a conference that has drawn a tech community of 120,000 leaders to Vancouver from around the world.
Walia has been an important part of B.C.’s innovation ecosystem for a number of years, said Tipping, adding that the thousands of entrepreneurs who have been supported by him and Launch Academy speak very positively of Walia’s work.
BIV spoke with Ray Walia, who underscored the success story of Later.com—a project from Launch Academy.
“This was just a hackathon idea by people that were working at Launch Academy,” he said. “It became one of the world’s top scheduling software for visual media.”
Walia says he inherited his entrepreneurial spirit from his father, an avid businessman who pioneered the live-concert industry in Bollywood and built single-family homes in Vancouver.
“In my childhood, I grew up either on a construction site pulling nails from two by fours, or running around backstage helping to organize these concerts,” he said.
At 16, Walia began running concerts in Vancouver alongside his brother, producing his very own concert at the Pacific Coliseum for thousands of people.
Upon graduating from school, a piece of advice from his father would change the trajectory of his career.
“I was looking at joining the workforce, not being an entrepreneur,” he said. “My dad told me you can definitely make a good career and help someone achieve their dreams, or you can spend that time, energy, and pursue your own dreams.”
In 1999, Walia opened a Dairy Queen franchise in Richmond, followed by a second restaurant on Denman and Robson in 2002.
“If I can build a restaurant downtown and sell one ice cream cake to each tower every single day, I’ll do really well,” he recalled thinking. “In 2002, the challenge was how are they going to come to the store, pick up the cake and get it back to the office.”
This led Walia to build an online ordering platform, allowing orders to be faxed to his restaurant and to a sub-contracted courier company that would deliver purchases in under 30 minutes.
The developer, a friend of Walia’s, created the platform for free in exchange of using the store to test his programs.
“What he ended up doing with the store was turning it into a bluetooth hotspot,” he said. “We were pushing coupons to people's cell phones whilst in the store, and that just blew my mind.”
“I started seeing all the different opportunities, and that got me into the tech space.”
By 2008, Razor Technology was built around this innovation, pushing movie trailers and music videos for Sony.
Walia sold his restaurants to focus on Razor Technology as CEO, but the company was forced to shut down due to the financial crisis.
This led Walia to start his own fashion app and join a co-working space, where he met the other future founders of Launch Academy.
Walia’s biggest contribution, he says, has been supporting thousands of startups and building transformative tools for Vancouver.
He said it’s been gratifying to service so many entrepreneurs and to see $2.5 billion raised by Launch Academy’s companies.
“By no means are we the only support system they’ve had, but I think that we played a bit of a role” he said. “Every time I talk to entrepreneurs, they’ve all had a touch point with Launch Academy or Traction at some stage.”
, and have also been announced as 2024 inductees into the . Including this year’s honourees, 55 individuals have been recognized by the initiative, which aims to highlight the role of innovation in B.C.'s economy, and the leaders that have left an important legacy of innovation in the province.
