J.R. Bédard

Jean-René started tinkering with electronics and programming from a young age in Québec. He then graduated in computer engineering from the University of Sherbrooke. During that time, he worked at Ubisoft Montréal as a game programmer on the video game productions of Myst IV and Assassin's Creed.

Wanting to flee Canadian winters, he moved to Los Angeles and worked on ZBrush, the digital sculpting software for Hollywood movie productions. After two years of L.A. traffic, he moved up to San Francisco and joined a Y Combinator startup called Scribd as the first engineer. He created iPaper, the embeddable online document viewer used by millions of people daily.

Wanting to explore Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, he Co-founded and was CTO of Gamify and Gamification platform (acquired by Badgeville).

While traveling across South America for a year in 2013, he started Saltado to help that part of the world with eCommerce products used by people from a dozen countries.

He's an investor in Bitcoin since 2012 and Ethereum since the 2014 crowdsale. While living in Palm Springs, he started Ether.Fund to develop and invest in blockchain technologies and decentralized applications. During that time, in the real world, he also won several 3D Printing competitions.

After living 10 years in California, I'm back in Montréal and experimenting with Machine Learning. With the goal of applying it to products in fields such as fintech, investing, blockchains, big data processing, 3D mapping, medical, and more.