Yung Wu

Yung Wu is a Canadian technology entrepreneur, private equity investor, and corporate director. He founded Castek Software Factory, an insurance enterprise software company later acquired by Oracle in 2007, and served as CEO of MaRS Discovery District from 2017 to 2023. He has served as chair of the Toronto Region Board of Trade and as a director of OMERS Administration Corporation.

Early life and education Wu was born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. His parents immigrated to Canada with their young children.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science, economics and mathematics from the University of Toronto.

Wu attended the Kellogg-Schulich School of Business at York University for an MBA but left two credits short of completing the degree to found his first company.

He is a member of Mensa and the Young Presidents' Organization. The company's main product, Insure3, was a policy lifecycle administration platform used by insurers in North America, Europe, South Africa, South Korea, and China.

Investing and board roles Wu is managing director and chair of NFQ Ventures, a Toronto-based private equity firm focused on early-stage investing.

In 2025, Wu was named to Toronto mayor Olivia Chow's Economic Action Team, convened to advise on strategies to respond to U.S. tariff threats. In February 2026, he joined the advisory board of Massey Henry, an executive search firm.

MaRS Discovery District (2017–2023) Wu was appointed CEO of MaRS Discovery District in October 2017, succeeding Ilse Treurnicht. Over the same period, MaRS reported that its supported companies raised more than $20 billion in capital and contributed over $30 billion to Canada's GDP.

Wu also oversaw MaRS' expansion to the Waterfront Innovation Centre on Toronto's Queens Quay East, developed in partnership with Menkes Developments and the University of Toronto.

In 2020, Wu launched Momentum, a scale-up program for high-growth Canadian companies with the potential to reach $100 million in revenue within five years. The program was developed using part of a $17.5 million allocation MaRS received from FedDev Ontario through the federal Scale-Up Platform initiative; its inaugural cohort included 53 companies with a combined $905 million in revenue.

Several companies supported by MaRS during Wu's tenure reached significant scale, including StackAdapt, League, ecobee, CarbonCure Technologies, and Carbon Engineering, which was acquired by Occidental Petroleum for $1.1 billion in 2023.

In April 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, Wu publicly urged the federal government to act within "days, not weeks and months" to support the innovation sector, calling for blanket acceptance of startups into the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy. During the pandemic, MaRS reported maintaining a vacancy rate below 2 percent across its 1.5 million square feet of space in downtown Toronto at a time when the broader Toronto office vacancy rate exceeded 15 percent. The newspaper subsequently published corrections clarifying that $14.1 million of the reported revenue decline was attributable to the termination of flow-through payments to third parties that MaRS had administered on behalf of the provincial government, and that Wu's fiscal 2023 compensation included a prepaid $157,500 bonus for fiscal 2024; without that bonus, his pay for fiscal 2023 would have been $525,000, representing an annualized growth rate of 1.7 percent over six years.

Toronto Region Board of Trade Wu joined the board of the Toronto Region Board of Trade in 2019, served as vice-chair in 2021, and was elected chair of the board of directors in January 2022.

In June 2020, Wu co-founded the Coalition of Innovation Leaders Advancing Respect (CILAR), alongside Armughan Ahmad and Claudette McGowan, to address systemic racism in the Canadian technology sector. The coalition launched with 25 founding members from organizations including KPMG, OMERS, Cisco Canada, Meta, Salesforce, JP Morgan, Deloitte, TMU, and Google.

Wu and his wife Katrina co-founded DifferentIsCool (DiSC), a non-profit advocacy organization for inclusion, inspired by Wu's adult brother who has autism. Canada's Top 40 Under 40 (1995)

RibbonDescriptionNotes King Charles III Coronation Medal Decoration awarded in 2025 Canadian version