Reza Satchu is the Founder and Managing Partner of Alignvest Management Corporation. He is also the Founding Chairman of NEXT Canada and a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Business School where he teaches The Founder Mindset and Founder Launch, two courses that he created, as well as The Entrepreneurial Manager.
For over 20 years, Reza has been both a serial founder and an entrepreneurship professor. He has co-founded, built and managed six operating businesses, from inception, within a variety of industries. These businesses, collectively, have been sold for in excess of $3.5 billion. Concurrently, Reza has taught many entrepreneurship courses and created several entrepreneurship programs at Harvard Business School, University of Toronto and NEXT Canada.
Alignvest is a private investment company, controlled by Reza, that has founded, built, and exited several businesses that have created substantial equity value, including:
(i) Alignvest Student Housing, built Canada’s largest owner-operator of purpose-built student housing with over 7,500 beds nationwide, sold to Forum REIIF for $1.7 billion;
(ii) Edgewood Health Network, built a leading national provider of mental health and addiction services, sold to Peloton Capital Management for $200 million;
(iii) KGS Alpha Capital Markets, built a leading New York based US fixed income broker dealer with over $10 billion of assets, sold to Bank of Montreal for over $400 million; and
(iv) StorageNow, built a leading self storage company, sold to InStorage REIT for $110 million
Previously, Reza was part of the founding management team of SupplierMarket, a supply chain software company, that was sold to Ariba for $925 million. Reza was a General Partner and Managing Director at Fenway Partners, a $1.4 billion New York-based private equity firm focused on acquiring leading middle-market companies, and he started his career as a Financial Analyst at Merrill Lynch in the High-Yield Finance and Restructuring Group.
Reza serves on the Board of Directors of Sagicor Financial Corporation, a public life insurance company, as well as several privately held corporations. In addition, Reza served on the board of the Hospital of Sick Children Foundation for over 11 years, most recently as Vice Chairman.
Reza has received Canada’s “Top 40 Under 40” Award, the 2011 McGill University Management Achievement Award, the 2025 McGill University Distinguished Leader Award and the 2025 King Charles III Coronation Medal. He is also the Co-Chair of his HBS Class of 1996 20th and 30th Year Reunions.
In 2010, Reza founded NEXT Canada, an intensive philanthropic entrepreneurship program that provides education, mentorship, and start-up funding to promising entrepreneurs. Reza is the Chairman of NEXT and teaches the core entrepreneurship course at NEXT. NEXT has launched several programs including NEXT 36, NEXT AI, NEXT Founders and NEXT IPO. NEXT now has an alumni base of over 1,200 young founders that have launched over 500 ventures, raised over $3 billion of equity capital and created thousands of jobs. Over the past 20 years, all of Reza’s teaching activities at University of Toronto and at NEXT Canada have been provided by Reza for no compensation and purely as part of his charitable endeavours.
Reza has a BA from McGill University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
