My story
From a prairie campfire to practical AI.
Performer family, film school, an AI startup, a decade of school fundraising, and the apps I still ship every week. It all belongs to one story.
Performer family, film school, an AI startup, a decade of school fundraising, and the apps I still ship every week. It all belongs to one story.
I grew up near Calgary in a big prairie family of farmers, ranchers and natural performers. Ours was a musical household: singing, dancing, acting, always a story on the go. I followed that thread to film school at SAIT, where I specialized in writing, producing and directing, and storytelling has been underneath everything I've done since.
Years later, around a family campfire in Saskatchewan, a cousin asked whether a camera could tell his cows apart. My husband thought it could. That question became OneCup AI, the livestock computer-vision startup we co-founded. I led it as CEO for five years, and I was also its main grant writer, the person who found the funding that keeps an AI company alive. We tested it on family cattle before any investor ever saw it, and it went on to win Business of the Year at the first Agribition AgTech Awards.
Alongside the startup years I did what a lot of parents do: someone asked me to be the chair, and I said yes before I understood what I was signing up for. They kept asking, and a decade of school Parent Advisory Councils later I had served as Chair, Co-Chair, Grant Lead and lead fundraiser, run the silent auctions, filed the gaming grants, and raised $25,000 or more a year for my kids' school communities here in Vancouver. Philanthropy kept pulling at me too. It's the chapter I'm most excited to write: donor relations, major gifts, helping generosity land where it matters. The roots are already down: the grant-writing years, the fundraising, and a seat on the board of Vancouver's Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre, where I serve as 2nd Vice-President.
One more thread runs through all of it: women leading. I trained in film and built a company in agtech, two industries that skew heavily male, and I've been the only woman in the boardroom, the only woman pitching in the room, and the only mom at the table. I succeeded in those rooms, and I want more women in them. I care deeply about female representation on the executive side, the AI side and the funding side, and I show up for the women building alongside me. The most important thing those years taught me: you can live as your authentic self and still get things done. Usually because of it, not despite it.
These days I run Mocha's MindLab, where I build the things I recommend: Grant Shifter, which helps Canadian organisations find and win grants from a database of 3,000+ live opportunities, and a fitness app that's live in the App Store. AI enablement is where it all comes together: I help mission-driven teams adopt AI that gives people their evenings back.
And the newest chapter: I'm co-founding Seento with Jeffrey, my husband and my CTO at OneCup AI. Seento builds AI agents that own back-office jobs for small businesses, so a 20-person team can hand off grants, compliance, marketing, or research the way they'd hand it to a hire. It's everything the rest of this story taught me, turned into a product.
Tell me where you're stuck. A short, free conversation is the fastest way to find out if I can help, and I'll point you somewhere useful even if I'm not the fit.