Josh Rainbow

I moved to Calgary in 2018 to study applied mathematics and went straight into the technology community here. While I was still a student I helped start student groups at the university and built my first company doing data and technology consulting.

Over the following years I designed data architecture, intelligence tools, agent workflows and AI systems, mostly for companies in Canadian energy and major projects: asset screening for midstream energy, a route-cost model for energy logistics, a market intelligence database that joins asset, production and price data. I still build. It is the part of the work that keeps the rest of it honest.

Alongside the building I worked in research and intelligence roles covering North American energy and power assets. So I got both sides: I was building the tools operators use while learning how investors size up an asset and decide where the money goes.

That combination of technical building, industry context and how capital decides is where most of my work now sits: making a project investable, making a market legible, making a decision defensible.

I spent years volunteering across Calgary's technology community and helped build YYC DataCon. Running an event forced a question I had been avoiding: what did it actually produce? A big number at the door is not a result.

I still believe in community. I stopped believing that showing up is the same as getting something done. That is the standard I hold my own work to now, including the gatherings I design.

By 2025 I kept watching the same thing happen. Serious technical, industrial and investment groups would arrive in Alberta looking for projects, local knowledge and people they could trust. Alberta had all of it and no obvious way for those groups to find each other.

So I founded Future Summit: an independent executive platform connecting Canadian industry, governments, institutions and global capital. It runs a flagship summit, private dinners, roundtables and delegations, and it is where much of my market access and convening work now happens. I am based in Alberta and work internationally, with one rule for the international work: it has to bring something back, whether that is buyers, capital, knowledge or partners.