EY Canada has announced its 2026 Entrepreneurs Access Network cohort, welcoming 12 founders from Black, Indigenous, Pan-Asian and Latino communities into a year-long program designed to remove systemic barriers to business growth. Now in its fifth year, the initiative pairs entrepreneurs with EY professionals for coaching, curriculum, and network access. This year's cohort spans sectors from creative industries and technology to health, education and real estate.
Canada's entrepreneurial landscape is rich with talent. But talent alone has never been enough to guarantee success, and for Black, Indigenous, Pan-Asian and Latino founders, the barriers to scaling a business have long been structural as much as circumstantial. Access to the right mentors, rooms, and networks remains unevenly distributed, and the consequences of that gap compound over time.
Against this backdrop, EY Canada's Entrepreneurs Access Network stands as one of the more deliberate institutional responses to the problem, using the firm's global reach and professional depth to create a pathway that underrepresented founders would otherwise have to carve out on their own.
Now entering its fifth year, the program has announced its 2026 cohort of 12 founders, drawn from communities across the country, bringing together a diverse group of business leaders whose sectors span consumer goods and health, media, real estate and technology.
The cohort's announcement, made on May 5, 2026, underlines EY Canada's continued and sustained commitment to supporting founders who, as Program Co-Director Christopher Gordon put it, are navigating "rising costs and rapid change" while facing a deeper, more fundamental challenge: access. The program is designed specifically to address that challenge, pairing each participant with an EY Relationship Ambassador for dedicated one-on-one coaching and enrolling them in a year-long learning curriculum that covers growth priorities such as digital transformation and cybersecurity.
Beyond the curriculum, participants gain entry into EY's global entrepreneurship network, a resource that few independent founders at this stage of growth could otherwise access.
A cohort built on breadth
The 12 founders selected for the 2026 program represent a compelling cross-section of Canadian entrepreneurship. The full cohort is:
- Antoinette Ellis, ACE & Company Ltd. (Stoney Creek, Ontario)
- Carlos Lavin, Appraisals International Inc. (Moncton, New Brunswick)
- Andrew Karesa, blueBell Village Ltd (Edmonton, Alberta)
- Ashley McKenzie-Barnes, D.PE Agency (Toronto, Ontario)
- Joao Gubolin Junior, Gubolin Technologies Corp. (Toronto, Ontario)
- Priya Bates, Inner Strength Communication Inc. (Mississauga, Ontario)
- Sharon Grewal-Macleod, Mary Macleod's Shortbread (Toronto, Ontario)
- Mariat Jibril, MIJ Consulting (Port Moody, British Columbia)
- Kerry Tam, Mimigo (Markham, Ontario)
- Benoit Loyer, Panorama (Kahnawake, Québec)
- Carlos Cadogan, The CQ Mindset (Uxbridge, Ontario)
- Christien Kelly, Trackore Inc. (Montréal, Québec)
Together, they represent businesses headquartered across six provinces, operating in industries as varied as shortbread manufacturing and tech-enabled consulting. That geographic and sectoral range is intentional. Program Co-Director Myriam Gafarou noted that the cohort reflects "the ambition and leadership of entrepreneurs who are too often overlooked," and that observation rings particularly true when you look at who's in the room.
A familiar name in Toronto's creative community
For readers who follow Toronto's Black arts and creative industries, one name on this list will feel especially familiar. Ashley McKenzie-Barnes, founder of D.PE Agency (Diverse, Progressive, Experiences), has been a fixture in the city's creative landscape for years. An award-winning creative director, curator and part-time professor in Humber College's Visual and Digital Arts program, McKenzie-Barnes built D.PE with a clear mandate: to create a creative agency that genuinely reflects the diversity of the communities it serves.
D.PE aims to give opportunities to art and creative directors, photographers, designers and copywriters of colour, hiring them as freelancers for specific jobs and projects. The agency's client roster includes major names such as Walmart Canada, Destination Toronto, Bell Media and Scotiabank. McKenzie-Barnes also led the creative strategy and brand launch of Now Playing Toronto, the city's most comprehensive arts, culture and entertainment events calendar.
Beyond the agency itself, McKenzie-Barnes founded the non-profit D.PE SHO Art Foundation, which supports BIPOC programming and artistry across Canadian contemporary art and culture. Her selection for the EY Entrepreneurs Access Network reflects both the strength of her enterprise and the broader recognition that creative businesses led by Black founders deserve the same institutional support as ventures in any other sector.
The case for programs like this one
Also worth noting among the 2026 cohort is Antoinette Ellis, CEO and co-founder of ACE & Company Ltd., based in Stoney Creek, Ontario. ACE & Company is a social enterprise dedicated to empowering women and girls to explore STEAM careers through innovative recruiting and advisory services. Ellis's work sits at the intersection of entrepreneurship and community development, the kind of enterprise that tends to generate outsized social returns alongside economic ones.
The program's design acknowledges something that too many accelerator programs still get wrong: financial capital matters, but it's often the last barrier, not the first. Before a founder needs investment, they need relationships, knowledge and legitimacy in the spaces where decisions get made. EY's Entrepreneurs Access Network addresses all three. As Program Co-Director Daniel Baer observed, when entrepreneurs move past structural barriers and focus on scaling, "the benefits extend well beyond individual companies and help strengthen communities and Canada's economy."
Roots and reach
The Entrepreneurs Access Network is part of EY's broader entrepreneurship ecosystem in Canada, which also includes the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year program and EY Entrepreneurial Winning Women. Together, these initiatives reflect a recognition that building a more equitable business landscape requires sustained, structural effort rather than one-off gestures. The Access Network, specifically, was designed to serve founders who fall outside the traditional pipeline that feeds major accelerators and venture capital networks, and five years in, it continues to do that work.
For the Black business community in particular, programs of this calibre matter deeply. The barriers that underrepresented founders face aren't hypothetical; they're documented, persistent and self-reinforcing when left unaddressed. A program that brings world-class coaching, a curated curriculum and access to a global network directly to founders who have built real, operating businesses is one of the more practical interventions available.
A signal worth amplifying
The 2026 cohort is a strong group. They build things that work, serve real communities and push their respective industries forward in ways that deserve recognition well beyond this announcement. For founders like Ashley McKenzie-Barnes and Antoinette Ellis, EY's Entrepreneurs Access Network offers something straightforward but genuinely valuable: a structured opportunity to scale without having to navigate every barrier alone.
Canada's entrepreneurial ecosystem is at its best when it makes room for the full breadth of its talent. This cohort is a reminder of how much that breadth has to offer, and what becomes possible when access is treated as a prerequisite rather than an afterthought. The work these 12 founders are doing is already meaningful. With the right backing, it has every reason to grow.
