Each year on International Women’s Day, we take the opportunity to celebrate the inspiring women entrepreneurs within our client community. Their businesses and expertise span industries, but they share a common thread: vision, resilience, and a commitment to making a meaningful impact.
This year, we’re proud to spotlight three remarkable women whose work reflects that spirit. From advancing mental health support for young adults, to pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence and robotics, to crafting wigs that bring characters to life on screen, these leaders are shaping their industries while creating opportunities for others.
Through their stories, we’re reminded that entrepreneurship is about more than building a successful business. It’s about solving problems, supporting communities, and opening doors for the next generation.
Catherine Branch, CEO, The Branch Family Foundation—Building a Path to Mental Health Support for Young Adults
What inspired you to start the Foundation?
The motivation to launch The Branch Family Foundation came from a deeply personal place. My daughter’s experience with mental health challenges in her late teens showed us the cracks in our Canadian healthcare system. When we sought help for her, we found that there was nothing in Canada at the time that provided residential mental healthcare for young adults. Between 17 and 19 especially, there was little assistance available—she was too old for Children’s Hospital and too young for adult hospitals like the Hope Centre.
Witnessing her journey, and the obstacles our family faced, compelled my husband and me to create The Branch Family Foundation. We were fortunate to be able to find and afford care for our daughter outside of the country, but we wanted to give back so that other families would not have to go through what we did.
The result is The Clearing, a non-profit residential, community-based environment designed specifically for young adults navigating mounting mental health challenges before life unravels any further.
What do you enjoy most about starting up the Foundation?
We are in the early stage of the Foundation’s life, so everything is still very new, daunting, but exciting.
What I enjoy most is speaking with people—experts in the field, supporters, and people with lived experience—and hearing their enthusiasm for the project. It reinforces for me every day that we are on the right path.
What’s a milestone or achievement you’re particularly proud of?
Because we are still early in the process, every milestone feels important. I am particularly proud of securing our CRA charitable status and passing the first hurdle with the City of Maple Ridge approving our project in principle.
Even smaller milestones, like launching our website landing page and the technology behind it, feel meaningful as we continue building momentum.
Is there anything you’d like others to know about the Foundation and its goals?
The Foundation will soon launch its campaign to fund the building and operation of The Clearing. Our family has purchased the $2 million property, and we will raise $10 million for construction and another $10 million to create an endowment to help fund access for low-income families.
We envision a sliding-scale model of fees so that people across a range of incomes can be served. Our goal is a facility where no one is turned away because of cost. The Clearing will support young adults aged 17–25 through longer-term stays of three to nine months, providing both personal space to breathe and a communal space to belong as they heal and learn.
Holly Peck, Roboticist & AI Entrepreneur—Shaping the Future of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence
What inspired you to pursue a career in AI and Robotics?
I’ve always been captivated by the problem of human intelligence—how to define it, how to build it, and how to harness it to solve other mysteries about our universe.
As a student at Princeton, I participated in an archaeological seminar where I excavated Neanderthal bones in France. That experience sparked a curiosity about human cognition and what makes us uniquely human.
Years later I was still asking the same question while building robot brains at Sanctuary AI, a Vancouver-based humanoid robotics lab. Since then, my work has included machine learning systems for warehouse robots, humanoid robotics, and commercial programs for embodied AI avatars, as well as co-founding Bytez, an AI company that powers model inference for major AI research conferences.
Most recently, in March 2026, I founded a new company building foundational infrastructure for robotics. The company is currently operating in stealth.
What do you enjoy most about working in your field?
To me, robotics is like kinetic art. You’re building hardware and software systems that interact with the real world, which means you must respect the laws of physics.
Getting robots to work reliably in production is incredibly challenging, and we are still very early as an industry. But the potential impact is enormous. If we can automate repetitive work, we can shift human effort toward creativity and exploration.
And selfishly, I just want to deploy robots in space.
What’s a milestone or achievement you’re particularly proud of?
As mentioned—I founded Bytez, an AI company backed by investors including Mozilla, MIT’s venture fund E14, Greylock, and Sequoia scouts.
With a very small team and minimal funding, we grew the platform from zero to 350,000+ monthly active users and hundreds of customers, now powering major AI research conferences.
Recently we launched what is now the largest inference API on the internet, giving developers access to more than 220,000 pretrained AI models. I’m incredibly proud of what the team built and what our customers are building with it.
What advice would you give to young women considering a career in AI, robotics, or other STEM fields?
Follow your curiosity and experiment with the tools available today.
Low-code and no-code platforms, along with large language models, make it easier than ever to prototype ideas quickly. The future belongs to people who can creatively combine existing systems to build new things. We’re no longer bottlenecked by technical knowledge alone—we’re bottlenecked by agency, grit, and creativity.
So go forth and build.
Stacey Butterworth, Owner, Stacey Butterworth Wig Creations Inc.— Crafting Custom Wigs for Film, Television, and Stage
What inspired you to start your business?
I was very young, 17, when I started my training, so I don’t think I had a “plan” per say. I just didn’t feel that I was going to have a traditional path into a career. I knew I wanted something different and challenging.
Looking back now I realize the key to my success was simply hard work. I did every job that came my way, was the first to arrive and the last to leave, did the work others didn’t want to do, stayed positive even when I felt miserable, and never let my ego get in the way.
What do you enjoy most about being a small business owner?
I love being in charge of my life. With that comes sacrifice though—you must be willing and excited about being responsible for everything. What I mean by excited is you have to want to be successful. That’s different than feeling that you deserve to be successful
What’s a milestone or achievement you’re particularly proud of?
Creating an international business, having first name recognition in my industry, and providing employment opportunities to others.
Is there anything you’d like others to know about your products or services?
Not really—just that we are the best at what we do!
The women featured here represent just a small glimpse of the incredible leadership within our client community. Their journeys highlight the many ways entrepreneurship can create positive change—from improving access to mental health care, to advancing technology, to supporting the creative industries that bring stories to life.
At DMCL, we’re proud to work alongside clients who are not only building successful businesses, but also contributing to stronger communities and a more innovative future. This International Women’s Day, we celebrate Catherine, Holly, Stacey, and all the women entrepreneurs whose ideas, determination, and leadership continue to shape the world around us.
