Marc Gingras

Marc Gingras has spent twenty years building productivity software, and for most of it the same people have followed him from company to company.

In 2006 he founded Tungle, which pioneered the calendar booking link: the now ordinary idea that you send someone a link instead of trading five emails about Thursday. BlackBerry acquired Tungle in April 2011, and Gingras stayed on as Senior Director of Handheld Applications, where his team went on to lead the company’s productivity suite.

He became CEO of Foko Retail in 2014, building software for the frontline teams at CVS, Whole Foods, Nike and LVMH brands. WorkForce Software, a division of ADP, acquired Foko Retail in May 2021, and Gingras spent the following year as its SVP of Employee Experience Strategy and Product Management.

Two decades of that work taught one lesson: results come from relationships. Efficiency without connection is speed in the wrong direction. The CRM is exactly where that lesson breaks down. It was built to record an advisor’s work, never to do it, so the advisor ends up serving the software instead of the other way around.

He cofounded Bloks in February 2021 with Chadwick Carlson, Jean-Philippe Lespinasse and Rian Robertson. All three had worked with him at Foko Retail, and Lespinasse and Robertson go back to Tungle. Bloks is the Un-CRM for financial advisors: the record keeps itself, the system acts, and the advisor does the relationship. AI is what finally makes that possible. It takes the robot’s job so the advisor can be more human, not less.

In 2026 he joined Mila, the Quebec artificial intelligence institute, as a Founder in Residence, and Bloks was named one of Canada’s Top 100 AI Startups at ALL IN. He hosts The New Wealth Advisor, a podcast on AI anxiety, the wealth transfer, and the administrative load that fills advisors’ evenings. He writes the Bloks blog.

Gingras holds a B.A.Sc. in mechanical engineering from the University of Ottawa, an M.A.Sc. in management sciences from the University of Waterloo, and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurship from INSEAD, completed across Singapore, France and an exchange at Wharton. He has served on the board of SOPAR-Bala Vikasa, a Canadian development organization working in rural India, since 2003. He lives in the Ottawa-Gatineau region, where Bloks is headquartered.