Chetan Mathur

Founder & CEO Next Pathway Inc.

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Chetan Mathur is the founder and chief executive of Next Pathway, the Toronto company that automates the hardest part of moving an enterprise off legacy infrastructure: translating the code. Its products scan a legacy estate, plan the migration, translate the code to a cloud target such as Snowflake or Amazon Redshift, and validate the result — work that otherwise consumes years of manual effort. EY named him an Entrepreneur Of The Year winner for Ontario in 2023. Next Pathway is his third company and the third time he has built one in the seam between financial institutions and the technology they depend on: he founded Sage Information Consultants in 1992 and sold it in 2000, co-founded M Systems Group in 2003 and sold it to Bell Canada in 2006. Outside business he has spent two decades inside Toronto’s cultural institutions, as a founding patron of Luminato, a board member of the Toronto International Film Festival, and a governor of Roy Thomson and Massey Hall.

Career Highlights

• Named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2023 winner for Ontario, listed by EY Canada under Next Pathway.
• Founded Next Pathway, whose SHIFT Cloud code translation software, Crawler360 scanning and planning tool and automated testing product together address legacy-to-cloud migration end to end, across targets including Snowflake and Amazon Redshift.
• Founded Sage Information Consultants in 1992 and built it into what he describes as a leading supplier of IT consulting to global banking and financial institutions, specialising in complex financial services software, before negotiating its sale in June 2000 to a NASDAQ-listed company.
• Co-founded M Systems Group in 2003, which grew into a global provider of outsourced managed email and directory services to financial services organizations, and coordinated its sale to Bell Canada in 2006.
• Graduated from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science.
• Writes for the Forbes Technology Council on legacy modernisation and enterprise AI readiness, arguing that organizations running agentic pilots on top of legacy warehouses lack the infrastructure to make AI accountable or scalable.

Professional Journey

Mathur’s three companies share a customer. He started Sage Information Consultants in 1992, straight into the market he has worked in ever since — banks and financial institutions with complex, specialised software estates and a permanent integration problem. Sage grew into an international technology integrator and a significant supplier of consulting services to global banking clients, and he negotiated its sale in June 2000 to a NASDAQ-listed acquirer.

Three years later he co-founded M Systems Group, which took a narrower slice of the same market: outsourced managed email and directory services for global financial services organizations. That business grew quickly enough to attract a strategic buyer, and he coordinated its sale to Bell Canada in 2006.

Next Pathway addresses the third version of the same underlying problem. Financial institutions and other large enterprises carry decades of accumulated code in data warehouses, ETL pipelines and reporting systems that were never designed to move. The manual approach — reading, understanding and rewriting that code for a cloud target — does not scale, and it is where most migration programmes stall. Next Pathway’s answer is automation at each stage: Crawler360 to scan the estate and build the plan, SHIFT Cloud to translate the code, and a testing product to validate that the translation behaves as the original did. By 2019 the Globe and Mail had, on the company’s account, called it Canada’s hottest cloud start-up, and in 2023 EY recognised Mathur as an Entrepreneur Of The Year for Ontario.

His recent public argument has moved with the market toward AI. Writing in mid-2026, he made the case that architecture, not model selection, is where the return on AI investment is now determined — that agentic systems built on top of an unmodernised legacy warehouse inherit its limits, and that the migration work is therefore a prerequisite rather than a parallel track. His last recorded public writing under the Next Pathway title is dated July 2026. The company’s own website has been unreachable since around March of that year, a state this review could not explain; see the verification notes, which set out both what was observed and what it does not prove.

Education

University of Toronto

Bachelor of Science, Mathematics and Computer Science