Solmaz Shahalizadeh

Solmaz Shahalizadeh is an operating advisor at Bessemer, an executive and advisor in data and product, and a founding partner of Backbone Angels, a collective focused on funding more diverse and women-founded companies.
Most recently, she was the Vice President and Head of Data at Shopify, helping it grow from 100k to over 1.75 million merchants from 2013 to 2022.
In her role, Solmaz was the voice of data in the senior leadership team and evangelized a culture of being data informed across the company.
She spent her early years building the company’s financial data warehouse and analytics, and played a critical role in their successful IPO.
With a passion to create experiences powered by data, she started and scaled Shopify’s portfolio of data products such as Shopify’s order fraud detection that runs in real-time on every order placed across Shopify platform, and Shopify Capital that has funded over 3B$ in cash advances to merchants based on machine learning models.
As the leader of the data team and discipline, she grew Shopify’s data team to over 500 data scientists, engineers and product managers, and additionally took on leading the suite of merchant-facing analytical products to give Shopify merchants best-in-class analytical experiences.