Victoria Ransom

Victoria Ransom is a New Zealand-born serial entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and former chief executive of Wildfire Interactive, the social marketing platform acquired by Google in 2012 for a reported US$350–450 million.

Who is Victoria Ransom?

Born in the mid-1970s, Ransom grew up on an asparagus farm in Scotts Ferry, near Bulls, in the Rangitikei district. She studied psychology at Macalester College in Minnesota, where she met her future husband and business partner, Alain Chuard, graduating summa cum laude in 1999. After a stint in investment banking at Morgan Stanley in New York, Ransom and Chuard returned to New Zealand in 2001 to co-found Access Trips, an adventure-travel company they ran for five years, before she completed an MBA at Harvard Business School.

What was Wildfire Interactive?

In 2008 Ransom co-founded Wildfire Interactive, a platform that helped brands run promotions and build audiences on Facebook and other social networks. It was profitable within a year, grew to around 400 employees and 21,000 clients, including 31 of the world's top 50 brands, and caught the attention of Google, which acquired the company in 2012. Ransom stayed on as a director of product at Google until 2015, one of the highest-profile exits by a New Zealand founder of her generation.

What is Victoria Ransom's net worth?

There is no reliable public figure for Victoria Ransom's net worth. The clearest marker is the Wildfire sale: Google paid a reported US$350–450 million in 2012, though that sum was shared with her co-founder and husband Alain Chuard and the company's investors rather than banked by her alone. Her wealth sits in private ventures and investments, so any specific personal figure attached to her name online is an estimate. The National Business Review has featured her among New Zealand's most successful women in business.

What is Prisma?

In 2020 Ransom and Chuard co-founded Prisma, a self-funded virtual school offering coach-led, project-based learning for students aged nine to eighteen, built on the idea of rethinking education from first principles. It is her second act after Wildfire and reflects a long-standing interest in how people learn, the thread that runs from her psychology degree through to the classroom she is now trying to reinvent.

Ransom's recognition has been wide-ranging: she was named to Fortune's 40 Under 40 at number 19, included on Fortune's Most Influential Women Entrepreneurs list, honoured as a White House Champion of Change by President Obama, named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, given the Kea World Class New Zealander award and made EY Entrepreneur of the Year for New Zealand in 2011.

Ransom's profile is noteworthy because she remains one of New Zealand's most successful technology founders by any measure: a farm kid from Rangitikei who built a company Google wanted to buy, earned recognition from the White House and then started again with education. Her story is a reminder that some of New Zealand's biggest founder stories begin in the smallest places.

Sources: Fortune · Kea New Zealand · NBR

Victoria Ransom features in our guide to the most famous New Zealand entrepreneurs.