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.

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.

In 2008, after completing an MBA at Harvard Business School, Ransom co-founded Wildfire Interactive. The platform 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 served as director of product at Google until 2015.

Ransom’s achievements have been recognised widely: she was named to Fortune’s 40 Under 40 at number 19, included in Fortune’s Most Influential Women Entrepreneurs list, awarded a White House Champion of Change by President Obama and named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. She also received the Kea World Class New Zealander award and EY Entrepreneur of the Year for New Zealand in 2011.

In 2020, Ransom and Chuard co-founded Prisma, a self-funded virtual school offering coach-led, project-based learning for students aged 9–18, with a vision to rethink education from first principles.

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