Stephen Hakami

Stephen Hakami is founder and chief executive of Wiza, a B2B contact data company in Toronto, Canada. He started Wiza after building prospecting tools inside his own cold-email agency, Kindling.

Running Kindling Before Wiza

In a 2019 essay on why he created Wiza, Hakami wrote that Kindling took target lists from clients, scraped LinkedIn with virtual assistants, uploaded names to Hunter.io for emails, and then ran a separate validator because fewer than half of the emails would deliver.

Turning Agency Tools into Wiza

That workflow pushed him to build in-house scrapers and verification so the agency could generate thousands of leads in a day. He then decided the stack should be a standalone product rather than stay locked inside Kindling. Early Wiza charged per valid email found instead of a monthly seat, so teams paid only when they needed leads, according to the same founding essay.

Focusing Wiza on Real-Time Verification

Wiza still sells around the moment a rep reveals a contact: it verifies emails and phone numbers live, exposes a Chrome extension for LinkedIn and Sales Navigator, and exports to CSV or a CRM. Hakami has kept the company bootstrapped while expanding from email finds into phone data and prospect search.