Chris Pavlovski is a Canadian technology entrepreneur, best known as the founder and chief executive officer of Rumble.
Chris Pavlovski is a Canadian technology entrepreneur, best known as the founder and chief executive officer of Rumble.
He grew up in the Greater Toronto area and began building websites as a teenager. Pavlovski attended the University of Toronto Mississauga between 2001 and 2006 and briefly worked as a network administrator at Microsoft before launching his own companies. [1] [2]
In 2001, Pavlovski founded Jolted (later Jolt) Media Group in Toronto, serving as its chief executive. While leading Jolt Media Group, he was appointed in 2010 as Director of Marketing for Next Giant Leap, a private space exploration company competing for the Google Lunar X Prize. [3] In 2011, he co-founded Cosmic Development, an IT and software services firm which grew to over 150 employees. For his early successes, Pavlovski was a regional finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2010. Between 2009 and 2012 Pavlovski served as director of marketing for NASA's Next Giant Leap. [1]
In October 2013, Pavlovski launched Rumble, a Toronto-based video hosting and cloud platform, as an alternative (Alt-tech) to YouTube with lighter contend moderation policies. Under his leadership the site grew rapidly, attracting major content creators. In 2021 Rumble secured new investment from high-profile backers Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance. Later that year, Pavlovski announced a merger with the special-purpose acquisition company CF Acquisition Corp VI; the combined company began trading on Nasdaq (ticker RUM) in 2022 with an implied enterprise value of about $2.1 billion. [4]
Pavlovski became a billionaire in January 2025 after Rumble's stock increased in price by nearly 190 percent in 2024. [5] [6]
Pavlovski is Canadian by birth and of Macedonian descent, and he is active in the Macedonian-Canadian community. He serves on the board of Macedonia 2025, a non-profit organization focused on economic and educational development in North Macedonia. [1] Pavlovski was married to his wife Vanessa in 2012, who he met as a teenager. [7]
He is a critic of internet censorship. In 2024, Pavlovski criticized the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France as a "red line." [8]