Meet Dr. Fatima Ebrahim Jivraj, RBC Canadian Women Entrepreneur Awards Excellence Finalist

Dr. Fatima Ebrahim Jivraj is the Founder and CEO of Family Braces and a 2025 RBC Canadian Women Entrepreneur Awards finalist. Since launching the company in 2016, she has grown it into Western Canada’s largest orthodontic provider and Canada’s top Invisalign provider, bringing high-quality, patient-focused care to thousands of families.

Fatima disrupted traditional orthodontic models by introducing direct-to-consumer access, transparent pricing, and flexible financing, all while building a principled, women-led team dedicated to scaling ethical healthcare. Her leadership combines clinical expertise with a systems-driven approach, creating meaningful impact for both patients and her community.

Meet Dr. Fatima Ebrahim Jivraj and discover how she is transforming orthodontic care in Canada.

I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur when…

After we immigrated to Canada, my mom faced a significant roadblock: her optometry license from the UK wasn’t recognized here. Instead of giving up, she pivoted and built a real estate business from scratch. Watching her transform a setback into an opportunity showed me that entrepreneurship is about creating your own path when traditional doors close.

Entrepreneurship is made for me because…

I believe every problem has a solution: you just have to be willing to break things down and rethink the way it’s always been done. I’m not afraid to challenge the status quo if it means creating something better and more impactful.

The impact I hope to make through my work is…

To prove that healthcare can be both ethical and entrepreneurial, making quality orthodontics accessible to families who thought it was out of reach, while building meaningful careers for over 75 team members, most of whom are women.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned on my entrepreneurial journey is…

Run your own race. We wasted our first year trying to compete by being marginally better—but real value isn’t created by doing things slightly better than others, it’s produced by doing things fundamentally differently.

My proudest accomplishment is…

Treating over 25,000 patients – more than 1.5% of Calgary’s population – while becoming Canada’s #1 Invisalign provider and creating over 75 meaningful jobs, most of which are held by women who take pride in the work they do.

The biggest risk I took that paid off was…

Being transparent about our pricing and going direct to consumers instead of following the traditional referral-based system. It ruffled feathers across the dental industry, but it opened orthodontic care to thousands of families.

My biggest setback has been…

Navigating inflation’s crushing impact on Canadian families. When mortgage payments and groceries are eating up budgets, orthodontic treatment—even for kids who genuinely need it—becomes an impossible choice for many families, despite being medically necessary.

I overcame it by…

Focusing relentlessly on maintaining affordability. We negotiated longer payment terms with our suppliers, which gave us the flexibility to extend our in-house financing for patients from 24 to 36 months, ensuring families could still access the treatment their children needed—without having to choose between braces and groceries.

The best advice I’ve received as an entrepreneur was…

“Structure is freedom.” Building systems early on can feel constraining, but it’s actually what liberates you to scale and innovate rather than constantly firefighting. Once we built centralized systems, what once felt like a limitation became the foundation that enabled sustainable growth.

I surprise people when I tell them…

I have three university degrees, but I don’t use any of them. I have no formal business training; everything from team building and operations to marketing and financial strategy was learned by doing, making mistakes, and iterating until it worked.

If I had an extra hour in the day, I would use it to…

Spend it with my 20-month-old daughter—she’s honestly my greatest accomplishment, and the time with her goes by too quickly.

If you Googled me, you still wouldn’t know…

That I am an astro-photographer. I love capturing the night sky—stars, moonrises, galaxies, the Milky Way—and the Canadian Rockies provide the perfect backdrop. There’s something liberating about how vast the universe is and how infinitely small we are. It puts everything into perspective and brings me back to work feeling grounded and clear-headed.

The future excites me because…

Our business has hit its stride after years of trial by fire, and now I see opportunity everywhere. We’ve built the playbook for scaling ethical healthcare—the question isn’t if we can grow, but where we want to apply what we’ve learned next.

Connect with Dr. Fatima Ebrahim Jivraj on LinkedIn.