$20 million gift to school from Lise and Giuseppe Racanelli is the culmination of a lifelong covenant between an immigrant’s gratitude and the institution that made his ambitions possible

When the Lise and Giuseppe Racanelli Foundation announced a $20 million gift to HEC Montréal—the largest single philanthropic contribution in the institution’s 119-year history—it was not the act of a man making a first gesture.

It was the culmination of a lifelong covenant between an immigrant’s gratitude and the institution that made his ambitions possible.

Giuseppe Racanelli arrived in Montréal from Italy as a young man, carrying with him the particular hunger of someone who understands, instinctively, how rare a genuine opening can be.

HEC Montréal provided exactly that — a window onto a professional world that might otherwise have remained closed.

His own words illuminate the debt he feels he owes: it was during a HEC Montréal internship in Europe, at a French multinational, that he first set foot in the ventilation industry that would define his career.

From that singular opportunity, he built not one enterprise but three.

In 1971, he founded Spiro Metal Tube Inc.

Eight years later, Industries Racan Inc. came, followed by the founding of Ingénia Technologies Inc. in 2004—each company a specialist in the design and manufacturing of custom air-handling units, each becoming a key player in its sector.

He sold Industries Racan in 1999, and in 2024, after two decades of relentless innovation, he sold Ingénia Technologies as well.

What followed the sale was not retirement in the conventional sense. In 2025, Racanelli turned his attention to an entirely different kind of construction: Campus Santé Mont-Tremblant, a more-than-$50-million integrated health campus developed on 44 acres of land he personally owns in the Laurentians.

He donated the land and helped catalyze a collaboration between private enterprise and the municipality of Mont-Tremblant — a project designed to bring together physical, mental, and social health services under one roof for a region he describes as chronically underserved. Its first phase, a new CLSC facility, opened in late 2025.

Construction of a multi-floor super clinic with a family medicine group, medical imaging center, and pharmacy was underway by early 2026.

The project is, in its way, a second career—not in business, but in building infrastructure for human flourishing.

It is against this backdrop that the magnitude of the HEC Montréal gift becomes fully legible.

This is not a donor writing a single check.

This is a philanthropist operating with a coherent, decades-long philosophy — one in which mental health, entrepreneurship, and access to quality services are inseparable pillars of a more resilient society.

The Lise and Giuseppe Racanelli Foundation, guided by values of gratitude and social engagement, has been supporting hospitals in Montréal and Québec City for years. In 2023, the Foundation contributed $2 million to HEC Montréal—half directed to the Hélène Desmarais Building and half to the Cursus entrepreneurial training program within the Pôle entRepreneuriat.

The new $20 million gift, then, is less a departure than an acceleration—a tenfold deepening of a relationship already grounded in shared conviction.

The donation is structured around three interconnected pillars, each reflecting a dimension of Racanelli’s worldview. The first targets the next generation of entrepreneurs: funding will flow directly into the Pôle entRepreneuriat HEC Montréal, supporting programs in business creation, acceleration, and succession—the full arc of the entrepreneurial lifecycle.

The second pillar supports HEC Montréal’s research and knowledge-transfer ecosystem, channeling resources to entities including Pôle D (the Top Executives and Strategic Management Hub), the Pôle Santé (Health Research Center), and the IDEOS social impact hub.

The third pillar — arguably the most personally resonant for Racanelli — addresses student mental health and well-being directly.

Mental health support and accessibility services already in place at the School will be significantly strengthened, and the student living environment improved, with the explicit goal of contributing to every student’s academic success.

“Although my life as an entrepreneur has come to an end, my mission has not,” Racanelli said at the announcement. “Throughout my career, I worked hard to build connections and to ensure that members of my organization were happy. Promoting well-being among the next generation is essential.”

The statement carries particular weight from a man who has spoken openly about the role that diversity played in his own professional success—who recognized that a workforce drawn from different backgrounds and cultures was his greatest competitive asset, the engine that allowed him to challenge inertia and develop technologies that set his companies apart.

The gift carries the imprint of the entire Racanelli family. Véronique Racanelli, who serves as president of the Lise and Giuseppe Racanelli Foundation, articulated the philosophy with precision: “Combining ambition and compassion is essential to building a stronger and more humane society. We share these same values with HEC Montréal.”

The inclusion of Lise Racanelli in the foundation’s name, and the naming of the Côte-Sainte-Catherine building after both Lise and Giuseppe, speaks to a partnership in philanthropy that extends well beyond the figurehead of a single donor.

That building — now officially the Lise-et-Giuseppe-Racanelli Building — is itself a vessel of symbolic meaning. It marks the 30th anniversary of its original construction on Côte-Sainte-Catherine Road, a milestone that Federico Pasin, Director General of HEC Montréal, described as a moment of inscription: the Racanelli family is now, permanently, part of the school’s architecture and its institutional memory.

“This rare act of generosity will allow us to amplify our mission to train responsible leaders and support cutting-edge research that contributes to the sustainable transformation of organizations and society,” Pasin said.

Michel Patry, President and CEO of the HEC Montréal Foundation, put it more expansively still, noting that a contribution of this magnitude gives wings not merely to an institution but to an entire generation of entrepreneurs who, like Racanelli himself, will become the visionaries society needs to meet the defining challenges of their era.

There is a fourth dimension to the gift that has received less attention but may prove equally consequential over time: a carefully designed mechanism to stimulate planned giving across the broader philanthropic community.

The HEC Montréal Foundation will launch a campaign in which every planned gift confirmed by the end of 2027 will trigger an immediate financial contribution from a portion of the Racanelli family’s donation, disbursed as scholarships for members of the HEC Montréal community.

It is philanthropy as a multiplier, a model that leverages the impact of one extraordinary act of generosity to normalize and encourage giving from donors of every background and financial means. In this sense, the Racanelli gift is not simply a transfer of capital.

It is a challenge, an invitation, and a framework for reimagining what a culture of giving at a business school can look like.

HEC Montréal — an internationally renowned French-language university founded in 1907, now home to more than 14,000 students from 154 countries and a global alumni network of over 120,000 — has long trained leaders who contribute to the social and economic development of Québec and beyond.

What the Racanelli gift does, structurally and symbolically, is bind together three conversations that are too often treated as separate: the conversation about economic productivity and entrepreneurship; the conversation about academic excellence and innovative research; and the conversation about the psychological resilience and mental health of the people doing the work.

In an era when student mental health has emerged as one of the most pressing challenges facing universities across Canada — from Queen’s University’s U-Flourish Centre for Student Mental Health Research to the $9.2 million Parr Centre for Thriving at Western University — HEC Montréal now has, in this gift, a landmark commitment to treating well-being not as an auxiliary service but as a prerequisite for learning and leadership.

For Giuseppe Racanelli, the logic is simple and personal.

He built three companies on the belief that the people around him—their happiness, their cultural diversity, and their sense of belonging—were more important than any automated process, any proprietary technology, or any balance sheet.

The $20 million gift to HEC Montréal is, in its deepest form, an extension of that same operating principle into the public sphere.

His mission, as he has made clear, has not ended.

It has simply changed addresses.