Nicolas Chapados holds a BEng from McGill University and a PhD in Computer Science from University of Montréal. While still writing his thesis and jointly with his advisor Yoshua Bengio, he co-founded ApSTAT Technologies in 2001, a machine learning technology transfer firm, to apply cutting-edge academic research ideas to areas such as business forecasting, supply chain planning and portfolio management. During a fruitful collaboration with Desjardins Global Asset Management (2003–08), he led the R&D of commodity forecasting and trading models. In 2012, he and Eric-Paul Couture decided to spin-off Chapados Couture Capital to enable the commercialization of portfolio management strategies relying on advanced quantitative models.

Previously, Nicolas has been a researcher within the speech recognition research group at Nortel Networks (1994–99), where he led the research and implementation of a natural-language dialog manager for speech recognition applications. He is a CFA charterholder.