Peter van der Zouwe Joins CodeLantern's Founding Team as VP Sales and Partnerships
CodeLantern ·
The twenty-five-year Microsoft veteran will help lead CodeLantern's go-to-market as the company helps enterprises adopt agentic development.
Toronto — May 20, 2026— CodeLantern, a software development consultancy built for the agentic era, today announced that Peter van der Zouwe has joined the founding team as Vice President of Sales and Partnerships, alongside David Judd, Nick Van Exan, and Jeff Zado. Peter brings more than twenty-five years of experience building and scaling Microsoft’s partner ecosystem across New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Canada, and will help lead CodeLantern’s sales and partnership strategy.
Peter spent most of his career at Microsoft, where he held progressively senior roles. Most recently, he served as Director of Strategic Partner Development at Microsoft Canada, leading a team of Partner Development Managers who built new practice capabilities for professional and managed services companies. Before that, he spent a number of years as a Senior Business Development Manager, helping Canada’s largest systems integrators develop their cloud practices during Azure’s critical growth years.
His career at Microsoft also included leading Canada’s national systems integrator channel, running the Developer and Platform Group’s customer team in Canada, and managing enterprise and commercial sector sales in New Zealand. Before Microsoft, he held product marketing roles at Dell in Europe and Australia.
Peter’s experience sits at the exact intersection CodeLantern serves: the space where Microsoft’s partner ecosystem meets enterprise software delivery. He has spent more than twenty-five years helping the same class of consultancies and systems integrators that now need to adopt agentic workflows.
“I’ve known and worked with Peter for a number of years, and I’m thrilled to be working alongside him again. Peter has spent his career helping enterprises succeed through every major platform shift, and he’s done it with both Microsoft and SI Partners. He understands what organizations actually need to adopt new technology, not just what sounds good in a pitch. That customer-first mindset is our north star, and we couldn’t be more excited to have him leading our go-to-market as we scale.”
CodeLantern launched in April to help engineering teams adopt agentic development without the failure modes that follow unsupervised AI coding: drifting conventions, lost context, and mounting technical debt. The company embeds with customer teams to install a structured workflow, a knowledge base that grows with every pull request, and tooling that keeps the workflow and knowledge base accurate as the codebase evolves.
“I’ve spent my career helping partners and customers succeed during great transformations in the tech industry: from Agile to DevOps to cloud-native development in Azure. Agentic development is the biggest shift I’ve seen yet. What excites me about joining CodeLantern is the opportunity to help enterprises deliver on agentic AI, with people who understand the methodology and tooling required to succeed and who’ve done the hard work of enterprise delivery before. That’s what partners and customers actually need.”
Outside of work, Peter volunteers with the Hour of Code, teaching programming to underserved teenagers, and is a six-time participant in the Ride to Conquer Cancer. He holds a Bachelor of Business Studies in Marketing and Business Law from Massey University in New Zealand.
About Peter van der Zouwe
Peter van der Zouwe is Vice President of Sales and Partnerships at CodeLantern. He spent more than twenty-five years at Microsoft in roles spanning New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Canada, most recently as Director of Strategic Partner Development at Microsoft Canada. His career has focused on building and scaling the partner ecosystem — from leading enterprise sales teams to developing cloud computing practices with Canada’s largest systems integrators. He previously ran his own IT consulting firm, Can-iwi IT Services, advising Solutions Partners on maximizing their Microsoft relationships. He is a Microsoft Top Business Development Manager Award recipient and holds certifications in Azure, AI, Modern Work, Power Platform & Dynamics. He holds a Bachelor of Business Studies from Massey University.
About CodeLantern
CodeLantern is a software development consultancy that helps engineering teams adopt agentic workflows. Founded by veterans of one of Microsoft’s most trusted technical partners in Canada, the company embeds with developers to install methodology, tooling, and a knowledge base, all built to make AI-assisted development predictable and auditable. CodeLantern is headquartered in Toronto. Learn more at codelantern.ai.
Media contact: info@codelantern.com