CIX recently hosted its closed-door Investor Forum, so BetaKit snuck reporter Josh Scott in and hid him behind the largest possible office plant to write about it . The piece shows a VC ecosystem taking a hard look in the mirror after years of struggling with prolonged fundraising, poor investment returns, fraught LP relationships, and competitive pressures from the south. Whenever BetaKit publishes something like this, the results are often the same: radio silence online, while the DMs stay popping . This time was no different, and I received a few eyeball emojis at comments from the CVCA’s Kim Furlong directly connecting the lack of capital across stages to the ongoing exodus of Canadian startups to the United States. “By the time you get to Series C, most of your capital is coming from the US, the talent to grow that company is in the US, and your customer base is in the US,” Furlong said. “If the capital rate is not [incentivizing] you to stay here, why are you building it here?” The comment reminded me of former Panache Ventures general partner Chris Neumann’s argument that correlation is not causation: American VCs aren’t the reason why Canadian startups are leaving, velocity is. You can read the full post on his thinking—I bring it up only so he won’t message me once this newsletter hits his inbox. For my money, what stands out most is that Canadian VCs seem equally concerned about the narrative regarding poor fund performance as the poor performance itself. I get it: narratives can be self-fulfilling, and seem easier to influence than the structural issues in Canadian venture capital. But if you take a hard look in the mirror and don’t like what you see, how much is a new haircut really going to help? Connect, collaborate, and close deals with 20,000 innovators, investors, and leaders shaping the future of finance and technology. Visit go.coindesk.com/betakit to sign up and save 20%. Difficulty accessing capital and concerns about fund performance were the talk of the town among Canadian venture capitalists at Elevate’s recent CIX Summit in Toronto. In closed-door conversations at the event’s Investor Forum, leaders from Canada’s VC industry gathered to discuss the structural issues limiting Canada’s tech investment community. Topics ranged from tensions between investors and LPs to prevailing narratives about poor VC performance and competitive pressures at the seed and growth stages. Toronto Tech Week has unveiled the speakers for its headline event and the official program calendar as the inaugural citywide initiative anticipates more than 10,000 attendees this June. Homecoming will feature Social Capital’s Chamath Palihapitiya, NVIDIA’s Sanja Fidler, Shopify’s Tobi Lütke and Harley Finkelstein, Waabi’s Raquel Urtasun, Wealthsimple’s Michael Katchen, and Cohere’s Aidan Gomez. It marks just one of over 100 partner-run events taking place during Toronto Tech Week from June 23-27. Several Canadian tech figures joined a number of business leaders and bankers in formally endorsing Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre in the country’s upcoming federal election. The endorsements were signed in a letter authored by the “Friends of Free Enterprise in Canada,” which ran as a full-page ad in several Canadian newspapers last weekend. Maverix Private Equity founder John Ruffolo, serial tech entrepreneur Amar Varma, Impression Ventures founder Christian Lassonde, and Leaders Fund co-founder David Stein represented tech on the endorsement letter, which was also signed by Fairfax Financial founder Prem Watsa. The letter had 33 signatories in all, at least one-third of whom are connected to Fairfax. The Government of Canada has announced new measures for Canadian businesses impacted by the global trade war, including a Large Enterprise Tariff Loan Facility (LETL) designed to help firms struggling to access traditional financing thanks to US tariffs and Canadian countermeasures. LETL applications are now open to companies with significant operations and more than $300 million in annual revenue in Canada that require a minimum loan of $60 million, provided they commit to minimizing the loss of employment, sustaining their activities in Canada, and demonstrating a plan to achieve financial sustainability. During his closing keynote address to the World Summit AI conference this week in Montréal, Canadian AI godfather Yoshua Bengio said that if companies succeed in creating superintelligent AI agents without solving for self-preservation, it could carry “catastrophic” risks. Bengio advocated for an alternative, non-agentic approach to AI development. In the meantime, many businesses are betting that the future of AI will involve agents. This week, Cohere launched its new Embed 4 model . Cohere claims that Embed 4 offers superior search and retrieval functions for AI agents, which the LLM developer expects to continue to play an important role in enterprise AI adoption. After raising far less than it had hoped for its first deep tech-focused VC fund and undergoing some leadership changes, Montréal-based Innovobot Resonance Ventures is ready to invest again with a “refreshed vision” and veteran early-stage investor Neha Khera at the helm. BetaKit sat down with Khera and Innovobot CEO and founding partner Mario Venditti to unpack what went down, how IRV navigated what remains a challenging VC fundraising environment, why they are so excited about Canadian deep tech, and their vision for the fund going forward. Manitoba has historically garnered a disproportionately small share of the VC dollars invested in Canada. Winnipeg-based Trillick Ventures wants to help turn the tide. The recently-launched VC firm is raising a $15-million fund to back early-stage Manitoba tech startups and connect investors from other parts of the country with the province’s budding tech sector. BetaKit checked in with founder and GP Iain Crozier and some other players from the province’s innovation ecosystem on Trillick’s progress to date, the state of Manitoba’s tech and VC market, and the role they hope to see Trillick play in ensuring that Manitoba is no longer Canada’s “most underrepresented” province for VC funding.
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