The president of BDC says the development bank’s return to direct investing in medtech is an attempt to re-engage with an industry it was too quick to pull back from.
“There’s still a role for us to play in this sector and, probably, we pulled out too quickly, too early.”
Isabelle Hudon, BDC
At the Medteq+ Health Innovation Summit in Montréal on Wednesday, Isabelle Hudon said that BDC wants to address a financing gap in the medtech industry with its recently announced life sciences fund. The fund envelope will be a little more than $100 million CAD, though the number isn’t confirmed yet, for exclusively direct investments into companies. The fund is expected to launch before April, Hudon told BetaKit.
On stage, Hudon explained that BDC, which is Canada’s largest venture capital (VC) investor, once had a dedicated fund for investing in medical and health technologies (its Healthcare Venture Fund, launched in 2013). This fund spun off as the independent entity Amplitude Ventures in 2019, with BDC as its anchor investor, taking on portfolio management of several companies from the original fund.
“We believed at a certain point that we had played our role as a development bank with this first fund, with successful investments…that were such a success that this fund took off outside of BDC,” Hudon said in French-language remarks that BetaKit has translated into English for publication.
Now, Hudon acknowledged, there is a “flagrant lack” of capital for the medtech sector—from the early-stage to the late-stage—and a lack of technical expertise for investing in the industry.
Faced with these issues, Hudon said, “there’s still a role for us to play in this sector and, probably, we pulled out too quickly, too early from this sector.”
Though Canada’s medtech sector stood out as a strong point in the latest Canadian Venture Capital & Private Equity Association (CVCA) report on domestic VC investment, it was fuelled by fewer, larger financing rounds, including a $500-million secondary sale by Vancouver-based clinic management platform Jane Software. This deal made up just under half of the sector’s $1.07 billion raised by the end of the third quarter of 2025.
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Peter van der Velden, managing general partner at Lumira Ventures, pointed out that with Jane excluded from the data, “2025 is trending to be one of the worst years for new life sciences investment activity in a decade.”
When BetaKit first reported that BDC was recruiting to launch a new life sciences fund in November, a BDC spokesperson said that the new fund will “will target a different stage of development” compared to its predecessor, and use “a two-pronged, complementary approach” that focuses on “the needs that are not currently met by other funds.”
The development bank, through its venture arm BDC Capital, is Canada’s largest and most active venture investor, with a mandate to support underserved sectors and entrepreneurs. With its Healthcare Venture Fund in 2013, BDC allocated $270 million to more than 25 startups developing innovations in precision medicine, biotech, and medical imaging ahead of its spinout into Amplitude. Some of its biggest portfolio companies included Calgary-based Circle Cardiovascular Imaging and Vancouver’s Zymeworks. In addition to Amplitude, BDC is a limited partner in healthtech-focused funds Genesys Capital and Lumira Ventures.
“We have a leadership role,” Hudon said on stage. “Our investment presence gives a certain degree of confidence to other investors, since we are often the first to invest and the last to get out.”
“Our investment presence gives a certain degree of confidence to other investors, since we are often the first to invest and the last to get out.”
Isabelle Hudon, BDC
BDC hopes its new life sciences fund will help it re-engage in direct medtech investments after a few years away. In an interview after the panel, Hudon told BetaKit that after Amplitude Ventures was spun out and saw success, BDC “didn’t follow up with another fund.”
“We sense that there’s a need in the market…we don’t have regrets but it’s an observation that there’s not enough available capital,” Hudon said.
Other industry leaders agree. Nicole DeKort, the president of industry association Medtech Canada, told BetaKit in an interview that Canadian medtech startups mainly need funding and for their first customers to be in Canada. Often, they will sell to the US market first.
At an industry conference put on by the Advanced Medical Technology Association (Medtech Canada’s US counterpart), DeKort said that Canadian entrepreneurs were most enthusiastic about the access they got to executives from large multinational medical tech companies.
“People think it’s a competition between Canada and the US, and it’s not. It’s an ecosystem,” DeKort said. “Innovations that [Canadians] are bringing to market are very complementary to innovations that already exist.”
Feature image courtesy Isabelle Hudon via LinkedIn.