About a decade ago, the federal government launched SUV, the Start-up Visa program, which was designed to attract top entrepreneurial talent from around the world to Canada.
“Speed is of the essence. This is a super dynamic marketplace. Canada is losing entrepreneurs, we’re losing the next generation of founders, and we need to do things, quick.”
Boris Wertz
Since that time, BetaKit has essentially reported on nothing but complaints with the program, including slow processing times, delays, abuse, and even fraud.
Things got so bad that, at the end of 2025, SUV wait times ballooned to somewhere between 10 and 35 years, before the program was suspended in anticipation of something new.
We’ve discussed the SUV’s ills on this podcast before, but multi-decade processing times is something new. So, what the hell happened? And can the Start-up Visa be saved or rebuilt?
To help me answer those questions, we have Boris Wertz, the founding partner of Version One Ventures and someone who lobbied for the original SUV program, and Lucy Hargreaves, CEO of Build Canada, which published a memo from Wertz on a potential solution to our entrepreneurial immigration problems.
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On this episode of The BetaKit Podcast, we discuss what went wrong with SUV, and why Wertz’s proposed solution looks a lot like the original program.
Let’s dig in.
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Feature image courtesy Freepik.