The sun is setting on the Banff Venture Forum (BVF), but another financial networking event is already poised to pick up its slack.
Earlier this month, the BVF quietly announced it would cease operations after a 25-year run as Alberta’s preeminent financing event, bringing venture capital firms and Alberta’s entrepreneurs and innovators together. The forum, which last year hosted more than 40 venture firms, 50 high-growth companies, and 325 delegates, will now transition into the Banff Capital Summit (BCS)—an iteration focused on expanding the original forum’s footprint beyond just venture capital toward the full “capital stack.”
“There’s a preponderance of wealth in the province. We need more of that activity and innovation in all sorts of sectors.”
“One of the larger trends we’re seeing in venture capital as a category is that we have a maturity in our ecosystem now where we need other solutions in the capital stack beyond just venture,” George Damian, the executive director of the BCS told BetaKit in an interview on Wednesday. “I think there was an admission that [the BVF] needed to grow in scope a bit and that there was probably a new team who maybe had the energy to do it, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”
In a statement issued today, Tom Ogaranko, the chair of CapitalRoad Foundation, which has historically organized BVF, said the decision to sunset the forum and allow the summit to take its place was a continuation of the BVF’s mission.
“For more than two decades, this foundation’s board has had a single charge: to keep Banff the place where Canada’s most consequential conversations about capital and innovation happen,” Ogaranko added. “Evolving the BVF into the BCS is not a departure from that mission, it is the next expression of it.”
CapitalRoad Foundation is a non-profit organization focused on connecting early and growth-stage tech companies with investors. In addition to the BVF, the organization has also hosted the Canadian Financing Forum. The organization will not be involved in organizing the BCS.
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For the BCS inaugural event, which runs October 7 to 9 at the Banff Springs Hotel, the summit plans to bring 200 delegates from across the capital stack. That includes early-stage investors and boutique venture firms to private equity, credit, bank financing and late-stage capital solutions. The invite-only event (though interested parties can request an invite) will this year focus on three main sectors that organizers feel are pillar industries for Alberta: agriculture, energy, and space and defence development.
“There’s a preponderance of wealth in the province,” said Damian, who is also a former executive director of the Venture Capital Association of Alberta. “We need more of that activity and innovation in all sorts of sectors, but especially these areas—energy, agriculture, space and defence—where we think we have a right to win.”
In keeping with this year’s themes, BCS’s 2026 event will feature two high-profile keynote speakers, including Brigadier-General Christopher Horner, the commander of 3 Canadian Space Division and one of Canada’s leading voices on defence capability. He’ll be joined by Brigid O’Brien, a managing partner of planetary health at RA Capital management, who’ll be speaking on why now is the time to invest in the energy transition.
BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Louis Paulin.