Boris Wertz thinks science is the new moat for Canadian tech

This article appears in the inaugural issue of BetaKit Most Ambitious. Go here to read more stories of bold ambition in Canadian tech.

When Boris Wertz started his marketplace company in 1999, creating a software platform was hard. It took a significant amount of time, money, and infrastructure to create even a minimum viable product, and the prospect of success—let alone profitability, IPO, or acquisition—was far from guaranteed.

“Building in atoms still has a real differentiator, if you nail it.”

Boris Wertz
Version One Ventures

Now an investor with his BC-based Version One Ventures, Wertz has watched over the years as the barriers to entry have been removed from the software landscape.

“With cloud compute, efficient marketing, and great developer frameworks, there’s almost no moat left around starting a software company,” he said. “Everybody can replicate it.”

In search of real differentiators, Wertz has focused his investments on AI, Web3, and robotics—three deep tech verticals with the potential to make big, unique impacts.

“Building in atoms still has a real differentiator, if you nail it,” he said. “It’s much harder to replicate, it takes much longer, and fewer people can do it.”

Across the country and around the world, there’s an insurgent emphasis on actually making things.

Countries are focused on rebuilding their physical infrastructure and shoring up their defences, both at the border and on the digital battlefield. Companies are looking for epoch-changing competitive advantages, enabled by the abilities of AI, the speed of quantum, and the power of compute.

All of this requires deep tech, a sector defined by its ability to tackle complex challenges in science and engineering. It is hard, time-consuming and expensive. But it holds the promise to fully eradicate old ways of doing things, in fields as diverse as finance, medicine, manufacturing, and agriculture.

At Version One, Wertz is particularly interested in robotics, healthcare, defence, and space.

Founders in these fields are “off the charts” smart, he said, and have often dedicated their lives and their careers to a singular focus of study.

“You don’t just wake up one day and say, ‘I’m going to build a protein sequencing thing,’” he added.

Deep tech requires the ability to imagine future capabilities and impacts that might not materialize for years. In this context, Canada has a track record of success. Wertz notes that Canadians shaped almost the entire field of AI, and sees a similar ability for the country to define innovation in drug discovery, vertical-specific robots, and Web3.

“There’s not a single important, deep technology that came faster than people thought. They all take time.”

“The currency for me is just the token, the economic expression of that ecosystem,” Wertz said of crypto. “Ultimately, what’s interesting is that it enables a new ownership layer on top of the internet. That’s a powerful idea.”

Investing your time and your money in deep tech is not for the faint of heart. Breakthroughs that are years in the making are met with requests to do more, sooner.

“There’s not a single important, deep technology that came faster than people thought,” he said. “They all take time.”

The difference today, he notes, is the urgency of the work, and the excitement it is generating—not just in labs, but in boardrooms, governments, and investor portfolios.

“I think, for the first time in a long time, we’re back in building mode,” Wertz said. “And Canada is very good at being at the forefront of crazy ideas.”

Feature image courtesy Xanadu.