Seasoned investor and former Anges Québec CEO Geneviève Tanguay is the newest addition to the Montréal-based Panache Ventures team.
Tanguay announced that she would be joining the early-stage venture capital (VC) firm as a partner in a LinkedIn post Monday evening.
“I am so proud and privileged to have Geneviève Tanguay join us in our quest to enable the best tech founders in Canada to create greatness,” Panache founder and chair Mike Cegelski wrote in a comment.
Mike Cegelski
“I am so proud and privileged to have Geneviève Tanguay join us in our quest to enable the best tech founders in Canada to create greatness.”
Panache Ventures
Tanguay joins Panache partners Patrick Lor in Calgary and Prashant Matta in Toronto. Lor previously told BetaKit that he leads Panache’s efforts in BC and Western Canada, while Matta focuses on Central Canada.
The news follows some executive turnover at the firm over the past year. Scott Loong, formerly a Montréal-based partner, transitioned to a venture partner role in March, while Domenic del Vecchio was promoted to principal with a focus on Eastern Canada. Former partner Chris Neumann also left at the end of 2024, and associate Sarah Willson was promoted to principal.
Tanguay led angel network Anges Québec as CEO for four years, up until her departure in October 2024, which the organization said aligned with a year-long succession plan.
In spring 2024, Anges Québec wrote in a news release about the transition that Tanguay “successfully led the vision and action plan” for the organization that it had adopted in 2021. It went on to say Tanguay helped transform the angel network into “version 3.0.”
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Previously, Tanguay was head of corporate development at Biron Groupe Santé. Tanguay spent the majority of her career at Fonds de solidarité FTQ, a development capital fund for Québec citizens, where she was the director of the fund’s private equity and venture capital (VC) investment portfolio for 12 years.
Tanguay has extensive experience as a board and committee member. She served on several committees and the board of Via Rail, Mouvement des accélérateurs d’innovation du Québec (MAIN), incubator Centech Montréal, the Institute of Corporate Directors, and the government-supported organization Scale AI. She was also a mentor at Creative Destruction Lab.
Panache is a sector-agnostic firm investing at the pre-seed and seed stage. Originally launched in 2018 by a team that came out of 500 Startups Canada, the VC firm has become one of Canada’s most active early-stage investors.
The firm’s portfolio includes companies like Certn, CoLab Software, and Relay, while its exits include Flinks, Lane Technologies, and Valence Discovery. Panache is currently investing out of its $100-million CAD second fund, which it closed in 2022. Last October, partner Patrick Lor told BetaKit that Panache had deployed just over 30 percent of this capital to date across 37 companies, noting that the firm plans to make another 43 core investments out of Fund II.
Feature image courtesy Anges Québec.