We are so back.
After a short break to focus on a most ambitious endeavour, The BetaKit Podcast has returned with a banger, laser-targeted on one of the spiciest topics facing Canadian tech today.
“We have a collective action problem. Somebody has to take the first step and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to deploy a lot of capital here in Canada. We’re gonna bet that Canada is going to grow more over the next 20 years than it did over the last 20 years.”
Jesse Wiebe
Recent data shows that the bottom effectively fell out of Canadian venture capital around 2023, erasing the post-pandemic highs and taking the country back about a decade in terms of both dollars raised and dollars deployed by our nation’s VCs.
It’s not a great time for Canada’s capital allocators to be stuck in the mud, given an exploding AI race (eating into Canada’s historical bread and butter of B2B SaaS) and a shifting geopolitical order requiring Canada to stand on its own two feet.
We’ve assembled a power panel of grumpy men in venture (RBCx’s Matt Roberts, new CVCA CEO Ben Bergen, and outgoing Startup TNT community development lead Jesse Wiebe) to answer two key questions: why is this happening and what to do about it?
Parsing through the data, the panel answers the first question easily, pointing to a variety of structural issues impacting our capital allocators, leading to a limited partner base so thin that government programs have an outsized influence on which Canadian VC firms get funded. The scarcity has led to competing visions of how provincial and federal governments should allocate capital, and vigorous handwringing over how quickly (and effectively) they are able to do so.
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What about solutions? Our power panel is also able to deliver, and I’ll leave it to you to parse how significantly their recommendations are impacted by where they stand in the ecosystem.
There’s lots of nuance to the debate (and sometimes finger-pointing), but everyone agrees that something has to be done, and soon. It might just require some collective action from all sides of the aisle to fix what has broken.
Related Links:
- A perfect storm”: 2025 was the worst year for Canadian VC fundraising since 2016
- Capital concentrates as Canadian VC market narrows: report
- CVCA and NACO offer competing visions for feds’ $750-million venture envelope
- The feds asked investors for candid feedback on BDC. It was never actioned
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Recorded and edited by Toronto Podcasts.