New early-stage VC fund Trillick Ventures aims to bring funding to “underrepresented” Manitoba

In Manitoba’s technology sector, many founders are forced to look beyond the province for funding. Manitoba has historically garnered a disproportionately small share of the venture capital (VC) dollars invested in Canada compared to other provinces.

“[We’re] the most underrepresented province in all of Canada for [VC] and we want to change that.”

Despite being home to 3.6 percent of Canada’s population, last year, less than one percent of VC investment in Canada went to Manitoban startups, according to the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (CVCA). The CVCA’s 2024 report found a mere $2 million CAD was invested in Manitoba—a 96-percent year-over-year drop—across four deals.

Winnipeg-based Trillick Ventures hopes to help turn the tide. The recently-launched VC firm is raising a $15-million fund to back early-stage Manitoba tech startups and connect investors from other parts of the country with the province’s budding tech ecosystem.

“We recognize that Manitoba is really far behind … [we’re] the most underrepresented province in all of Canada for [VC] and we want to change that,” Trillick founder and general partner Iain Crozier told BetaKit in an interview.

Crozier believes that Manitoba’s tech ecosystem has “the foundation” for success, thanks in part to the growth of homegrown Winnipeg tech firms like checkout software provider Bold Commerce, challenger bank Neo Financial, and food delivery company SkipTheDishes.

Trillick has secured nearly $5 million towards its $15-million target to date, after holding its first close in February and its second in March. The firm intends to hold another close at the end of April, and Crozier said it ultimately hopes to secure the remainder of its goal by August, as it continues fundraising amid particularly challenging market conditions.

The fund’s current limited partner (LP) base consists primarily of high-net-worth individuals, including Manitoba tech entrepreneurs and leaders like Taiv co-founder and CEO Noah Palansky, ConstructionClock co-founder and CFO Dominique Smith, Chekkit co-founder and COO Emily Franz-Lien, and Bold Commerce co-founder and former CEO Yvan Boisjoli—now the COO of Trillick portfolio company Parallel.

Tech Manitoba chair and Women’s Equity Lab Manitoba managing partner Sandy Foster, who wrote the first cheques into SkipTheDishes and Taiv, and was an early investor in Callia, is also an LP in Trillick’s first fund.

“Every year, when I get that map of Canada and the [VC] investment in every province, and it’s not applicable or not available for Manitoba, it’s depressing,” Foster told BetaKit in an interview. “I believe that it’s time that we have a locally-based [VC] fund.”

With subsequent closings, Trillick hopes to attract capital from institutions and family offices. To round out its team, Crozier has brought on Palansky, TriplePlay co-founder and ex-CEO Mark Hlady, and former BDC Capital Seed Venture Fund principal Saif Hashmi as venture partners. This trio also sits on Trillick’s investment committee alongside Crozier.

The fund has made three investments to date, including social shopping platform Parallel and event hosting and management software startup 3Common. Outside of Trillick, Crozier has also independently invested in construction industry time-tracking app ConstructionClock.

Through its first fund, Trillick aims to back 20 to 25 pre-seed and seed-stage tech companies and lead financings for Manitoba startups. It has dedicated two-thirds of its fund to startups in the province, with 25 percent of its total capital reserved for follow-on investments in top performers. To help it fill out the remainder of rounds, the VC firm is allocating the remaining third of its fund to supporting other VC leads in deals outside of Manitoba.

Crozier said this will give Trillick’s LPs exposure to not just promising Manitoba startups, but nationwide deal flow, and help the firm build relationships with investors across the country and bring them into deals in Manitoba.

“I want to be an ambassador for our province,” he said.

Crozier said with so few Manitoba tech entrepreneurs finding funding in the province, companies are inadvertently raising a red flag for investors who ask why they are not able to raise money in their own backyards—making the province’s paucity of deals a self-compounding problem.

In an interview with BetaKit, Boisjoli noted that many of Manitoba’s most successful tech companies were entirely bootstrapped, while the startups that did secure funding were often forced to move to markets where their investors resided, such as Toronto or the United States. “The idea of raising money and building a company in Winnipeg was just not something you heard about,” he said.

For Bold Commerce, seeking early-stage funding “was a foreign concept,” Boisjoli said. The e-commerce developer bootstrapped for approximately seven years, focusing its efforts on building a profitable company without any outside investment, before ultimately securing a sizable first financing from outside of Manitoba to scale its business in 2019.

“There are some really talented, smart people in Manitoba that just never get looked at when they need to raise money,” Boisjoli said. As a Trillick LP, he hopes to help change that.

The Government of Manitoba launched a fund-of-funds in 2022 to help attract more capital to the province. The province has committed $100 million towards the Manitoba First Fund (MFF), which has committed $75 million across five funds to date, including TriWest Capital Partners, PFM Capital, Tall Grass Ventures, Pine Hill Capital, and the WestCap-managed Connect Manitoba Growth Fund.

“The idea of raising money and building a company in Winnipeg was just not something you heard about.”
Yvan Boisjoli,
Parallel

All five of these firms are headquartered outside of Manitoba and are required to establish a presence in the province as a condition of MFF’s support. The majority focus on more established companies rather than early-stage startups. Asked whether MFF intends to back more early-stage investors based in Manitoba in the future, MFF CEO Ken Ross told BetaKit that MFF is currently “in various stages of discussion with a number of early capital funds.”

While Manitoba is home to some angel groups and wealthy individuals who invest in startups, its institutional VC landscape is scarce: aside from Winnipeg-based Red Leaf Capital, Trillick appears to be the only other VC firm headquartered in Manitoba.

“There is certainly a need for early capital (pre-seed, seed, Series A funding) and I hope [Trillick is] successful,” Ross said.

Crozier, who was born and raised in Manitoba, began his career outside the province working in sales and construction for his father’s company, which built playgrounds for schools and municipalities. After leaving and spending some time helping other entrepreneurs, Crozier built a wine recommendation app called Taistr before returning to startup coaching, including with Platform Calgary, eventually coming back to Manitoba in 2023 to raise his family there.

Upon returning, Crozier said he quickly became aware of the “very weak access to capital” in Manitoba’s tech ecosystem. “I saw it as a really big opportunity to bring a traditional [VC] fund to Manitoba,” he added.

Last fall, the Manitoba government launched an innovation and technology department aimed at growing the province’s tech sector. And earlier this year, Tech Manitoba and the Manitoba Technology Accelerator announced a merger to create Manitoba Innovates and the launch of a new funding program for early-stage startups. Crozier and Boisjoli both hailed these moves as positive developments for Manitoba’s tech ecosystem.

“Manitoba is very traditionally a government, agriculture, and manufacturing province—those are our three main sectors,” Crozier said. “There’s no reason why we can’t add tech to it, because we’ve got the buddings of a really, really terrific sector to grow here.”

Feature image courtesy Trillick Ventures.