Today, you will hear from Paul Lacerte, Managing Partner of Raven Indigenous Capital Partners, an Indigenous-led and focused VC firm in Canada. The firm’s mandate is to solve the lack of access to capital to what Lacerte refers to as Indigenous impact entrepreneurs in a culturally safe way.
“Trust, and Indigenous impact measurement, and the wellbeing of Indigenous families sit alongside risk and return. In fact, in our fund, sit significantly above risk and return as investment considerations.”
There’s a lot of reasons for that lack of access, due to issues with collateralizing debt, trust, and what Lacerte called a “trauma relationship with money.”
It’s safe to say that Raven is looking for a different type of returns than any other VC in Canada, and Lacerte articulates those in this episode, as well as how the firm uses the traditional framework of VC to achieve them.
Now, in a traditional VC sense, Lacerte has almost an unfair first-mover advantage with a huge untapped addressable market. But on this new national holiday, that’s not really the point.
Raven Capital wants to invest in the Reconciliation economy. Let’s dig in on how.
RELATED: Canadian tech must embrace Indigenous reconciliation
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The BetaKit Podcast is hosted by Douglas Soltys & Rob Kenedi. Edited by Kattie Laur. Sponsored by SAAS NORTH.
