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\t<\/a><\/p>\n\t The Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association, the country\u2019s main VC lobby group, wants<\/a> Ottawa to direct the funding to companies raising large investment rounds at the Series B stage and later. The group argues Canada lacks domestic investors capable of leading those deals and that too many firms rely on foreign capital to scale.\u00a0<\/p>\n The National Angel Capital Organization, meanwhile, is pushing<\/a> for the money to support companies at the earliest stages, citing declining pre-seed and seed-stage investments, which they say will leave Canada with fewer and less successful startups overall.\u00a0<\/p>\n Members of the CSCA say both positions address part, but not all, of the problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re not going to solve the problem if all the money goes to late stage and we\u2019re not going to solve the problem if all the money goes to angel,\u201d said Jesse Wiebe, who recently left Startup TNT to lead the new group. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to figure out a way to make the whole stack work collaboratively together.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The group argues the issue is not a shortage of capital, but a lack of coordination to connect investors and founders at the earliest stages, pointing to declining pre-seed deal sizes and capital becoming increasingly concentrated in fewer, later-stage deals. The CSCA believes it can \u201cact as a connective layer\u201d to help fix such problems. It\u2019s trying to convince Ottawa to carve out a portion of the $750 million\u2014between 10 per cent and 20 per cent\u2014for early-stage companies. Two-thirds of that money would go toward funds investing in startups at the angel, pre-seed and seed stages, and the remaining third would go to programs to connect startups with financing and customers.\u00a0<\/p>\n The idea is to back funds that may be too small to qualify for Ottawa\u2019s flagship VC program. The government is allocating $1 billion to the next iteration of the program, called the Venture and Growth Capital Catalyst Initiative, which is currently being designed along with the $750 million for early-growth capital.\u00a0<\/p>\n The CSCA is entering the fray at a time when industry representatives are still debating what problem the federal government\u2019s budgeted growth capital is meant to solve.\u00a0<\/p>\n Wiebe, who has been discussing the startup funding with officials in the departments of Finance and Industry, told The Logic that Ottawa initially intended for the $750 million to go to companies raising money around the Series B stage. While those startups have typically already raised tens of millions of dollars over multiple funding rounds, CVCA data shows<\/a> that Canadian capital becomes more scarce at that stage, forcing many companies to raise from foreign investors or relocate.\u00a0<\/p>\n NACO chief executive Claudio Rojas, however, has a different understanding of the mandate. He said last month he believed the government intended to reserve the $750 million for early-stage, high-growth startups. Based on that interpretation, Rojas\u2019 organization is angling to capture the full allocation for startups at their earliest stages. <\/p>\n Gabrielle Landry, a spokesperson for the Industry Department, did not say what kind of companies the government intended to support when it announced the funding. She said the strategy is still being developed and that details will be announced later this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n CSCA plans to play a longer-term role in shaping federal policy beyond the current funding decision, positioning itself as a national platform for early-stage investors that can coordinate activity across regions and investor types. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A coalition of startup investors has formed a new organization to represent a part of the market they…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14848,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[525,143,61,7875,7876],"class_list":{"0":"post-14847","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ottawa","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-federal-government","10":"tag-ottawa","11":"tag-startups","12":"tag-venture-capital"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14847\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\t<\/a><\/p>\n