Co-Founder of @leadersfund, investing in category leading SaaS and cloud infrastructure companies.
Toronto
Joined June 2011
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If you’re a founder building in Canada, I want to hear from you.
link here to the full report: leaders.vc/canadianstartups
🙏 Thanks to @mimurchison Alan Bekerman, @SpecterHQ , and my @leadersfund colleagues for the collaboration.
We also need a cultural shift.
We need to celebrate people like @tobi who had every chance to leave, but chose to stay and build. He should be on the $5 bill.
The question: how do we turn this energy into global companies built here?
It starts with urgent, bold action:
✅ Eliminate capital gains on startups
✅ Make Canadian tech purchases tax deductible
✅ Channel resources into industries we can be #1 in
@Shopify @ada_cx @360insights @Wealthsimple prove Canada can build global winners.
New players like @turbopuffer @withmantle @datacurve_ai show promise.
There's fresh energy from @jrodgers in Waterloo, to @internetvin @newsystems_ in Toronto.
With tougher US H-1B rules, Canada has a rare chance to attract and keep talent.
Founders will and should always make decisions based on what’s best for their business, not national pride.
If Canada can’t offer a better product to founders, they will leave.
Canadian founders who start their company in the US raise capital at higher rates than those who stay:
📊% of companies started that raised >$1M
Canadian founders who move south raise much more capital 🚀
📊 2x more capital raised in the US than in Canada
🚨 COVID was disastrous for Canada’s tech ecosystem.
While the US and Israel rebounded, Canada has yet to.
📊 Last year, the US outproduced Canada 45:1 high-potential startups (vs. 10:1 in 2015). High-potential = >$1M raised.
Until now, this has been anecdotal.
We teamed up with @SpecterHQ to dig into the data.
The numbers confirm what many suspected:
👉 Canada risks losing its next generation of scale-ups.
🇨🇦activity is slowing while tech ecosystems in the US, EU, and Israel seem busier than ever.
The only pipeline we've built in Canada in the last decade is from waterloo to @ycombinator
🇨🇦VCs have shifted from “we invest in Canada” → “we back Canadians wherever they build.”
Investing across Canada, the US, and Israel, I’ve had a front-row seat to the inner workings of different ecosystems.
For years, I’ve had a nagging feeling that Canada’s startup engine isn’t firing like it used to.
🚨New data: Homegrown Canadian startups are disappearing
As the US raises barriers to talent, we need to make it easier to build here
That starts with eliminating cap gains + rewarding ambition.
📊 % of Canadian-founded startups founded in 🇨🇦 vs abroad
(1/12) 🧵
Very excited to announce that @leadersfund has led a $20M financing in @vellum_ai to help enterprises bring reliable AI applications to production. We're more bullish than ever on LLMops and Vellum's leadership in the space.
AI Development Needs a Standard. We’ve raised a $20m Series A to build it.
Today, I’m thrilled to share that we’ve raised $20M to bring rigor, speed, and reliability to AI development. The round was led by @leadersfund, with participation from @ycombinator, @sociicapital, @RebelFund_VC, @pioneer_fund and @eastlinkcap. It’s a big milestone for us, but more than anything, it validates what we’ve been seeing on the ground: the need for a standard approach to bring AI products into production, especially inside large, complex organizations.
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The promise of AI is real. But real AI powered products are still rare.
Why? Because building with LLMs today feels like writing software in quicksand:
- What works in a demo often breaks in production because models behave unpredictably
- The pace of change makes it nearly impossible to stay current, let alone build with confidence (agents weren’t mainstream until just 6 months ago!)
- Everything falls on engineers, making them the main bottleneck
@SiddSeethepalli, @FlahertyNoa and I felt this pain firsthand, and Vellum is the platform we wish we had when doing our AI development.
Teams at Redfin, Drata, Swisscom and Headspace use Vellum to power mission critical AI systems. Not demos, real apps in production built using our test-driven development philosophy.
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I remember someone asking me in Month 2 of our company, “What’s your vision of Vellum?”
My answer back then holds true today: “We’ve lived the AI development pain first-hand so our customers don’t need to. We will be the best-in-class platform engineering teams around the world rely on to power core AI applications.”
Today we are grateful to partner with @Gideonhayden, and the team at @leadersfund to scale what we have shown works time and time again.
We’re building not just software, but the standard of how the world builds AI products.
Over the next few days we’ll be sharing some exciting new case studies and launching a huge new feature every day, so follow along for updates!
In the meantime, if you want to try Vellum for yourself, sign up for free here: app.vellum.ai/signup
Huge thank you to our team, customers, and investors, especially @bradflora and @_puneetKumar for working with us since the early days in YC. We’ve been building toward this moment and there’s an exciting journey ahead. The path to billions of ARR continues 🚀 🚀
Axios coverage: axios.com/pro/enterprise-sof…
Businesswire: businesswire.com/news/home/2…
Open letter from me: vellum.ai/blog/announcing-ou…
