Northside Ventures has secured final close for Fund I to back Canadian founders at inception

4 min readSep 5, 2024

One year after announcing the launch of Northside Ventures Fund I, I’m excited to share that we’ve successfully reached the final close of our inaugural fund at $15M CAD ($11M USD). This additional capital enables us to continue carrying out our mission of backing exceptional Canadian founders across North America at the earliest stages of company ideation and inception.

Northside Ventures focuses on investing in companies in the US and Canada where at least one founder has a connection to Canada. We invest $100–500K in the first round of capital raised by a company with a focus on AI, vertical SaaS, fintech and cleantech.

The Fundraising Environment

The last two years have been the most difficult period for raising capital since the dot-com crash. This was apparent in the number of meetings required to raise the fund — over our 18 month fundraising process, I connected with 700 Limited Partners (LPs) that led to 77 commitments. There are an additional 200 LPs who couldn’t make this fund but are interested in future Northside funds and I’m excited to build relationships with everyone over the coming years. You can read more about my fundraising reflections after one year in my previous post here.

I am deeply grateful to all of our LPs for their support in launching Northside’s inaugural fund, a diverse group that includes institutional investors, fund of funds, corporate venture arms, fellow VC funds, family offices, and a long tail of experienced operators and founders.

Our ‘Institutional Angel Investor’ Approach

Northside addresses a gap in the market by adopting an ‘institutional angel investor’ approach to early stage investing. We are building an institutional-grade fund with top-tier service providers and a long-term vision of becoming a multi-generational firm, while also operating like an angel investor, offering an efficient deal process and supporting founders through our personal networks. Our investment style and agile deal process is a culmination of learnings from my startup experience as the founding employee of a company acquired by Blackstone, combined with the best practices taken from my experience as an early stage investor at institutional venture funds BDC Capital and Global Founders Capital.

The Northside Network Advantage

Northside portfolio companies have an advantage over other startups because they can connect with some of the most successful founders and firms in North America to access customers and capital more efficiently than others. In addition to my personal network spanning the US and Canada, Northside has over 50 individual LPs who are experienced founders and operators that portfolio founders get access to for support like mentorship or customer introductions. These LPs include angel investors who work at companies like Google, Uber, Affirm, Deel, Rippling, Wave, PointClickCare and many others. Northside’s LPs also consist of over a dozen VC funds including Inovia, Bain Capital Ventures, Intact Ventures, Notable Capital, Golden Ventures, and Bling Capital who are interested in participating alongside Northside or providing follow-on capital to our portfolio companies in subsequent rounds of financing.

Our Growing Portfolio

We’ve made 15 investments to date in both B2B software and infrastructure, investing across categories like AI, cleantech, fintech, martech, vertical SaaS and recommerce. The public portfolio can be found on our website here. Two thirds of the portfolio are Canadian companies while one third are Canadian founders building in the US. We plan to make another 15–20 investments over the next 1–2 years.

Areas We’re Excited About Going Forward

AI Software Applications: AI offers the potential for efficient growth and a new level of productivity and efficiency not seen before. We see businesses seeking specialized applications powered by AI to enhance business development efforts (ie. our investment in Postilize), power marketing efforts (ie. Switch), sell products more efficiently (ie. ImagineCreate) and make existing employees more productive by augmenting or replacing repetitive white collar tasks.

AI Infrastructure: As the demand for AI capabilities expands, infrastructure services (‘picks and shovels’) that support the training, deployment, and scaling of AI models will become increasingly important. This includes investments throughout the data stack including data labeling (ie. Datacurve), optimizing for computing power and cloud infrastructure (ie. Thoras.ai), and improving data security.

Business in a Box Offerings: We’re actively exploring ‘business in a box’ offerings for small teams and solopreneurs, the digitization and automation of heavy operations, AI for supply chains, and equipping SMBs with the tools needed for efficiency and growth. More specifically we see AI agents shifting the role of AI from tools within existing systems to digital collaboration partners or actors capable of both knowledge and action. AI agents will increasingly provide SMBs with a new arsenal of tools to compete with larger enterprises.

Unglamorous Vertical SaaS & B2B Marketplaces: Outside of AI, we’re excited about vertical SaaS and B2B marketplaces in unglamorous sectors like fintech, recommerce and logistics. While these businesses may not be ‘AI-first’, we do see a significant product roadmap opportunity to leverage new AI features that unlock previously unavailable sources of value.

Join the Team

Northside offers a rotating four month analyst internship each year with three opportunities to join (winter / summer / fall). If you’re passionate about pre-seed investing and interested in joining the team please reach out through a warm intro to get connected.

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