We need moreReference points

The Government of Canada created VCAP and VCCI to strengthen Canada’s venture ecosystem.

But once that capital reaches venture funds…

How much of it actually stays in Canada?

Over the last four months, I’ve been raising a small fund alongside Althra.

During that process, I came across the Venture Capital Action Plan (VCAP) and the Venture Capital Catalyst Initiative (VCCI).

I’d heard the names before, but never really understood how much impact they had on Canada’s venture ecosystem.

So I started digging.

In 2013, the federal government announced VCAP, a $390M program to introduce fresh capital into private Fund of Funds (FoFs).

That was followed by VCCI, with major iterations in 2017 and 2021.

The basic idea was simple.

Government capital would flow into a small group of selected Fund of Funds managers and specialized funds. Those recipients would then raise private capital alongside the government’s commitment, creating significantly larger pools of venture capital that could be deployed into the Canadian startup ecosystem.

Here’s how it played out…

• $1.2B was invested by the Government of Canada through VCAP and VCCI.
• That capital helped recipient Fund of Funds managers raise $3.7B from public and private investors, including Northleaf, Teralys, HarbourVest, and Kensington.
• From there, capital flowed into the second layer: venture funds backing startups, such as Relay Ventures, Lumira, Garage Capital, Golden Ventures, and others.
• Those supported venture funds ultimately invested $6.4B into startups.

The flow of capital looks roughly like this:

Government ($1.2B) -> Fund of Funds ($3.7B raised) -> Venture Funds ($6.4B invested) -> Startups

At the first layer, the capital is intentionally concentrated through four major Fund of Funds managers: Northleaf, Teralys, HarbourVest, and Kensington.

Beyond that is where it gets interesting.

Many of these venture firms don’t invest exclusively in Canada.

Most have a North American investment mandate.

To better understand what that meant in practice, I reviewed the publicly disclosed portfolios of 12 venture managers connected to the VCAP/VCCI ecosystem, representing more than 624 disclosed financing events, using public sources and Preqin.

From 2019 to 2024, disclosed financing was still Canada-led:

• $7.2B into Canadian-headquartered companies
  (Ex. 7shifts, Jobber, Top Hat, and more)

• $3.56B into foreign-headquartered companies
  (Ex. PubNub, Populus, Brightwheel, and TVision)

30% flowed into foreign-headquartered companies.

But over the last two years, that trend has flipped.

From 2024 to 2026:

• $1.91B into Canadian-headquartered companies
  (Ex. Moment Energy, Float Financial, and PayShepherd)

• $6.26B into foreign-headquartered companies
  (Ex. Groq, Supabase, and Astranis)

Foreign-headquartered companies represented 63% of disclosed financing during that period.

It’s important to note what this analysis measures.

“The analysis follows the companies financed by VCAP/VCCI-supported venture managers, rather than tracing individual government dollars. The objective is to understand where the broader ecosystem is evolving, not to determine the exact source of capital behind each financing round.”

After digging through all of this research, it would be easy to conclude that we simply need to direct more government-backed capital toward Canadian companies.

I’m not convinced that’s the core issue.

What feels harder to build is belief.

Choosing to start a company means walking away from a stable career path. Consulting. Big Tech. A six-figure engineering job.

If everyone around you is optimizing for security, and you rarely see people building companies, how long can you keep pushing against the grain?

Canada needs more founders who have achieved some measure of success to be visible.

Become proof that there’s another path.

My ask is for Canadian founders who have achieved some level of success (Ex. raised a seed round, bootstrapped to $300K ARR, landed enterprise customers, built something meaningful) to be louder and show that Canadians can build scalable companies.

Theese stories compound. If you’ve done something worth sharing, be louder.

Write the post. Speak on the panel. Mentor another founder. Tell the story behind the win and the failures that got you there. The next generation of founders doesn’t just need more capital.

They need more reference points.

People they can point to and say,

“Someone like me did it.”

Thank you to the Althra mentors for being those reference points.