The New Brunswick Innovation Foundation has announced it will back six Canadian investment groups with a total of $3.5 million this year to help attract more capital to the province’s startups.

At the InnovateNB reception Thursday night, NBIF Chief Executive Jeff White said his agency will provide capital to three groups in Atlantic Canada and three outside the region. The goal of the new strategy is that these funds will invest significant capital and bring co-investors, so the result will be a greater amount than NBIF is committing.

The announcement is the first phase of a strategy first outlined by White at the InnovateNB celebration in 2022, when he said NBIF would adopt a three-pronged strategy to increase equity investment in the province’s innovation-driven companies.

“We think it will help to build the capital pools in our region, and we’d like to see it accelerate funding for some of our companies,” said White in an interview. “We thought you needed to have big cheques to get attention but it turns out you don’t.”

He added this is just the first phase of the limited partner strategy, which eventually calls for investments totalling $10 million in independent investment groups.

The six investment groups are:

  • CMD Capital, Montreal, a new early-stage fund led by tech vets David Dufresne and Matt Roberts that invests in early-stage, AI-strong companies.
  • Two Small Fish Ventures, Toronto, an early-stage fund founded by Allen Lau, a co-founder of Wattpad, and his wife Eva.
  • Brightspark Ventures, also of Toronto, which invests in early-stage companies.  (This fund is already an investor in Fredericton-based Potential Motors.)
  • Sandpiper Ventures, Atlantic Canada, a fund managed by women to invest in startups led by women.
  • Tidal Venture Partners, Halifax, an early-stage VC fund launched in 2022 and targeting Atlantic Canadian startups.
  • And Women’s Equity Lab Atlantic, an angel fund that backs startups led by women. (Since this is an angel group rather than a VC fund, NBIF will commit to matching its investments in NB companies led by women.)  

“We’re trying to show up in a different way in the ecosystem,” said Heather Libbey, who has just joined NBIF as the Vice-President of Strategy and Operations. “It sends signals to a few different audiences. It signals to our entrepreneurs and it signals to the [provincial government] that we’re serious about getting a return on investment.”

Last year, White outlined a 10-year, $20 million strategy that would include the foundation becoming a limited partner, or LP, in independent funds. A second component was to increase funding to graduates of approved accelerators, which as of now are Propel and Energia Ventures. NBIF has quietly increased the pool of capital for that component, said White.

The final part of the strategy is for the foundation to set up its own Series A fund that would draw on funding from NBIF and from other limited partners from New Brunswick and elsewhere. White said his organization has paused on that part of the strategy while working on the LP side but plans to address it in the future.

White added NBIF has been quiet of late but has been busy making investments through its own funds – which will continue to be the core of its work with startups. Since April 2022, NBIF has committed $7.1 million through 37 total investments. Of these, 22 have been follow-on funding rounds and 15 have been first-time investments. In total, these companies have raised $46 million.