Tribe Network has hired Phillip Yoon, a finance veteran with experience on both sides of the fundraising table, as its new investment principal.

Yoon, originally from Singapore, holds a Master of Technology Entrepreneurship and Innovation degree from Saint Mary’s University and has worked for alternative asset managers and computational finance companies in Switzerland and Hong Kong, as well as helping various startups raise capital. He joins Tribe about a year after CEO Alfred Burgesson said he planned to raise an investment fund of as much as $20 million, to be called Tribe Ventures.

“Phillip is a Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst with over 20 years of experience as a Capital Allocation Strategist, Fund Manager in Alternative Investments, Portfolio Manager, and Investment Consultant, specializing in both private and public market opportunities,” wrote Burgesson in a press release.
“We are glad to have him as part of the team, and to benefit from his knowledge and expertise at Tribe Ventures.”

Tribe, a Halifax-based professional organization for BIPOC startup founders, now counts more than 1,000 people and organizations among its members and has worked directly with 700 program participants in its three-year history.

While data about the racial makeup of the Canadian VC market is scarce, in the United States, less than 1 percent of the US$543 billion of VC funding raised by startups in the latter half of the 2010s went to Black founders, according to Crunchbase.

“Racialized investors and racialized managers are more likely to invest in racialized founders,” Burgesson said previously. “People like to invest in what they know. And so if White investors don't understand the lived experience of racialized founders, it's going to be much harder for them to resonate with the problems they're trying to solve.”