About two decades ago, a young venture capital investor named Tony Van Bommel was attending an event in Fredericton showcasing technology developed at the University of New Brunswick, when something caught his eye.

Having just joined the VC team at Business Development Bank of Canada, Van Bommel was on the lookout for opportunities, and one booth featured a new cybersecurity product that battled cyber-attacks by tracking data flows through networks.

The company was called Q1 Labs.

Q1 became Van Bommel’s first investment for BDC, and after the company exited to IBM in 2012 (reportedly for more than $600 million), Canada’s Venture Capital and Private Equity Association, or CVCA, rewarded Van Bommel and his co-investors with its Deal of the Year award.

It was one of the highlights of a BDC career that came to a close this month when Van Bommel retired as a Senior Managing Partner from what’s now BDC Capital, the investment arm of the federal government’s business bank. He also stepped down from the boards of portfolio companies, including Dartmouth-based CarbonCure Technologies, which won a Carbon Xprize last year.

“Venture capital is, in my opinion, an industry that can be best suited to a younger generation,” he said in an interview last week from his home outside Toronto. “Keeping up with the technology and the capabilities and all the knowledge that’s necessary, you naturally lose that piece  . . .  and I decided that it was time to pass the torch.”

Though a native of Ontario, and though his more recent postings were in Vancouver and Toronto, Van Bommel was always a pillar of the Atlantic Canadian ecosystem and considered himself a champion of the region.

After graduating from the MBA program at Dalhousie University in 1997, he joined Innovacorp because he wanted to get into venture capital. The Nova Scotia government’s innovation agency was just getting into VC at the time and Van Bommel was part of the first wave of VC fund managers at the organization. He helped to invest in troubled instrument maker Satlantic in Halifax, and turn the company around so it could be sold at a profit to the American conglomerate Danaher.

Van Bommel was also seconded for a few months to a new venture that businessman John Risley was starting called Ocean Nutrition Canada, helping to research the market for omega-3 fish oil supplements and ingredients. There was no investment, but he felt he had helped in a small way when the company exited for $540 million in 2012.

First Investment: Q1 Labs

After making the jump to BDC early in this century, Van Bommel made his first investment in Q1 Labs. “It was actually hard work to get them to come to me,” he recalled with a laugh. “Usually it’s the other way around.”

(BDC around this time also invested in Fredericton-based Radian6, which also earned a CVCA Deal of the Year, but Van Bommel had a smaller role in that investment.)

There were other investors in Q1 Labs at the time and Van Bommel had to work to close the investment. He traveled to New Brunswick from his Halifax office again to meet with the Q1 team of Sandy Bird, Brian Flood and Chris Newton. Eventually, Van Bommel got Q1 to agree to the deal then had to convince his own superiors of the company’s potential.

“In those days, there wasn’t a lot of love from Central Canada BDC for software companies from Atlantic Canada, and I had to fight all the way internally,” he said. “Those investments in Radian6 and Q1 Labs really changed the thinking about Atlantic Canada in Central Canada.”

About 10 years ago, two things happened that impacted Van Bommel’s career in the long-term. First, he was promoted during a period of downsizing, and he met Robert Niven, the Founder and CEO of CarbonCure.

BDC downsized in about 2012, which led to a cross-country reduction in the number of VC officers. At the same time, Van Bommel was promoted so he was overseeing an investment team, and had to be physically with them. So he moved to Vancouver, meaning there was no longer any BDC venture capital investor in Atlantic Canada. 

“I always caught flak for that,” said Van Bommel. “There never was a conscious decision by anyone at BDC to shut the Halifax office. … There was a general downsizing. That resulted in cuts not just at BDC in Halifax as most of the cuts were in Montreal, Toronto and Calgary.”

Meeting Rob Niven

Before he left the East Coast, Van Bommel met Niven, whose company was developing technology that used carbon dioxide to cure concrete. The production of the world’s most common construction material usually emits CO2, but Niven’s process would actually use CO2 that would otherwise have gone into the atmosphere.

“He was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, a smart, smart guy whose business idea at the time was . . . not investable, in my opinion,” said Van Bommel, remembering his first meeting with Niven. “I told him this and I gave him some advice.”

Niven met up with Van Bommel a couple of years later in Vancouver, by which time the investor was heading the bank’s cleantech team. Van Bommel was impressed that Niven had acted on all the advice he’d given in the first meeting, but still not impressed enough to offer a term sheet. When they met a third time and Van Bommel witnessed further progress, he decided to “take a flier” on CarbonCure, which today is one of Canada’s leading cleantech startups. BDC invested and Van Bommel spent eight years on the board, becoming a key partner for Niven.

“I can absolutely say that CarbonCure may not be what it is today without him,” Niven said of Van Bommel in an email. “I'm sure that many other company CEOs would have the same sentiment. We definitely are losing a great champion of the local tech industry.”

Van Bommel has spent the last decade in Vancouver (where he won a second CVCA Deal of the Year award for his investment in Bit Stew) and Toronto, but he has always seen himself as a champion of Atlantic Canada within BDC and the Canadian VC community.

As he moves into the next phase of his career, he will maintain links to the broader community by working with businesses or non-profits. And given that his wife’s family has a home in Cape Breton, he’ll maintain his connections with Atlantic Canada.

 Van Bommel is optimistic about the prospects of the Atlantic Canadian startup community, which he says has great entrepreneurs and a strong support network.

“I‘m really a supporter of Atlantic Canada and I’ve always tried to make efforts to get out there and have a look at the companies that were there,” he said. “I’m retiring, so I can be helpful to some extent, but there are lots of champions out there.”