Where Canada's investors actually are
AngelMatch's Canada view tracks 3,000+ investors right now, and the mix breaks down roughly the way you'd expect if you know how startup capital works here: about half are tagged as angel or individual investors, and the rest split between venture capital firms and private equity investors. That mix matters because the type of investor you're pitching changes what they want to see. An angel wants to hear your story and trust your team. A venture capital investor at Series A wants a business model that scales past a single city. Filter by city, stage, and market in the investor database above rather than working through the list top to bottom, or you'll waste your best pitches on investors who were never a fit.
Ontario holds about half of that total, and most of those investors are clustered in Toronto, by far the single biggest hub for startup capital in the country. British Columbia, Quebec, and Alberta account for most of what's left, centered on Vancouver, Montreal, and Calgary respectively. Smaller but real pockets exist too, including Ottawa, Waterloo, and Winnipeg, so don't assume every investor worth pitching lives in one of the big four cities.
Scroll through the live table above and you'll see a mix of profiles. Some, like Ben Yoskovitz and Rick Nathan in Toronto, are tagged across several investor types, including venture capital and angel or individual. Others, like Sylvain Carle and Chris Arsenault in Montreal, carry a narrower set of market tags. That range is normal. Canadian investors, especially outside the largest funds, often wear more than one hat, so check an investor's full type and market list before you rule them out.
Beyond Toronto: the other hubs worth pitching
Toronto's density comes from its financial sector and its concentration of head-office capital, so a lot of the city's investors have banking or asset management backgrounds layered on top of startup investing. That's useful context: a founder pitching fintech or enterprise software often gets a faster read from a Toronto investor than a founder pitching something further from that world.
Vancouver's investor base leans differently, with a longer track record in cleantech, gaming, and life sciences thanks to the city's proximity to natural resources and a couple of decades of studio and biotech activity. Montreal's scene is shaped by its universities and a well-known cluster of AI research, which shows up in the type of deals local investors gravitate toward. Calgary's investor base still carries an energy-sector imprint, though a growing share has rotated into software and cleantech as the city's startup scene has matured. None of this means an investor in one city won't fund a startup outside their usual pattern, but knowing the local flavor helps you frame your pitch in terms that land.
Two more pockets worth knowing about if Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and Calgary aren't a fit: Waterloo carries an outsized tech investor presence relative to its size, built on decades of computer science and engineering talent feeding startups straight out of school, and Ottawa's investor base skews toward government-adjacent technology, including telecom, defense, and public-sector software, a legacy of the city's role as the capital.
How the money moved in 2025
Canadian venture capital investors deployed CAD $8.0 billion across 571 deals in 2025, according to the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (CVCA), down 6% from 2024 as deal count fell even more, by 12%. Capital didn't dry up so much as concentrate: the average deal size climbed to CAD $14.07 million for the year and jumped further to CAD $23.06 million in the fourth quarter alone, the highest quarterly average CVCA has recorded since it began tracking data in 2013.
Where that money went is worth knowing before you pitch. Information and communications technology pulled in well over half of all Canadian venture dollars in 2025, at CAD $5.06 billion across 269 deals. Life sciences came in a distant second at CAD $837 million across 129 deals, followed by cleantech at CAD $660 million across 56 deals and agribusiness at CAD $251 million across 39 deals, according to CVCA. Ontario alone accounted for just over half of total dollars deployed nationally, with Quebec, British Columbia, and Alberta splitting most of the rest.
Private equity shows up a lot in AngelMatch's Canadian data too, and it's worth being clear on what that means here. These are individual people who work at private equity firms, not the firms themselves, and they typically get involved later than venture investors, backing companies that already have revenue and are ready for a buyout, recapitalization, or growth injection rather than a first check. If you're pre-revenue, they're usually not your first call, but they're worth keeping on your radar for later rounds.
Angel investing told a different story. Canadian angel groups deployed $113.8 million across 490 deals in 2025, a five-year low, according to the National Angel Capital Organization (NACO). That marked a drop of more than a fifth from 2024. NACO also found deal activity concentrated geographically: central Canada accounted for about three-quarters of all angel deals and capital in 2025, though Northern Ontario punched above its weight on a per-capita basis. If you're outside the Toronto-Montreal-Vancouver corridor, that concentration cuts both ways. There's less local competition for attention, but a smaller pool of active checks nearby too.
One more shift worth knowing if you're courting outside money: U.S. investor participation in Canadian venture deals fell from 32% of deal activity in 2024 to 25% in 2025, according to CVCA. That's a meaningful pullback, and it means Canadian founders raising a round with cross-border ambitions should budget more time to find domestic co-investors than they might have a year or two ago.
Exits stayed scarce through 2025, with only 29 venture-backed exits recorded nationally and no IPOs at all, per CVCA. That matters for how you set expectations with investors: a Canadian VC writing you a check right now is planning on a longer hold than they might have a few years back, so patience and a credible path to profitability tend to land better than a growth-at-all-costs pitch.
There's a policy backdrop to all of this worth knowing if you're raising over the next year or two. Ottawa earmarked $750 million in its 2025 federal budget for startup support, and as of early 2026 investor groups were still debating how it should be split between early-stage and growth-stage companies. NACO has pointed to a documented US$1.6 billion gap in Canadian early-stage capital as the case for weighting that money toward pre-seed and seed. Whichever way that debate lands, it's a sign that public money may start supplementing private checks at the stage most AngelMatch users are raising at, so it's worth watching for programs tied to that budget line as you build your list.
Getting a Canadian investor to actually reply
Location shapes your approach more in Canada than founders expect. Toronto has the deepest bench of investors, but it's also where you'll find the most competition for a partner's attention, so a generic cold email is likely to get buried. Investors in Vancouver, Calgary, and Montreal often have more room on their calendar for a first meeting, and a warm intro from a local founder or accelerator carries real weight in those smaller, tighter networks.
If you're pitching in Quebec, don't skip the language question. Many Montreal investors work comfortably in both English and French, but a French-language subject line or a bilingual one-pager signals you've done your homework on the local market, and that small effort tends to stand out.
With deal counts down and average check sizes up, Canadian investors in 2025 spent more time per deal, not less. That's a signal to slow down your own process too: a rushed data room or a pitch deck with gaps in the numbers stands out more when an investor has fewer live conversations going at once and more time to look closely at each one.
Timing matters more in Canada than a lot of founders assume, mostly because the calendar looks a little different than it does south of the border. Outreach tends to go quiet around Canada Day in early July, through the summer cottage season that follows it, and again around the Thanksgiving long weekend in mid-October, which lands a full month earlier here than the American holiday of the same name. Plan your outreach pushes around those gaps rather than into them.
Whichever province you're targeting, keep your outreach organized instead of firing off the same email to everyone on your list. A tool like AngelMatch's email outreach tracker lets you see who's opened your note and who hasn't replied yet, so you can follow up with the right people instead of guessing.
What Canadian investors are actually funding
B2B, information technology, and financial services investors show up most often across the Canadian investor base, and fintech and health care investors aren't far behind. Enterprise software, consumer internet, and manufacturing round out the next tier. If your startup sits in one of the top markets, you're pitching into the deepest part of the pool. If it doesn't, that's not a dealbreaker, but expect to spend more time explaining your category to investors who see fewer deals like yours.
Seed is the most common stage tag among Canadian investors, followed by early-stage venture and pre-seed. That lines up with the national funding data: pre-seed and seed capital held roughly steady in 2025 even as Series A through D activity declined, so if you're raising at the earliest stages, the investor pool hasn't shrunk the way it has further up the stack.
Check sizes follow the usual pattern. Angel investors in AngelMatch's database typically write checks between $25,000 and $500,000, while venture capital investors write much bigger checks, from $2 million up to $100 million or more at the growth stage. Expect to give up somewhere in the 15% to 25% range in equity at an early round, roughly in line with what founders see everywhere else. If equity dilution at that stage doesn't sit right with your plans, venture debt saw record use in Canada in 2025, with CAD $1.40 billion deployed across 69 deals per CVCA, and it's worth asking any VC you're talking to whether they can point you toward a lender as well as a term sheet.
Canada's investor base is real but concentrated: about half of it sits in Ontario, and angel investing nationally just posted its slowest year in five. Cast a wide net across provinces rather than pitching Toronto alone, and keep a clear record of who you've reached out to so a slower-moving Vancouver or Calgary investor doesn't fall through the cracks. AngelMatch's Fundraising CRM keeps that list in one place as you move from first email to signed check.
Toronto investors
