Pre-seed funding in Canada is thinner than it looks
There are 200+ investors in the AngelMatch database with pre-seed listed as a stage they invest in and Canada as a location, and that's a small pool next to what's available south of the border. If you're raising before you have real revenue, you're competing for a narrower slice of capital than a US founder is, and 2025 made that slice narrower still.
According to the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association's 2025 annual report, the average pre-seed deal size in Canada came in around $880,000 CAD, about 15% below the five-year average, and pre-seed dealflow dropped roughly 5% year over year. That's a smaller decline than the brutal 47% drop seed-stage deals saw back in 2024, but it confirms what founders on the ground have been saying: pre-seed is the stage getting squeezed hardest while later, bigger rounds soak up more of the total pie.
The bigger picture backs that up. Canadian venture capital totaled roughly $8 billion across 571 deals in 2025, but just 26 megadeals of $50 million or more accounted for about two-thirds of every dollar invested. That's a market getting more concentrated at the top while the earliest stage gets squeezed from below, which is exactly the environment where a scattershot pitch strategy stops working. You can't afford to email everyone who's ever written a Canadian check. You need to know who's actually still active at your stage.
None of this means pre-seed money has dried up. It means you need a tighter, better-targeted list instead of a long one, which is exactly what a scoped investor database is for.
Where Canada's pre-seed investors are based
Pull up the investors AngelMatch has tagged to Canada at the pre-seed stage and the map isn't evenly spread. Toronto and the wider Ontario region carry the largest share, Montreal in Quebec is the next biggest cluster, and Vancouver in British Columbia rounds out the top three. Calgary and Halifax show up too, but in much smaller numbers.
That clustering matters for how you plan your raise. A founder based outside Ontario shouldn't assume the closest investor is the right investor. Some of the most active pre-seed checks in the country still get written by people based in Toronto, even for companies that will never open an office there, so don't rule out a target just because they're a flight away.
The three hubs also skew toward different kinds of companies, which is worth knowing before you start cold-emailing. Toronto's pre-seed scene leans fintech and enterprise software, pulled along by the big banks and insurers headquartered there. Montreal punches above its weight in AI and gaming, partly thanks to research institutions like Mila anchoring the talent pool. Vancouver's early-stage money tends to show up around cleantech, health tech, and consumer products, reflecting the industries the city already has strength in. None of this is a hard rule, but if your startup fits one of those patterns, start with the city where it fits best.
What a pre-seed check in Canada actually looks like
An average round size of $880,000 doesn't mean one investor is writing an $880,000 check. Individual angel checks usually run $25,000 to $500,000, so a round that size is almost always a syndicate: a lead who anchors it, plus several smaller checks filling in around them. When you're modeling your raise, think about who leads and who follows, not one number.
Dilution at this stage typically lands in the 15% to 25% range, the same band used everywhere else. Before you set a target, run your current spend through a runway calculator so the round you're asking for actually buys you enough time to hit your next milestone, not just enough to survive a few more months.
One thing that trips up first-time Canadian founders: decide early whether you're raising in Canadian or US dollars, and say so explicitly in your deck and your outreach. Investors with a cross-border presence will assume USD unless you tell them otherwise, and a valuation that sounds reasonable in CAD can look thin once it's converted. Being explicit about currency from the first email saves you an awkward conversation two calls later.
Canada also gives early-stage companies a lever most other countries don't have: the Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) tax credit refunds a meaningful share of R&D spending for Canadian-controlled private corporations. It's a big reason some pre-seed rounds here get structured smaller than a comparable US round would be. If most of your spend is engineering and product work, factor SR&ED into your runway math before you decide how much to raise, since it can stretch a Canadian dollar further than the same dollar goes without it.
When to raise
Deal activity in Canada picked up noticeably in the second half of 2025 after a slow start to the year, driven partly by a snap federal election and trade uncertainty that made investors cautious in Q1 and Q2. That pattern isn't unique to 2025. Canadian VCs tend to be quieter in the first few months of the year and busier from late summer through year-end, so if your timeline has any flexibility, weight your outreach toward September through December rather than January through March.
That doesn't mean don't raise in the spring if you need to. It means set your expectations accordingly: expect more silence and slower responses in Q1, and don't read a quiet February as a signal that your pitch isn't landing.
How to approach pre-seed investors in Canada
Warm intros carry more weight here than in bigger markets, mostly because the pool is small enough that most active pre-seed investors know each other. A cold email still works, but it works better when it references someone the investor actually trusts, and a lot of that trust runs through a handful of Toronto and Vancouver based funds and angel groups.
Government-backed capital plays a bigger role in Canada than it does in the US. BDC Capital, the venture arm of the crown corporation Business Development Bank of Canada, was Canada's most active seed-stage investor in 2025, taking part in 20 of 215 recorded rounds. It's worth checking whether a program like that fits your stage before you write off non-traditional capital, and it's a detail most US-focused fundraising guides won't tell you to look for.
Conferences still matter for building that first layer of warm intros. Events like Collision and Elevate Festival in Toronto pull in a meaningful share of the country's active early-stage investors in one place for a few days, which is a faster way to build a relationship than a hundred individual cold emails. If one lines up with your raise timeline, it's usually worth the trip even if you can't afford a booth.
A surprising number of Canada's pre-seed checks arrive bundled with an accelerator or incubator spot rather than as a standalone angel check. Getting into a well-regarded program, even a short one, often comes with a small check attached and a fast path to the warm intros that matter most in a market this size. Weigh that route against a longer solo raise, especially if your existing network in Toronto, Montreal, or Vancouver is thin.
Once you've built a real list, the harder problem is staying organized across dozens of conversations at once. That's the part an email outreach tool built for fundraising handles better than a spreadsheet, since it tracks who opened what and who's overdue for a follow-up.
Should you also pitch US investors?
Plenty of Canadian founders do, and it's easy to see why: the United States has a far larger pool of pre-seed investors than Canada does. Some US funds actively look for Canadian teams, especially ones with a clear plan to sell into the US market. Local investors still tend to move faster, ask fewer basic questions about how Canadian equity and tax rules work, and are often the better first stop before you widen the search.
The two aren't mutually exclusive, and they don't have to happen in a fixed order. A lot of successful Canadian raises mix a local lead who understands the market with one or two US angels or scouts who bring a US network for the next round. Just be upfront with everyone involved about who else is in the round. A syndicate that finds out about each other secondhand is a bad way to start a relationship you'll need again at seed.
Canada's pre-seed pool is small, concentrated in a few cities, and getting more competitive as dollars shift toward bigger, later rounds. Build your list around the investors who actually write checks at this stage, lean on warm intros where you can get them, and use a free investor matcher to turn that shortlist into a starting point instead of a cold list.
Pre-seed investors
