Vancouver's Seed Scene Sits Apart from the Rest of Canada
Vancouver held its own as Canada's third-largest venture hub in 2024, with 64 deals worth $2.2 billion, according to CVCA data compiled by Vancouver Tech Journal. That's a healthy amount of capital moving through the city, but it doesn't tell you much about what's actually available to you at seed. British Columbia's provincial total that year was pushed up heavily by one deal: legal software company Clio's $1.24 billion raise, alongside large rounds for Alpha-9 Theranostics and Svante. Strip those out and the picture at the early stage looks a lot thinner.
The skew shows up in the average deal size too. British Columbia's average VC deal in 2024 came in at $27.9 million, the highest of any province in Canada that year. A number that big isn't built from seed checks. It's built from a small handful of large, later-stage rounds doing most of the lifting, which means the province's totals can look strong in a headline while the earliest stage of the funnel, the one you're actually trying to get into, stays quiet underneath it.
Seed funding pulled back across the country in 2024, with just $510 million invested across 201 deals nationwide, the weakest tally the CVCA had recorded in years. That national pullback matters more to your raise than the province's headline number does. If you're closing a seed round in Vancouver, don't anchor your expectations to British Columbia's multi-billion-dollar VC total. It's a small number of checks writing very large, later-stage deals. Your actual pool is a tighter group of Vancouver angels and seed funds, and knowing exactly who they are matters more than any city-wide dollar figure. You can browse Vancouver's full investor base to see who's active beyond seed too.
What Vancouver's Seed Investors Actually Look Like
Of the 100+ seed investors AngelMatch has tagged in Vancouver, the large majority are angel and individual investors rather than institutional funds. Venture capitalists make up a little over a third of the group, and private equity investors and investment partners fill out a smaller slice behind them.
That mix tells you something practical: your first seed check in Vancouver is more likely to come from a person writing a personal check than from a fund committee. Angel investors here tend to move faster and ask fewer process questions than a VC partner would, but they also expect you to have done real homework on them specifically, not pitched the room.
Check size doesn't really change because you're in Vancouver instead of anywhere else. Angel checks here still typically fall in the $25,000 to $500,000 range, though a debut check from an individual angel is more likely to land toward the smaller end of that range than a fund's first check would. Expect standard early-round dilution too, usually around 15% to 25%. Build both numbers into your cap table model before your first meeting, not after someone asks about them, and run them against a runway calculator so you know exactly how many months a given check buys you.
Some of the most visible names actively backing early-stage Vancouver companies in 2026 include Boris Wertz, founding partner of Version One Ventures, a Vancouver-based seed fund that backed Coinbase, Dapper Labs, and Uniswap Labs early in their lives. Ryan Holmes, who founded Hootsuite, now writes seed and pre-seed checks through LOI Venture, his fund for founders under 30. Roham Gharegozlou, founder and CEO of Dapper Labs, is also an active angel outside his own company. None of them are easy to reach cold, but they're a good starting point for understanding who's actually writing checks in the city right now, not who used to.
Wertz's roots in the city go back further than Version One Ventures itself. He was part of the same small Vancouver startup circle as Tiny Speck founder Stewart Butterfield in the years before Tiny Speck pivoted into Slack and eventually sold to Salesforce for close to $28 billion. That kind of overlap is normal in a city this size. The people who backed Vancouver's biggest tech exits and the people writing today's seed checks are often the same small group, which is exactly why a warm introduction carries so much weight here.
Where Vancouver Seed Money Is Actually Going
Look at what Vancouver's seed investors actually back, and a pattern shows up fast. Information technology, B2B, and consumer internet are the three biggest categories, followed closely by software and e-commerce. Health care and fintech investors are also active, though in smaller numbers, and wellness and consumer software round out the top ten.
If you're building outside those categories, that's not necessarily a bad sign. It just means you'll be pitching investors whose usual portfolio doesn't include a company like yours, so your pitch needs to work harder to explain why they should care anyway. Lead with the problem, not the category label.
Worth noting too: these are the categories with real depth, not just a name or two. A market showing up with only two or three tagged investors in Vancouver isn't a market worth building a pitch strategy around locally. You're better off treating a thin local category as a signal to widen your search beyond the city rather than a reason to assume there's no interest at all.
Vancouver Seed Investors Don't Stop at Seed
Here's something the data shows that's easy to miss: most of Vancouver's seed investors don't stop at seed. Roughly two in three also back early-stage venture deals, about a quarter also do pre-seed, and a smaller group goes as far as Series A.
That overlap is worth building into your investor list. An investor who only ever writes seed checks and never follows on is a one-time relationship. An investor who's active across seed, early-stage venture, and pre-seed could lead your next round too, and that's worth knowing before you start outreach, not after you've already picked a lead. Track which of your target investors show up across multiple stages in a fundraising CRM so you're not trying to reconstruct that picture from memory three months into your raise.
The Series A overlap is smaller, but it's not nothing. A little over one in ten of Vancouver's seed investors also carry a Series A tag, which is a meaningful number given how few investors anywhere write checks at both ends of that gap. If one of your seed investors turns out to be in that smaller group, it's worth a direct conversation about their appetite for a follow-on before you assume you'll need to find a whole new lead when the time comes.
How to Approach Vancouver Seed Investors
Vancouver's startup scene is small enough that most of the active seed investors know each other, and they talk. A cold email that lands well with one of them tends to get forwarded. One that misses badly tends to get talked about too. Get a warm introduction if you can, and ask other founders who've already raised from Vancouver's seed investors before you pitch anyone cold.
Two events are worth building your calendar around if you want real in-person access. Vancouver Startup Week runs at the end of April into early May, and Web Summit Vancouver runs in mid-May. Both pull a meaningful share of the city's angel and seed crowd into one place, which beats chasing individual calendars all spring.
Outside those two weeks, patience matters more in Vancouver than it does in a bigger, faster-moving market. A tight-knit investor community means reputations travel quickly, but it also means fewer people are chasing every deal, so decisions can take longer than you'd expect from a smaller city. Build extra weeks into your fundraising timeline rather than assuming a quick city means a quick close. State your ask with a specific runway attached when you finally do sit down with someone, not a round number that just sounds reasonable.
Vancouver's seed money is real, but it's concentrated in a small, well-connected group of angels and seed-focused funds rather than spread across a deep bench of institutional VCs. Build your target list around the people and funds actually writing checks at this stage in this city, not the province's headline VC totals, which are skewed by a handful of massive later-stage rounds. Pull that list, along with contact details for the seed investors covered here, from AngelMatch's investor database before you start your outreach.
Seed investors
