And we’re live… in British Columbia!

A note from William Johnson, BC lead at Startup TNT:

What a rush! Hundreds of founders and investors. Thousands of innovators. Countless new connections – Startup TNT’s first official week in Western Canada’s most Western province was something special.

So who are we again?

Startup TNT is the most active pre-seed and seed-stage investor in Western Canada (CVCA, 2023). We are a community of entrepreneurs, investors, scientists, innovators, and startup supporters that gather every week to have fun, share stories, and build great companies.

We also invest in top-tier early-stage startups across Western Canada. In fact, last year our angel investors committed $3.7M to 38 startups at our Investment Summits or as follow-on cheques, making us the following:

#1 most active pre-seed stage investor in Canada
4th most active seed stage investor in Canada
7th most active investor in this asset class in Canada

And we did all that by only focusing on the Prairie startup community. Well, we’re now taking our brand of community-driven investing and expanding across B.C. That’s where I come in. And that’s why I was so excited to have my colleagues Tim Lynn and Jesse Wiebe join me last week at Innovate West and Startup TNT’s inaugural Happy Hour.

Celebrating west coast innovation

Innovate West was the perfect coming party for our team. Tim, our co-founder, joined a talk titled Capital Catalyst: Navigating Diverse Funding Avenues for Startup and Scale-Up Success. On that panel, he and investors with Raven Indigenous Capital Partners, Top Down Ventures, eFund discussed the various capital-raising avenues available to startups – including venture capital, angel investment, specialized, niche, and emerging funds.

I had the pleasure of moderating two unique heavyweight sessions focused on Vancouver’s tech ecosystem and artificial intelligence. I shared the stage with executives from Rhino Ventures, Cymax, Inovia Capital, FISPAN, Variational AI and Mila. Thanks to everyone who joined and made for very engaging sessions.

Happy Hours are happening

Still, the highlight of the week was our inaugural Happy Hour, co-hosted with our friend Danielle Graham, co-founder of the Firehood. By the way, if you didn’t already know, the TNT in Startup TNT actually stands for Thursday Night Tradition – because we do these meetups Every. Single. Week. But why?

We believe that great entrepreneurs exist everywhere, and the best way to unleash the potential of startup communities is to connect people. We want to be a place where people meet their co-founders, where investors write cheques to local entrepreneurs, and where prominent members of the community come to celebrate wins.

Want to get in on this? Here are a few ways to get involved.

For investors: