Leah Carr

Canada just dropped $25M into a single gap in the venture pipeline. CIBC and Women in VC announced a $25M fund targeting female-led SaaS companies. The data is simple: → Women-led startups get <3% of global VC funding → Yet they consistently show higher capital efficiency and stronger early retention → And still, they receive less than 3% of global venture funding → Most never raise again because they weren’t funded properly to begin with This fund is one of the first signals that Canada’s capital markets are starting to price talent with discipline. Because this isn’t about “supporting women.” It’s about investing in founders who are already outperforming, even when under-resourced. The bigger signal? → Founder profile ≠ founder potential → Capital is starting to chase performance, not pitch polish → SaaS isn’t just a sector - it’s systems. And women are building better ones. I’ve seen it first-hand: when capital sharpens, better companies emerge and cleaner GTM systems get built. Some of the best I’ve seen are led by founders the market still underestimates. It shows the ecosystem is stronger when capital chases performance over pattern. #femtech #womeninvc #womenintech #saas #femtech #womeninvc #womenintech #saas

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Canada has world-class builders. What it's sometimes lacked is the GTM infrastructure around them to help them compete at scale. That's what Boreal Ventures Fund II is about — and why I'm excited to be contributing. $60M, early-stage, B2B tech, and a genuine obsession with helping founders move past product-market fit. The next generation of Canadian champions won't build themselves. https://lnkd.in/e5EnzGyC https://lnkd.in/eRJtvAVR

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2025 was the worst year for Canadian VC funding since 2016. At the same time, 80% of our founders burn through early-stage capital rebuilding broken MVPs. Scope creep still kills half of all software projects. Non-tech founders get quoted $50k to $400k for the same application with no way to validate what's real. And when they do build? Half of the IP generated here gets assigned to foreign companies. We don't have an innovation problem. We have a translation problem. Brilliant ideas die in the gap between vision and technical execution because founders can't speak developer, and developers can't read minds. The concept-to-PRD process still costs $50k to $400k in senior engineering time. Most early-stage companies can't afford that, so they hire junior talent, get locked into vendors, or burn runway on throwaway code. The Vision-to-Execution gap isn't capital. It's the $400k scoping barrier that keeps ideas trapped inside founders' heads. Until we fix the process, more funding won't solve anything.

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Early-stage founders don’t fail because they ignore data. They fail because they measure the wrong things. At Venn, we’ve worked with thousands of Canadian businesses. From side hustles to fast-growing teams, we’ve seen the same pattern again and again. Founders set up dashboards to track CAC, LTV, retention, funnel drop-offs. But they haven’t talked to ten customers who share the same urgent pain. The numbers don’t matter if no one actually needs what you’re building. The businesses that grow the fastest focus on urgency. They constantly ask themselves: - What problem are customers trying to solve right now? - What keeps them up at night? - What are they hacking together because no better solution exists? If you’re under 1MM in revenue, your best signals won’t come from metrics. Start with conversations. Listen first. Build from what you hear. That’s what moves the needle early on.

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