Allied Venture Partners

Hello Partners,

As a current or prospective partner, this newsletter provides exclusive insights into our investment strategy, portfolio companies, and industry trends.

Thank you for your continued trust and support,

Matt Wilson

Founder & Managing Director | Allied Venture Partners

Not an LP? Click here to join the Allied Venture Partners syndicate.

Team Updates

• Our core team includes Steve, Melinda, Brendan, and Colton.

• The Allied Scout and Advisory programs continue to expand with several new members each week, providing quality diversified deal flow from across Canada and the United States. Thank you to all those who have participated.

New Deals

• We currently have two deals open – one follow-on and one new investment. Syndicate LPs should have received an email invite. If you didn’t, please let me know.

• New LPs can join the Allied syndicate and gain access to our dealflow at no cost by clicking here.

Portfolio News

• Bavovna announced multiple new customer contracts following the recent executive order to advance UAV development in the United States.

• Rook signed a new agreement with Gentherm, the leading provider of medical patient temperature management systems.

• Tiliter launched its new Vision Agent Platform, a universal AI vision agent that lets anyone identify and verify items in images. Adoption has rapidly grown beyond retail.

• Ediphi opened its 8th post-secondary VR training lab across four universities. The team was invited to speak at HITEC 2025 – the leading annual conference in hospitality tech.

• Thanks to Scott Kelly for inviting me on the Emerging Managers Podcast.

Industry Insights

The recent discussions following Toronto Tech Week have reignited a familiar debate in our ecosystem: should Canadian founders feel obligated to build their companies domestically? While I deeply appreciate the sentiment behind keeping talent and innovation north of the border, I believe we need to reframe this conversation around founder realities rather than national sentiment.

The harsh truth is that most founders get one real shot at building a transformative company. In that context, their primary obligation isn’t to geography—it’s to maximizing their venture’s probability of success. This means pursuing every available advantage, whether that’s accessing deeper capital markets, reaching customers with higher willingness to pay, or tapping into more mature talent pools.

When Canadian founders face risk-averse markets, lack sufficient depth, or remain entrenched in traditional approaches, the rational response isn’t martyrdom—it’s migration. The founder who stays in Canada despite these headwinds isn’t being patriotic; they’re potentially being irresponsible to their stakeholders, their vision, and their own career trajectory.

So what’s the path forward?

I’ve built all my companies in Canada, but that was my calculated choice based on my specific circumstances and market opportunities. For today’s founders, I advocate for what I call the “build first, give back later” approach:

Phase 1: Choose the path of least resistance. If that means relocating to access better markets, capital, or talent—do it. Your job is to get big and profitable, period.

Phase 2: Once you’ve achieved scale and success, return as a force multiplier. Successful founders make the most impactful mentors, investors, and ecosystem builders.

The uncomfortable reality is that asking founders to handicap themselves for national pride addresses the wrong problem. If Canadian founders consistently find better opportunities elsewhere, that’s not a founder problem—it’s a systems problem. Rather than guilt-tripping entrepreneurs into staying, we should be asking why they’re leaving and addressing those root causes.

This means improving our risk capital availability, attracting and retaining top-tier talent pools, and creating regulatory environments that favor innovation over incumbency. Until we make these systemic changes, expecting founders to sacrifice their companies’ potential for flag-waving is both unrealistic and counterproductive.

The most Canadian thing a founder can do might actually be to go wherever gives their company the best shot at massive success—and then bring that experience, capital, and network back home.

As a reminder, our Core Investment Values since Day 1:

Read our investment thesis one-pager, available here.

Can you help us grow our social channels? Please follow us on X and LinkedIn