Capital in Canada is scarcer than it used to be — venture funding in Ottawa alone has dropped from roughly $600M a year to $125M over the last two years, and Canadian VC firms have posted zero distributions back to their own investors in eight years. So when a Canadian AI-native founder raises their next round in San Francisco instead of Toronto or Ottawa, it’s not always about loyalty — it’s often just where the term sheets actually are. In this session, founders and investors get candid about how they actually got funded: who said yes, who said no, and why some of the country’s most promising AI-native companies are choosing Silicon Valley capital over homegrown options. No elbows-up spin — just the real calculus founders are running when they decide where to raise, and what it means for building (and staying) in Canada.
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