With a goal to launch 100 Startups by 2023 and 1,000 Startups by 2033, First Fund is Canada’s most-active pre-seed investment fund.

We are Founders ourselves who saw a gap in early-stage funding and so decided to fix that. We curb Founder Brain Drain and promote the birth of new tech startups by investing up to $250,000 as early as the pitch-deck stage in entrepreneurs looking to get new startups off the ground.

Traditional venture capital needs to see traction before investing, leading to Founders self-funding or taking friends-and-family loans to fund their initial operations and traction.

This is not viable for brilliant Founders who may not have the existing financial background to self-fund their first 6 - 9 months. And even if it is viable, it’s not a great model for Founders as they end up with considerable personal risk to do so. While all Founders take some measure of Market, Execution, and Financial Risk, we believe there is no need to add to what is not necessary to take.

As Founders ourselves, we understand the value that can be created by providing initial runway to a good pitch deck, a strong founding team, and a well-thought-out plan. So we are willing to invest in people over traction. We invest pre-seed, and say “yes” when others say “too early”.

As counter-intuitive as it sounds, a company that grows to $20M in ARR in 3 years would be considered a miss by traditional venture capital.

When your Limited Partners are large pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and endowment grants, you need to only focus on opportunities of a certain size for the returns to make sense for the LPs involved. This has converted Venture Capital to Rocket Capital - a funding model that is only looking to provide Rocket Fuel to Founders building Rockets.

We believe this focus on Rockets is making them miss out on smart Founders choosing to build really nice sports cars in the $10M - $100M opportunity range. We champion Founders building Sports Cars, and confidently invest where traditional venture capital won’t.

Traditional venture capital focuses on Unicorn Hunting. VCs deliver on their returns expectations by chasing a “growth-at-all-costs” model, and sometimes those costs are a lot.

This puts considerable pressure on Founders and leads to many startups imploding under their own unsustainable and unprofitable weight in the VC firm’s quest to find Unicorns. But every successful venture-funded business does not need to be a Unicorn. We believe that for companies with the right structure, a $20M - $100M exit can be a fabulous return.

We focus on viable business models with strong underlying unit economics. Our growth preference is sustainable, not reckless. We prioritize the bottom-line as much as the top-line. We seek Horses that can gallop the long run, not Unicorns that will spark and burst into flames.