Ed. note (Sept 1, 2025): The name of the firm has been updated from North Exit Ventures to North Exit Ventures.

North Exit Ventures, a venture capital firm that launched in November to back early-stage fintech startups across Canada, is ready to start deploying capital after a year of fundraising for its Fund I. 

The outfit intends to write cheques ranging from $250,000 to $1 million for pre-seed and seed-stage companies, primarily those in B2B sectors such as capital markets, insurance, lending, payments, treasury, and wealth. This year, it plans to be “aggressive” with investments, given changes between 2023 and 2024 that it believes will benefit its portfolio companies. These include increased IPO and M&A activity, lower interest rates, and regulatory clarity in areas like open banking (which allows third parties to access consumer banking data with consent) and real-time payments (transactions that are processed and settled instantly, while traditional methods can take hours or days to clear).

"We want to build a portfolio of 30 of the best fintech companies in the country," says Tal Schwartz, general partner at North Exit Ventures. "We have a very big pipeline that allows us to increase our rate of deployment, and we’re excited for the opportunities this presents in the Canadian market."

The six companies that North Exit has invested in so far include two from Vancouver: Opal, a spend management platform designed for ad agencies, and Walter, an operating system that streamlines corporate law firm operations. Traits that the founders have in common, which align with what the venture firm looks for, include having deep expertise in the problems they’re solving and demonstrating grit and determination. The reason, Schwartz said, is that he’s found that one constant in some of the largest and most successful fintech companies, even as they pivot, is their leadership.

“Walter’s founder Ryan Wilson has had a string of successful exits throughout his career,” Schwartz highlights. “He's built companies, he's scaled them, and he's been able to navigate growth and an M&A transaction with a successful outcome multiple times. And these were all in very different industries and disciplines. So that, to us, showed that Ryan was very committed to executing on an idea, but also showed a successful track record of doing it before."

Schwartz added: “Opal’s founder, Alex Steele, previously ran his own ad agency and has an incredibly deep understanding of the problems that agencies face when acquiring new customers — going through onboarding, purchasing, and buying. He's been able to surround himself with a really elite group of mentors and advisors, who are some of the most credentialed individuals within the vertical software industry. That showed he's able to surround himself with a team of winners and that he's able to motivate people.”

What makes North Exit unique as a fund is how well its community of founders know the industry — and particularly the sector's emerging companies.

Schwartz is the creator of Canadian Fintech, the largest community of its kind in the country, which tracks funding, products, acquisitions, and trends through its newsletter while also bringing founders together through conferences. Teaming up with him is his father, Gary Schwartz, the founder of the Canadian Lending Association (CLA), which represents and advocates for over 300 companies involved in financing small-to-medium-sized business, homes, equipment, vehicles, mortgages, and more. Prior to the CLA, Gary Schwartz founded mobile marketing solutions provider Impact Mobile, which he sold to digital communications conglomerate Cisco.

“We’re in the market talking with founders at the earliest stages, meeting with hundreds of them a month, and helping them through some of the earliest problems that arise when you start to build a business,” Schwartz says. “In many cases, the founders have not even incorporated their ideas. In some cases, they're still employed at other companies. We're helping them grapple with some of the grittier parts of starting a business. The reason we're able to do that is because of the huge amount of distribution we have.”

Another advantage to North Exit is the expertise it offers through its venture partners, who are all exited entrepreneurs that have collectively generated billions of dollars in investor returns.

Kathy Gregory is the founder of Paradigm Quest, which helps lenders process and manage residential mortgages (acquired by Canada’s largest independent mortgage finance company, MCAP); Norm Cappell is the founder of Savvyy, a digital mortgage platform that simplifies the application and approval process (acquired by an undisclosed financial institution); and Michael Garrity is the founder of Financeit, which started as the country’s first peer-to-peer lending service before offering point-of-sale financing (acquired by private equity and venture capital firm InterVest).

There’s also Ali Metel, the founder of Lendcare, which offers financial services and point-of-sale solutions for businesses (acquired by alternative financial services company Goeasy); and Catherine Dahl, the founder of Vancouver’s Beanworks, a cloud-based software company that automates accounts-payable services (acquired by business automation solutions provider Quadient). Dahl is the only venture partner based on the West Coast.

“Beanworks is an incredibly successful fintech business,” notes Schwartz. “It was one of the original AP automation platforms that specifically had an edge in multi-entity international corporations. Catherine brings a huge amount of rigor to both the diligence that our fund does when we're evaluating founders, but also to the mentorship and coaching that we provide to our portfolio.”

North Exit believes a fund like it has "never existed before", and that its advantages position it to become a "dominant player in the Canadian market."

Dahl agrees, as she reflects on her struggle to raise early-stage capital for Beanworks. Pitching the company was a tough sell, she shares, as many investors knew very little about accounts payable and cloud options had yet to gain traction in the U.S. While she did receive inquiries from private equity and venture capital firms in the States, they were looking for startups generating around $20 million in revenue. At the time, Beanworks was doing between $1 million and $3 million.

Fortunately for Dahl, she turned to Rhino Ventures for advice. The venture capital firm, focused on Vancouver founders, was one of the early investors in Beanworks. It was co-founded by Dan Eisenhardt, who was part of the team behind the maker of the world’s first smart eyewear for sports, Recon Instruments (acquired by the world's largest manufacturer of central processing units and semiconductors Intel). Eisenhardt encouraged Dahl to ask the companies making inquiries if they knew others interested in investing at the stage Beanworks was in. That’s how she discovered Fintop Capital, a Tennessee-based fund where Square co-founder and billionaire Jim McKelvey is a general partner.

Dahl highlights that, at the time, she was among many fintech entrepreneurs who struggled to find capital in Canada and had to head south of the border. This sometimes led companies to focus heavily on the U.S. market, as seen with QuickBooks Online launching in Canada five years after its U.S. debut. However, Canada’s snub by competitors gave Beanworks an upper hand. The infrastructure it created to handle GST made it especially valuable to business automation giant Quadient — which later acquired the company — as it needed existing technology to accommodate the VAT tax process in Europe.

“It took a chunk of time for fintech companies [in Canada] to grow, exit, and now have some people with cash — dry powder — in their banks, ready to give back. They all struggled like I did,” Dahl says, adding that the process typically takes 10 years. 

Now, she believes that the country is in its second round, where a generation of exited fintech entrepreneurs are able to support the next generation. 

“We're just trailing behind in terms of time, but it's happening. There are other early stage funds now that didn't exist when I was looking for money [...] North Exit Ventures is, I think, the only one really focused on fintech [...] If you just do a list of all the successful fintech companies that have come out of Canada, it's crazy. We do more fintech than the U.S.”

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