- Andre Charoo is a venture capitalist who invests exclusively in startups with Canadian ties.
- Some of the great tech companies like Uber, Slack, and Shopify have a Canadian cofounder.
- Charoo credits their success in part to Canadians’ “chip on our shoulder” mentality.
Three years ago, Andre Charoo, then a startup worker, found that many of the great tech companies like Uber,
Slack
and Instacart had one thing in common: a Canadian cofounder.
“Canadians have actually created a disproportionate number of multibillion-dollar companies and some of the most iconic, category-defining companies of all time,” Charoo said. “But when I pulled on that thread, I found that none of them had a Canadian investor at the earliest stages, including Shopify, which is in Canada. I said, that is strange.”
To solve this, Charoo, a Canadian expat, got to work raising a venture fund that invests exclusively in tech startups with Canadian ties. Since then, he’s raised more than $17 million from people in his network and storied institutions like Tiger Global and Insight Partners — convincing them to invest on the promise of the Canadian tech diaspora.
The firm with the cheeky name, Maple VC, is part of a wave of specialized investors searching for future unicorns in a particular vertical or geography. The benefits are clear: Having a speciality allows these checkwriters to spot opportunities before the generalists do, and build a network that is helpful with recruiting talent and customers.
Charoo’s fund invests in pre-seed and seed companies across categories. “I’m just betting on Canadians,” he said.
(More specifically, he backs founders who are from or attended school in the Great White North, but they don’t need to base their companies there.)
The Gist
Silicon Valley North
Charoo is a little biased. He grew up in Markham, Ontario, and studied economics at the University of Toronto. But it wasn’t long before his career ambitions led him to Silicon Valley. After a rough go starting a recruiting company during a financial crisis, and a brief stint at megafunded photo app Color, which failed spectacularly, he was hired as the 25th employee at a low-profile black car service called Uber. He helped expand the service to Toronto in 2012.
Charoo left Uber for a doomed startup, Cinemagram, then joined the job-site Hired as the 15th employee.
As Uber and Hired exploded in popularity, and valuation, his friends remarked on his knack for joining rocketship companies in their earliest days. That foresight, Charoo said, gave him the confidence to become an investor.
In 2016, he raised a $1.2 million debut fund from his friends and coworkers while he was still employed at Hired. He invested the fund across nine startups — and six of them went on to raise subsequent financing from marquee investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, and Insight Partners, he said.
Those investments included Sivo, a debt-as-a-service provider led by a rare Canadian female founder; RenoRun, a delivery service for construction materials based in Montréal; Neo Financial, a Calgary, Alberta, fintech with backing from Peter Thiel’s Valor Ventures; and Dongnae, a Korean proptech startup whose Canadian cofounder lives abroad.
The first fund’s early success made it a bit easier for Charoo to raise a second fund, though he said it still took almost two years to close. The economic uncertainty through the pandemic slowed things down, and some investors remained skeptical. They asked Charoo, “why Canadians?”
Charoo, who is from Toronto but splits his time between San Francisco and Seoul, South Korea, said that Canadians carry a “chip on our shoulder.” They hustle harder because they are so often overlooked in the tech ecosystem.
Funding for Canadian startups jumped to $9.3 billion through the third quarter of 2021, tripling the previous year’s total, according to CB Insights. Still, they get a fraction of the funding that investors shovel into US startups.
“The quality of our product needs to speak louder than our resumes,” Charoo said. “There’s an element of grit.”
Credit: Source link
