🌊 Founder & Managing Partner @ripple_ventures 🎙 Host of @TankTalkPodcast
Toronto, Ontario
Joined May 2012
- Tweets2.2K
- Following1.4K
- Followers2.6K
- Likes3.4K
Pinned Tweet
Eight years ago I started @ripple_ventures with a simple thesis: back the most ambitious founders we could find, in the markets that move GDP.
Today @_dominiclau and I are announcing that Fund IV is live, anchored by Northleaf Capital Partners, @RBC / @rbcx , and one of Canada's largest private conglomerates. We have completed our first close and already have ten companies in the portfolio.
Our world has changed a lot since 2018, but our role as a VC has not. What has changed is where that ambition is showing up. It is no longer in IT budgets, but in rocket launch, air defence systems, critical minerals exploration, biology labs, and the manual back-office workflows nobody wants to do by hand. These are the markets that decide what a country owns next.
Three things are guiding this fund:
- Following the brightest founders into the most ambitious things being built.
- Investing with conviction in the earliest stages (pre-product and pre-traction).
- Supporting sovereign capabilities with frontier technologies.
Welcoming the newest portfolio companies out of this fund:
@CanadaRocket Company (sovereign launch capability)
@NV_Dynamics (full-stack air defence systems)
Terranox AI (AI uranium exploration)
Daedal Systems (diagnostics for fusion reactors)
Valen (AI to improve drugs)
Green Abundance (plant engineering)
@urunml (infrastructure for the interactive era)
Silmo (AI for the back office)
Blackletter (building a new type of law firm)
Asset (embedded AI accounting)
To the founders we have not met yet: if you are building with this level of ambition, we'd love to partner with you. Come find us early, that is when we are most useful.
Watch the launch video and read our full article below.
cc: @katiekola_smile @okayjay70
Most VCs listen to podcasts. @shomikghosh21 watches public market investor days instead.
As a partner at @Sierra_Ventures (Intuitive Surgical, Intuit), he's followed over 175 public companies through earnings calls and investor presentations, covering everything from packaging and photonics to manufacturing jet-engine metals.
So, when a hard tech founder walks in, he already knows their supply chain. Being a specialized generalist lets him move faster than others.
The best hard tech investors are the ones reading beyond typical sources. If you are interested in space, this episode is the fastest way to see what works and where to look.
Full episode in comments below
See links for full episode:
▶️ YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=pXffAHyl…
🎧 Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcas…
🟢 Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/7v68cF…
Why are investors betting on Canadian startups?
Silicon Valley has produced some of the world's most successful founders. Not just because they're talented, but because they're loud about what they build.
Canada has the talent. We just don't make noise.
"We are crap at telling our stories. We're crap at bragging about things, and we get really busy just building the business."
- Michael Garrity
The calibre of founders at @nrthtechCA makes it clear.
On this week of @TankTalkPodcast, we have a range of guests: one built a billion-dollar company, one invests in founders from the world's largest network of AI researchers, and one runs a 700-company portfolio out of San Francisco, and still calls Toronto her favourite place to scout.
If you think the best founders are all south of the border, bookmark this one. We might change your mind.
See links for full episode:
▶️ YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=wtLpXYQM…
🎧 Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcas…
🟢 Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/7v68cF…
Matt Cohen retweeted
For decades, law firms have run on the billable hour. So the slower a lawyer works, the more they make.
At most firms today, associates’ bonuses are still tied to the hours they bill. So when legal tech builds copilots to make lawyers faster, it’s working against the very system lawyers are paid by.
@jrbluth , a @Harvard_Law grad, saw this problem firsthand. Instead of building another legal tech tool like most players in the industry, he’s rebuilding the firm itself.
At Blackletter, Canada’s first AI-native law firm, Jonathan and his team are redesigning entire legal workflows end to end, pairing technology and people to deliver better outcomes for clients, not more hours.
“It’s no longer about providing tooling to people doing the work, but saying end-to-end, how do we do this better?”
On Tank Talks, Jonathan breaks down the perverse incentives holding legal back, and why the only way to make top-tier legal services more abundant is to become the firm.
The legal industry is on the edge of a major shift. Bookmark this episode to see what's coming.
Full episode on Tanktalks.fm
Matt Cohen retweeted
Human researchers decide everything from compute and data spend to what experiments to run. To replace them, models need this judgement.
We’re introducing FrontierML, a benchmark testing how well agents use money to scale model performance on 21 challenging, end-to-end ML tasks.
Canada builds satellites and just sent an astronaut around the moon. But we still can't launch to orbit ourselves.
Canada Rocket Company (canadarocketcompany.com) just broke ground on the Jeremy Hansen (@Astro_Jeremy) Test Facility in London, ON:
Canada's first large-scale static fire site, built for 1+ MN engines.
@ripple_ventures is proud to be the first to back Hugh and the CRC team.
Matt Cohen retweeted
The founder of Canada's newest unicorn (backed by @OpenAI) thinks we need to stop glorifying being a "founder."
"I don't think it's healthy to wanna do entrepreneurship for the sake of entrepreneurship." "It's probably not the shortest path to happiness."
Matt Cohen retweeted
Great being on the show! Always love talking with @mattybcohen. This was a fun conversation.
He went from @Harvard_Law to employee #20 at @cohere . Now he's building Canada’s first AI-Native law firm, Blackletter (blackletterfirm.com) .
Jon Rosenbluth was one of the few in his Harvard Law class who didn't go into law. But after seeing countless founders lose time and money to billable hours, he wanted to build a firm that would change that.
So, he left Cohere to fix a system that hasn't changed in 70 years.
Now, his team at Blackletter consists of elite lawyers AND machines working together. The system checks for errors and stays online 24/7. But most importantly, the lawyers remain the key judgment layer, and clients are charged a flat fee.
This week on @TankTalkPodcast with Jon Rosebluth, we cover:
02:14 - His career journey from Harvard to McKinsey to Cohere
07:48 - The real case for joining an early-stage startup
15:47 - Why build an entire law firm instead of just another legal tech tool?
19:39 - Problems that most founders face with the current legal system
24:51 - Where software hands off to human lawyers
32:15 - What the law firm of the future actually looks like
He went from @Harvard_Law to employee #20 at @cohere . Now he's building Canada’s first AI-Native law firm, Blackletter (blackletterfirm.com) .
Jon Rosenbluth was one of the few in his Harvard Law class who didn't go into law. But after seeing countless founders lose time and money to billable hours, he wanted to build a firm that would change that.
So, he left Cohere to fix a system that hasn't changed in 70 years.
Now, his team at Blackletter consists of elite lawyers AND machines working together. The system checks for errors and stays online 24/7. But most importantly, the lawyers remain the key judgment layer, and clients are charged a flat fee.
This week on @TankTalkPodcast with Jon Rosebluth, we cover:
02:14 - His career journey from Harvard to McKinsey to Cohere
07:48 - The real case for joining an early-stage startup
15:47 - Why build an entire law firm instead of just another legal tech tool?
19:39 - Problems that most founders face with the current legal system
24:51 - Where software hands off to human lawyers
32:15 - What the law firm of the future actually looks like
See links for full episode:
▶️ YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=wtLpXYQM…
🎧 Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcas…
🟢 Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/7v68cF…
Matt Cohen retweeted
CEO and Co-founder of Canada’s newest unicorn, backed by @OpenAI, shares his biggest learning as a first time founder:
Matt Cohen retweeted
Some of the top Canadian founders (Turbopuffer, Maple, Opslevel) are all ex-Shopify
The Shopify mafia is real.
This week, Rahul Parmar (Ex-Google Sales, GTM at Railway) tells us why Shopify is secretly such a great founder factory, and it all boils down to the culture:
- extremely fast moving
- high agency, high autonomy
- entrepreneurship actively encouraged
Canada doesn’t need to be like SF, we just need more Shopify’s
Fusion companies raised $4.48B last year. Almost none of them can buy the instruments to see inside their own reactors.
They all build them in-house. It's like every airline building its own radar before it can fly. Billions going into reinventing the same tools instead of reaching net energy.
Daedel Systems is fixing that.
@ripple_ventures is excited to back Daedel alongside @OMERSVentures
Matt Cohen retweeted
The @BostonCollege Investment Committee (an LP and my beloved alma mater) asked for a few thoughts on what's happening in AI. I recorded a test run yesterday morning and then shared it with my partners, who encouraged me to share it more broadly... so here you go!
This is not a sales pitch, it's just a reflection on what we're seeing. And it wasn't intended to be shared, so please pardon the rough edges.
loom.com/share/c016702964a04…
Matt Cohen retweeted
Had a lot of fun hanging with my friends at @ripple_ventures
"Canadian buyers are the hardest to sell. Reps trained on them crush it in the US."
Rahul Parmar (@parmstar) co-founded Lighthouse Labs, was an early @googlecloud sales lead in London, scaled @DrataHQ from $5M to $50M+, and now runs GTM at @Railway solo.
New @TankTalkPodcast 👇
"Canadian buyers are the hardest to sell. Reps trained on them crush it in the US."
Rahul Parmar (@parmstar) co-founded Lighthouse Labs, was an early @googlecloud sales lead in London, scaled @DrataHQ from $5M to $50M+, and now runs GTM at @Railway solo.
New @TankTalkPodcast 👇
🤖 Made with AI
Matt Cohen retweeted
We now run the largest frontier lab composed entirely of autonomous AI researchers.
Introducing Primus Society: a society of agents composed of thousands of researchers working under structured institutions designed to solve the world’s toughest problems. We believe this is how AI research should run at scale, safely and productively: an entire society of agents with institutions and purpose.
One discovery we can already share is that the society has discovered a novel result which improves model training by 30%.
Primus Society was inspired by the structures that have organized science for centuries and stress-tested against what’s known about how populations of AI agents fail.
Everything is observable. You can open the virtual city in a browser and read what any researcher is working on.
Learn more about Primus Society here:
lab.cloud/society
The biggest opening in the AI race is running the largest well-governed organization of AI researchers in the world. We’re building the institutions that let a million AI scientists safely tackle the world's toughest problems in AI and beyond. And we’re doing it right here in Canada.
Matt Cohen retweeted
Introducing Primus Society: an agent society of thousands of autonomous AI researchers.
We believe this is the path to scaling AI research safely at unprecedented scale safely and productively.
Learn more about Primus Society, the research it produced and browse the virtual city yourself: lab.cloud/society/
We now run the largest frontier lab composed entirely of autonomous AI researchers.
Introducing Primus Society: a society of agents composed of thousands of researchers working under structured institutions designed to solve the world’s toughest problems. We believe this is how AI research should run at scale, safely and productively: an entire society of agents with institutions and purpose.
One discovery we can already share is that the society has discovered a novel result which improves model training by 30%.
Primus Society was inspired by the structures that have organized science for centuries and stress-tested against what’s known about how populations of AI agents fail.
Everything is observable. You can open the virtual city in a browser and read what any researcher is working on.
Learn more about Primus Society here:
lab.cloud/society
The biggest opening in the AI race is running the largest well-governed organization of AI researchers in the world. We’re building the institutions that let a million AI scientists safely tackle the world's toughest problems in AI and beyond. And we’re doing it right here in Canada.
Matt Cohen retweeted
Big update: Primus for Math is live today. It’s an autonomous AI research scientist specifically for mathematics and engineering.
We built it in partnership with Maplesoft to make frontier AI mathematics research systems accessible to everyone, not just a few frontier closed companies.
Primus for Math is a true partner for math researchers and engineers. Give it a problem and it reads the field, works through the analysis in Maple's math engine, simulates the system, proves what it can and shows its work at every step for you to understand and build on.
It also changes who gets to do this kind of work. Now a physicist with a math question, an engineer working outside their field, a two-person lab can do the work themselves as Primus brings the field's literature, methods and rigor to the project.
Maplesoft has been an ideal partner to collaborate with. During the beta, they’re generously offering Maple access for every Primus for Math user at no additional cost. And we're offering free credits to Primus if you sign up now.