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

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

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…

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 👇

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.

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/

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.

This year @TankTalkPodcast is taking the Keynote Stage at the @SAASNORTH Conference! I'm sitting down with Avery Pennarun, Co-Founder and CEO of @Tailscale, for a live on-stage conversation. The topic? "100x More Programmers: Who Controls What They Build?" As AI democratizes coding to millions, maybe even billions, of new people, do we rebuild the mainframe around a handful of AI companies that control models, data, and compute... or do we build a portable, composable, open system? 🤔 Avery, David Crawshaw, David Carney, and Brad Fitzpatrick started Tailscale in 2019. In just a few years, they turned Tailscale into the leading global secure and private network platform with their conviction in open infrastructure. And they did it while building out of Canada! If you’re thinking or working in the AI space, you won’t want to miss this conversation! 📍 Canada Hall 1, Keynote Stage - Rogers Centre Ottawa 📅 November 4, 4:35 PM 🎟️ saasnorth.com/events/100x-mo… See you in Ottawa 🍁

This is super exciting!