BC Be Bold: 2025 Western Angel Investment Summit Round Up

 All of our summits in Victoria had a theme and all were focused on investors and entrepreneurs stepping up and actively engage in things that would help our tech sector. With a slowing down in angel, seed and venture investment during 2024 combined with the current threat of tariffs it was clear we needed something that would deal with all this uncertainty. It was time to take action, and the theme for the summit became: BC be Bold.

And it was great to have BC’s Ministry of Jobs, Economic Development and Innovation, Diana Gibson, open the summit. Gibson dove right into the challenges that our economy is facing and highlighted that government at both provincial and federal levels were actively working to create new economic opportunities. Reducing provincial trade barriers and increasing business with Europe were a few initiatives, but she encouraged the tech sector present in the room to actively bring ideas and support politicians with their thoughts on how to move forward.

Guests Boris Wertz and Dan Burgar built on the challenges tech was facing. Wertz was quite concerned over how Covid had affected tech communities and noted how many entrepreneurs worked remotely affecting Canada’s relatively small tech ecocenters. Dan Burgar zeroed in on how the provincial government could do a lot more by making larger budgets for the tech sector available while also paying attention to the necessary infrastructure to support a thriving tech sector.

That sector is of course driven by enterprising entrepreneurs and the summit therefore – for the first time – started earlier with a dedicated full founder day. Pieter Dorsman took the attendees through a ‘Journey to Web Summit’  preparatory workshop (part of the R2WSV program) to ensure founders understood the basics of engaging with investors in a global setting. All of that came down to preparation and laying the groundwork for a network of potential investors as well as commercial partners that are instrumental to enable the start-up to take off. The afternoon of the founder day was focused on getting entrepreneurs to engage with experts for a series of round table ‘Q&A’ sessions. The first day wrapped up in the evening in Victoria’s well-known Drake Eatery pub.   

On summit day itself a series of pitches enabled a number of entrepreneurs to showcase their business with Benny, an all-natural energy drink, taking home the most Promising Pitch award. Yet, the core issues of being bold kept resonating with a panel that focused on emerging investment trends and one that highlighted ‘unusual founders’. It was inspiring to hear from founders who had taken a different route to get to market and whose stories inspired the attendees to think outside the box and to be bold.

As the summit wrapped up on Friday evening at the Herald Street Brewery it had become very clear that the attendees were ready to step up. The time had come to be less modest in terms of ambitions and do away with Canadian reticence: investors and founders are to dream big and take the opportunities in these times of uncertainty and ensure BCs’ and Canada’s tech is funded and put on the global map.

And finally of course a warm thanks to our supporters VIATEC, BDC, NACO, R2WSV by InnovateBC, PacifiCan, Harper Grey, PWC, Bonsai Growth, Entreflow,  Blankslate, Western Pacific Trust, Nimbus Synergies, eFund, WUTIF and Strategic Decisions Institute

Pieter Dorsman