Venture-capital funding in Canada fell to prepandemic levels in the second quarter this year as the tech downturn hit privately held companies, the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association says, and financiers warn that the sector’s sudden caution may continue.
Particularly among later-stage companies, “we’re going to see a slowdown that might persist,” Christiane Wherry, the CVCA’s vice-president of research and product, said in an interview. While some of the institutional investors her association works with are “able to stay the course” with financings, she said she’s seen much more caution among smaller VC firms, funds and family offices.
“We’ve seen the VC space move back into something a bit more normalized from before the pandemic, but it’s a struggle to figure out how much of that regression will show up in valuations.” The tech sector has struggled since last fall as a mixture of macroeconomic events including the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began triggering supply chain slowdowns and broad uncertainty. Subsequent high inflation put pressure on central banks to boost interest rates, making capital more expensive and drying up the pools of investor money that flooded the market for tech companies since the Great Recession.