Rural innovators need local capital to stay and scale: Angel Capital CEO

Claudio Rojas, CEO of the National Angel Capital Organization / NACO PHOTO

Canada’s innovation economy must ensure that promising startups can grow in the communities where they are founded — including rural regions — by mobilizing more domestic and local investment, Claudio Rojas, CEO of the National Angel Capital Organization, said in an interview with The Rural Roundup.

“That's something that needs very careful attention to ensure that we're mobilizing domestic capital, and then not just domestic capital, but also local capital to where those companies are being founded, so that we have economic opportunity across this extraordinary geography of ours,” Rojas said. “A founder in a rural community in Manitoba or Saskatchewan or in Alberta can stay local and grow a national success story that becomes global.”

Rojas warned that when startup companies take early funding from abroad, “the more likely it is that they might move their headquarters to the jurisdiction where that capital resides.”

He pointed to Canadian success stories like Skip The Dishes — “funded by angels in our network early in their journey” — and noted that its trajectory helped enable the rise of Neo Financial, both of which remained in the Prairies. 

“It's just extraordinarily important for us to maintain the economic opportunities that we cherish in this country,” he said.

Rojas’ comments came following the federal budget’s new commitments to early- and late-stage investment. He said the government’s approach creates “two verticals … that provide an end to end solution,” including a $750 million commitment to early-stage companies and a $1 billion Growth Catalyst Initiative aimed at later-stage financing. 

This represents “a renewed commitment, but a more comprehensive approach to the full capital pipeline,” he said, adding that strong early-stage infrastructure is essential because “later stage investments can't reach their full potential” without it.

He called the budget “very bold,” and said it “deserves to be applauded,” especially as peer countries make large-scale bets on frontier technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. “We’re headed in the right direction,” Rojas said.