Alex McIsaac here wishing everyone a Happy New Year!

2025 marked Northside Ventures’ most active period since I founded the firm three years ago. We screened nearly 5,000 companies, met with over 500 founders, made 12 new investments, and deployed more capital than any prior year. We grew the Northside team to six people, launched the Northside Scout Program and our inaugural cohort, hosted founder events across Toronto, Waterloo, and San Francisco, and began fundraising for Northside Ventures Fund II (more on this soon).

Investments

Over the past 12 months we invested $3M USD across 12 companies at an average cheque size of $250K, bringing Fund I to 29 portfolio companies. All 12 investments were founded by Canadian founders, with eight teams headquartered in the U.S. and four in Canada. Across the full portfolio, roughly half of our companies are based in Canada and half in the U.S.

As code-writing AI tools continued to commoditize traditional software, we increasingly indexed toward sharper, more defensible business models at the intersection of AI and the physical world. We backed founders building across robotics, logistics, auto, reinforcement-learning environments, industrial systems, defense, rare earths, and space — categories we deliberately chose for their ability to support defensibility through proprietary data, hard technical execution, and tangible go-to-market advantages beyond what surface-level AI applications can replicate. Our new investments this year included:

This year a greater share of capital went towards “frontier” companies we define as companies building deeply technical solutions for solving massive problems at the edge of what is possible today. Examples include Solcoa Industries’ rare-earth reactors for magnet manufacturing, Valstad Shipworks’ autonomous shipyards and North Vector Dynamics’ low cost counter-UAS defense systems.

We continue to spend significant time meeting every YC founder with a Canadian connection and this year was no different. We invested in three exceptional YC companies: Subtrace (YC W25), Relling Systems (YC S25), and Anytool (YC W26). We also made a follow on investment in Datacurve (YC W24)’s $15m Series A who raised only 12 months after our initial investment. Today, roughly one in five Northside investments is YC-backed, and we remain bullish on Canadian founders going through the program.

The Northside Community

Community remained core to how we showed up for founders in 2025. Throughout the year, we hosted events across Toronto, Waterloo, and San Francisco, bringing together founders, operators, investors, and LPs during key moments in each ecosystem.

We were particularly excited to build our presence in the Waterloo ecosystem with events like the Socratica Symposium happy hour we co-hosted with our friends at Garage Capital and Inovia and the Waterloo Tech Week pre-seed fundraising workshop we held in September with over 60 local student builders. Outside of Waterloo we hosted several founder gatherings like the Jeffersonian-style dinner for Toronto founders we co-hosted with our friends at CIBC Innovation Banking and a dinner in San Francisco for Canadian founders in YC we co-hosted with Bain Capital Ventures, an LP in Northside.

Looking forward to 2026 we plan to host more dinners and events alongside local partners in Toronto, Waterloo, New York, and San Francisco. Stay tuned for more!

Our Team is Growing

This year marked an important phase of internal growth for Northside with the addition of Naomi Walch as an Associate and our first full-time investment team hire. Naomi is a recent Ivey Business School graduate who completed two internships at Northside, where she consistently stood out as a top performer. She previously interned at Mackenzie Investments as an Equities Investment Intern and completed the Ivey Women Venture Forward Executive Education program. Naomi worked across all 12 investments we completed this year.

Naomi will also be leading our part-time Analyst Intern program which will be expanding to four positions in 2026. We are partnering with students studying either engineering or business at the University of Waterloo, Ivey Business School, and the University of Toronto. If you’re interested please reach out to Naomi on LinkedIn.

We recently announced the launch of the Northside Scout Program for 2026 which is designed to identify exceptional founders early and support them as they develop ideas, teams, and companies. If you’re interested in becoming a Northside Scout you can fill out this form here.

Thank You to Our Supporters

The first three years of Northside have been an incredible journey but we believe the next phase will be even more exciting! As we make our final Fund I investments and shift focus toward Fund II, we continue to be energized by the quality, ambition, and velocity of Canadian founders building generational-defining companies in both the US and Canada!

A sincere thank you to all the founders, LPs, investors, friends and ecosystem supporters — Northside would not exist without you. We’re excited to keep building together in 2026 and beyond.

We wish everyone a wonderful holiday season and a Happy New Year!

-Alex