Northside Ventures

Alex, the founder, leads investment decisions. He previously headed the Canadian practice at Global Founders Capital and worked as a principal at BDC Capital. An associate, Naomi, supports pre-seed and seed deal execution. The firm does not list additional investment partners.

Northside runs a venture scout program across Toronto, Waterloo, New York, and San Francisco, where university students and recent graduates refer founders. Scouts receive US$1,000 when Northside backs a referred startup. The firm also operates a recurring intern program that contributes to sourcing over 5,000 founders each year.

The firm invests at pre-seed—often before a company has a product, revenue, or even a fully formed idea. It calls this 'investing in founders before ideas' and writes the first institutional check. The website states explicit comfort with pre-product, pre-revenue stages.

Northside focuses on three categories: software (B2B SaaS, application-layer AI for legacy verticals), AI infrastructure (developer tools and infrastructure accelerating non-AI-native adoption), and frontier technology (deeply technical solutions for massive problems). Portfolio companies span AI data labeling, video generation, agentic logistics, and rare-earth recycling.

Northside’s website does not disclose check-size ranges. It presents itself as a first-check investor that acts as an extension of the founding team, connecting founders to downstream capital for their next round, which implies it does not typically lead large later-stage rounds.

No additional physical offices are listed. However, its venture scout program operates remotely across Toronto, Waterloo, New York, and San Francisco, giving it a distributed sourcing presence beyond its Toronto headquarters.

Northside combines a lean team making high-conviction pre-seed bets with a widely distributed scout network that sources deal flow from university communities. It operates as an institutional angel investor, emphasizing direct founder relationships, early customer introductions, and support through ideation—an architecture closer to an operator-turned-angel than to a multi-stage fund.