White Star Capital

Decision-making is distributed across a partnership of six named partners, each anchored to a specific geography: Eric Martineau-Fortin (Montreal/New York), Jean-François Marcoux (Montreal), Christian Hernandez Gallardo (London), Matthieu Lattes (Paris), Shun Nagao (Tokyo), and Eddie Lee (Singapore). The firm does not concentrate final authority in a single central investment committee; instead, local partners lead underwriting and board representation for companies in their region, with cross-office consensus typically required for new investments.

White Star sources through in-country partners who operate with local-language fluency and deep market networks in six hubs: New York, London, Paris, Montreal, Tokyo, and Singapore. Each partner maintains relationships with local accelerators, seed funds, and corporate spinouts relevant to White Star's fintech, enterprise SaaS, and digital health focus. The firm also runs an investor network called WSC Angels, composed of senior operators and LPs who refer early-stage companies, creating an auxiliary sourcing channel outside the typical GP-LP pipeline.

White Star Capital operates as a classic venture capital firm, not a family office. It raises institutional limited partner capital through sequential flagship funds and a dedicated digital asset vehicle, deploying on behalf of sovereign wealth funds, global financial institutions, and family offices. The firm's partnership model and fiduciary obligations are those of a registered investment adviser, not a single-family vehicle managing proprietary capital.

White Star pursues both direct investments and fund commitments. Its primary activity is writing direct equity checks into early-stage companies from seed to Series B. The firm also selectively commits as a limited partner to other venture funds — particularly those operating in geographies or sectors adjacent to its core footprint — to extend deal visibility and co-investment rights, a practice the partnership has confirmed in public communications about its sourcing strategy.

White Star targets pre-seed through Series B rounds, with initial checks typically between $1 million and $8 million. The firm averages a first-check size at the larger end of that range for Series A rounds, reserving significant reserves for follow-on investments into breakout portfolio companies. While the mandate is stage-agnostic within early-stage, the partnership has exhibited a pattern of concentrating reserve capital into later-stage follow-ons for top-performing positions like Clark and Tier Mobility.

White Star does not publish an explicit exclusion list, but its investment activity and public commentary show a deliberate avoidance of deep-tech hardware (semiconductors, advanced materials), biotech and pharmaceuticals, and pure-play real estate or infrastructure. The firm concentrates on digital-first business models — enterprise SaaS, fintech, digital health, and mobility — where product-market fit can be demonstrated with software rather than physical science risk, a boundary the partnership has articulated in limited partner communications.

White Star was founded by Eric Martineau-Fortin and Christian Hernandez Gallardo as an institutional venture firm, not as a vehicle for a single fortune. The founding capital did not derive from a disclosed family wealth source; Hernandez Gallardo's liquidity stemmed in part from his tenure as an early Facebook executive, while Martineau-Fortin brought prior institutional finance and venture experience. The firm has since raised third-party institutional capital, making its founding GP commitment the closest equivalent to a disclosed proprietary stake.