Michelle Scarborough Interview with National Angel Capital Organization
Michelle Scarborough speaks with National Angel Capital Organization at SaaS North in 2023.
Michelle Scarborough is Managing Partner of the Thrive Venture Fund and Women in Technology Venture Fund at BDC Capital. She leads the world’s two largest venture funds dedicated to supporting and investing in women-led technology businesses and is recognized as an influential leader in venture capital in Canada.
In September 2022, BDC launched the $500 million Thrive Venture Fund and Lab for Women, a new investment platform and the largest of its kind.
Building on the success of BDC Capital’s Women in Technology (WIT) Venture Fund, launched in 2017, Thrive will be the largest investment platform of its kind in the world, supporting Canadian women-led businesses for them to grow and have a lasting impact on the economy.
The Thrive platform is comprised of three distinct components, providing a comprehensive approach to addressing barriers faced by women, be it through direct early-stage investment, strategic investment in women-led and focused funds, or emerging models for providing equity investments for women-led businesses in the earliest stages of development, all while continuing to develop a more robust and sustainable ecosystem for all.
More specifically, the platform will be made up of:
$300 million direct investment fund – seeking to partner with promising women entrepreneurs building Canadian technology companies at seed and Series A/B stages. Using the same investment thesis as the WIT Venture Fund, Thrive Venture Fund will remain sector agnostic and will continue to invest in companies with strong growth and scalable market potential, that bring together the right innovation, team, and resources to transform today’s markets.
$100 million lab – a new initiative designed to develop innovative equity investment models for women-led companies with promising business models and growth potential, which may not necessarily be on a traditional path to securing venture capital investment. The initial focus of Thrive Lab will be to deliver its unique offering in collaboration with ecosystem partners, with the goal of filling important gaps in early-stage financing. Specific details regarding the lab will be made public in the coming months.
$100 million indirect investment envelope – to be invested by BDC Capital’s Fund Investment team in women-led and focused general partners across the country. This allocation builds upon BDC Capital’s leadership on DEI standards and impactful results to date with 43% of the Fund investment team’s active portfolio invested in funds that are women-led or co-led, or that have women in partner level roles; double the Canadian average.
Over the life of the WIT Venture Fund, Scarborough and her team made 38 investments in women-led businesses, already exiting eight of them successfully. Furthermore, ecosystem building activities have touched more than 7,500 women entrepreneurs and ecosystem partners since 2017.
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About National Angel Capital Organization:
National Angel Capital Organization (NACO) members have invested $1.54 billion into more than 2,000 entrepreneurial companies. Angel investors are individuals and pre-institutional funds that put their capital at risk in the early-stage ecosystem. This includes individual Limited Partners (Angel LPs) that invest passively or semi-actively in venture capital funds; family offices and funds that invest in pre-seed and seed stage companies, and individuals that invest directly into early-stage companies on their own or with the support of an angel collective. Angel investment fuels the pipeline of companies that grow to raise venture capital and scale into the global success stories of the future.