- Venture capital per capita — how much venture risk-capital Canada attracts per person.
- Intellectual property generation & commercialization — whether Canada generates IP and keeps the value.
- Trademark registration times — how long trademark registration takes.
These findings are drawn from a research report by Leaders Fund — a September 2025 study drawing on a Specter dataset of over 1 million startups across the US, EU, Israel, and Canada, from which it segments 2,932 venture-backed companies founded by Canadians between 2015 and 2024. It is the cleanest available measure of whether Canada is still building venture-scale companies at home — and the answer it returns is the headline of this site's Building pillar.
The two endpoint years are the only annual data points Leaders Fund discloses. What the chart shows is the distance travelled, not the path.
Number of US-founded high-potential startups produced for every one founded in Canada.
The ratio widened roughly four-fold over a single decade. The Leaders Fund study identifies the COVID pandemic of 2020 as the inflection point. Other ecosystems (the US, Israel) rebounded. Canada has not. The shape of the curve between the two years is not publicly disclosed, so the intervening path should be treated as unknown rather than assumed to be a straight line.
Source: Leaders Fund — "Where have all the Canadian startups gone?" (Gideon Hayden, 22 September 2025); underlying data from Specter (tryspecter.com).The study discloses four quantities. Everything on this page is drawn from them. The table below states each one and the limits that come with it, so a reader can see exactly how far the published evidence reaches.
| Published quantity | Period | Value | What it does not tell us |
|---|---|---|---|
| US-to-Canada ratio of high-potential startup formation | 2015 & 2024 | 11× → 45× | The eight intervening years. Leaders Fund publishes the two endpoints only. |
| Share of Canadian founders headquartering abroad | 2024 | ~50% | Any earlier year. The study describes a steady rise since 2020 but publishes no pre-COVID counterpart figure. |
| Capital raised, Canadian founders in the US vs. in Canada | 2015–2024 pooled | ~2× | Whether the premium is widening or narrowing. The figure is pooled across the decade, not broken out by year. |
| Study cohort | 2015–2024 | 2,932 companies | Its composition. No sector, city, or stage breakdown of the cohort is published. |
The US-to-Canada high-potential startup ratio moved from 11× in 2015 to 45× in 2024, a ~4-fold widening over a decade. Leaders Fund publishes only the two endpoints, and the study dates the break to the COVID pandemic in 2020. Other Western ecosystems (the US itself, Israel) have rebounded from the 2022–2023 venture downturn; Canada has not, at least not in founder-formation terms. This finding is the empirical anchor of the Leaders Fund study and the proximate reason for elevating this metric to the headline of the Building pillar's entrepreneurship theme.
Roughly 50% of Canadian founders who raised more than USD 1M in 2024 headquartered their company outside Canada, overwhelmingly in the United States. The pre-2020 baseline isn't publicly disclosed by Leaders Fund. The study describes "a steady increase since COVID" but gives no earlier figure. This is the metric most directly comparable to what an immigration analyst would call "founder emigration". It captures de-facto relocation through company-domicile choice, not personal immigration status.
Canadian founders who built their company in the US raised approximately twice as much capital as Canadian founders who built in Canada, pooled across the 2015–2024 study window. The obvious alternative explanation, that Canadian VCs are simply stingier, does not fit: Canadian VC-per-capita is competitive with the UK on the Building pillar's secondary metric. US-headquartered Canadian founders gain access to a deeper and faster capital stack at every stage. The Leaders Fund commentary attributes part of this gap to graduation-rate differences between US and Canadian funding rounds, a claim the study makes but does not quantify, and the single most useful number it could yet publish.
This metric (founder location, Leaders Fund / Specter) and the secondary metric (VC invested per capita, CVCA/NVCA/BVCA/SNC) measure different but related phenomena and were assembled from independent data feeds. Both point the same direction: Canada is producing world-class founders, but they are increasingly building elsewhere, and the capital flowing into the companies they build in Canada is per-capita well below US and Israeli benchmarks. The agreement of two independent series strengthens the conclusion. The two series disagree in one place: Canadian VC-per-capita has partially rebounded post-2023 while founder-location has continued to drift south. That disagreement is itself informative. Capital is recycling within Canadian ecosystems, but the pipeline of new founders is shrinking.
Four published quantities carry a metric this important further than most, but not as far as it should go. Each gap below is closable from the panel Leaders Fund already holds, and each will appear here once Leaders Fund publishes it:
- Year-by-year ratios 2015–2024 — turning the two-point endpoint chart into a continuous annual series, so the shape of the deterioration is visible rather than inferred.
- A pre-2020 counterpart to the ~50% figure — without it, the claim that founder emigration accelerated after COVID rests on the study's prose rather than on a number.
- Founding-city splits — Toronto–Waterloo, Montréal, Vancouver, Calgary — which would show whether the phenomenon is national or concentrated in one or two ecosystems, and would make the metric usable for provincial policy comparison.
- Graduation rates between funding rounds — the share of Canadian-founded companies progressing seed to Series A, A to B, against US-headquartered peers. This is the study's central explanatory claim and the one quantity that would turn an observation into a diagnosis.
None of these require a methodology change. Until they are published, this page stays at four figures, and readers should treat the annual path between 2015 and 2024 as unknown rather than assumed.
The US now produces 45 high-potential startups for every one in Canada, up from 11 in 2015, and about half of Canadian founders raising over USD 1M build outside Canada.
- Compared with
- Canada's own 2015 position on the US-to-Canada ratio of high-potential startups (11×), the only earlier point Leaders Fund publishes.
- Where Canada sits
- In 2024 the United States produced 45× as many high-potential startups as Canada. Roughly half of Canadian founders who raised more than USD 1M that year headquartered their company abroad.
- Which way it is moving
- Up. The ratio widened from 11× in 2015 to 45× in 2024, which is a deterioration for Canada. Only the two endpoints are published, so the path in between is unknown.
- What the verdict follows
- Level against Canada's own 2015 baseline. The gap is about four-fold wider and the page reports no rebound, so level and direction agree.
- Data basis
- Leaders Fund, “Where have all the Canadian startups gone?” (Gideon Hayden, 22 September 2025), on Specter data covering 2,932 Canadian-founded venture-backed companies, 2015–2024. Page last reviewed September 2026, data current to 2024, the latest published by Leaders Fund, next review on Leaders Fund's next publication.
Methodology notes
Indicator family. Three related measures of where Canadians are building venture-backed companies: (a) the relative production rate of high-potential startups in Canada vs. the US, (b) the share of Canadian founders who headquarter their company outside Canada, (c) the funding premium associated with relocating south. All three derive from a single underlying microdata panel held by Leaders Fund / Specter.
Sample construction. Per the methodology Leaders Fund shared, the study draws on a Specter dataset of over 1 million startups across the US, EU, Israel, and Canada, from which it segments 2,932 venture-backed companies founded by Canadians between 2015 and 2024 (inclusive) that have each raised more than USD 1M. Founding dates are taken from official company registration records. Leaders Fund flags that the 2023 and 2024 cohorts are expected to receive additional updates over the next several years as further rounds are disclosed. The most recent cohorts therefore understate formation, and year-on-year comparisons at the end of the window should be read with that in mind.
'Canadian' definition — two categories. Leaders Fund segments companies into two groups:
- In Canada: companies founded and headquartered in Canada, regardless of where the founders were educated. Defined by company location.
- Abroad: companies founded in the US or elsewhere by Canadian-educated entrepreneurs — defined as companies in which more than half of the founding team, or the CEO, was educated in Canada. Defined by founder education.
This is an education-based definition of a "Canadian founder," not a citizenship- or residency-based one.
'Stayed' vs. 'left'. For the analysis, companies headquartered in Canada are classified as having "stayed"; companies headquartered outside Canada are classified as having "left." This headquarters-location partition is what underlies the ~50% abroad figure.
'High-potential' threshold. More than USD 1M in disclosed equity funding (any round, any investor type), the threshold Leaders Fund uses to define a high-potential, venture-backed company.
Collection window. All data collection and analysis was conducted between 29 July and 21 August 2025.
Underlying data source. Specter (tryspecter.com) — a venture-data aggregator that consolidates Crunchbase, PitchBook, LinkedIn, company filings, and proprietary scraping, with deep coverage of companies that have raised institutional capital. The "high-potential" framing (USD 1M+ raised) is well-suited to Specter's coverage profile.
Comparability with the secondary metric. The secondary metric (VC invested per capita; built as Building_VC-Per-Capita.html) measures capital deployed into domestic companies. This headline metric measures where founders are domiciling their companies. The two answer different but related questions: VC-per-capita can rise even as founder location deteriorates, and that divergence is exactly what the 2022–2025 window appears to show. The two series should be read together.
The limits of what is published. This page reports the four quantities Leaders Fund has disclosed and does not go beyond them. It publishes no estimate of the intervening years, no sector or city split, and no graduation rate, because Leaders Fund has published none of these. Where the study states a direction in prose without a supporting figure (the rise in founder emigration since 2020, the role of graduation rates), this page says so rather than filling the gap with an inference.
Sources
- Leaders Fund — "Where have all the Canadian startups gone?" (Gideon Hayden, 22 September 2025)
- Leaders Fund — "The Future at Risk: Canada's Shrinking Startup Pipeline" (full study, download-gated via the page above)
- Specter — venture data aggregator (Leaders Fund's data partner)
Triangulation. The TD Economics report "Canada's Silent Brain Drain" (May 2026) reaches a directionally consistent conclusion through entirely different data feeds (Statistics Canada labour certification, ICC Leaky Bucket, the Blit-Skuterud-Zhang Waterloo CLEF paper). Where the Leaders Fund study measures companies, the TD report measures people; both find Canada functioning as a feeder system for the US innovation economy.
Why this is the headline metric, not the triangulation
The Building pillar's entrepreneurship theme is anchored by two metrics: this one (founder location, Leaders Fund / Specter) as headline, and venture capital invested per capita (CVCA / NVCA / BVCA / SNC) as triangulation. The choice of headline is deliberate. VC-per-capita measures dollars flowing into domestic companies, a useful and credibility-bearing indicator but two analytical steps removed from the substantive question of whether Canadians are building Canadian companies. Founder location measures that question directly.
