In 2015, the United States produced about 11 high-potential startups for every one founded in Canada. By 2024, that ratio had widened to 45 to 1. Of Canadian founders who raised more than USD 1M in 2024, roughly half headquartered their company outside Canada — typically in the United States. And among those founders who did move south, the ones based in the US raised nearly twice as much capital as their counterparts who stayed.
The figures come from a September 2025 study by Leaders Fund (Toronto) 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 (2015 and 2024) are the only annual data points publicly disclosed in the Leaders Fund study. The shape of the curve between them is not in the public domain; reproducing it is one of the v1.0 deliverables.
Number of US-founded high-potential startups produced for every one founded in Canada. v0.1 shows only the two endpoint years publicly disclosed in the Leaders Fund study; intervening years populate on dataset receipt.
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 2015 and 2024 is not publicly disclosed; reproducing it is one of the v1.0 deliverables.
Only the two endpoint years are populated. Intervening years will be filled from the row-level dataset on receipt.
| Founding year | US-to-Canada ratio | Share of Canadian founders HQ'd abroad | Data status |
|---|
Source: Leaders Fund / Specter (forthcoming). v0.1 populates only 2015 and 2024 — the two endpoints publicly disclosed in the September 2025 study. Intervening years will be filled from the row-level dataset on receipt.
The US-to-Canada high-potential startup ratio moved from 11× in 2015 to 45× in 2024 — a ~4-fold widening over a decade. The trend predates the COVID pandemic but accelerated after it. Other Western ecosystems — the US itself, Israel, the UK — 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, but the directional language in the study ("a steady increase since COVID") implies a materially lower share five years earlier. This is the metric most directly comparable to what an immigration analyst would call "founder emigration" — except 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 cleanest reading of this gap is not that Canadian VCs are stingier — Canadian VC-per-capita is competitive with the UK on the Building pillar's secondary metric — but that 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, which the full dataset will quantify.
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 point of disagreement — Canadian VC-per-capita has partially rebounded post-2023 while founder-location has continued to drift south — is itself informative: capital is recycling within Canadian ecosystems, but the pipeline of new founders is shrinking.
The current page rests entirely on three publicly-disclosed figures. The full Specter dataset — which Leaders Fund has agreed to contribute to this tool and is now incoming — will allow this page to expand in five ways:
None of these expansions require methodology changes — they are all already in the Specter dataset that produced the September 2025 study. With permission secured, the only remaining step is dataset delivery.
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.
'Canadian' definition — two categories. Leaders Fund segments companies into two groups:
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.
v0.1 vs. v1.0 — the gap to close. v0.1 (this page) contains only the three publicly-disclosed headline figures and the two endpoint years. The full Specter dataset — which Leaders Fund has agreed to contribute and is now incoming — will enable a continuous annual series, sector and city breakdowns, graduation-rate analysis, milestone-pace analysis, and non-dilutive-capital reliance, all already computable from the existing Specter feed. With permission secured, what remains is dataset delivery, not a partnership task.
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.
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.
The trade-off is data dependency. VC-per-capita is sourced from four government-recognized free trade associations and can be sustained indefinitely on a $0 budget. Founder location depends on the contributed Leaders Fund / Specter data; if that relationship lapses, the headline metric goes dark. With permission now secured, the hedge — discussed at planning — is to budget for internal capacity to reproduce the Leaders Fund methodology via PitchBook or Crunchbase within 12 months of v1.0 launch. The aim is to use the Leaders Fund contribution for its data quality and analytical credibility, while not being single-threaded on it.