Canada IN SHOCK As Its Top Founder FLEES To America — And Raises Twice The Money There

A Vancouver founder built a startup valued in the tens of millions, then moved it to San Francisco — and according to a decade of data, she is far from alone. In this breakdown, we examine why Mai Trinh's Internet Backyard and the AI company Gumloop both left British Columbia for California, what their founders told Canadian media about visa backlogs and venture funding, and how a Toronto investment firm's study of nearly 3,000 high-potential Canadian-founded startups reveals just how routine these departures have become. What looks like a handful of individual business decisions turns out, on closer inspection, to be a structural shift in where Canada's most promising companies now choose to build. We then trace the economics underneath the exodus: a domestic venture capital pool that has shrunk sharply relative to the size of the economy, seed rounds that consistently come in smaller than those raised in comparable American cities, a deepening reliance on U.S. investors, and a Startup Visa queue that federal processing data now measures in more than a decade. Every departure carries more than a founder — the jobs, suppliers, and tax revenue a scaling company generates follow it across the border. We also weigh the other side of the ledger: new domestic funds, investors betting on Canadian talent, and Ottawa's cancellation of a proposed capital-gains hike — and ask whether any of it addresses the deeper problem of a country that educates its most ambitious builders, then gives them fewer and fewer reasons to stay. Turn on notifications to stay updated! 🔔🔔🔔