Building a Canadian retail equity crowdfunding platform, and looking for early stage Waterloo founders or investors to talk to
Hey guys, 4th year engineering student building a Canadian platform that'll let everyday Canadians invest $50 minimums into vetted pre-seed startups. I've spoken to many angels and angel networks and I'm wondering what your thoughts on this are?
Background: YC, Angel List, and other VCs fund around 200 companies a per batch out of thousands of applicants. There's a massive gap of legit Canadian founders with real products who never raise because they don't fit the VC (Venture Capitalist) funnel (think AirBnB or Uber getting rejected when they started because of VC vision), and there's a massive gap of Canadian retail investors locked out of private startups by accreditation rules. Unicorne (our platform) is a platform for letting anyone in Canada invest into these; working like Wealthsimple, Angel List, and Kalshi but for startups.
Looking around to talk to Waterloo founders who:
Are early stage (pre seed, raising or about to)
Are Canadian incorporated or plan to be
Might consider listing on a platform like this when we launch
Not asking for money or commitment, just some pushbaack or validation. If we vibe, we'd love a non-binding LOI from you as part of our investor materials to help you raise + get first users.
Shoot me DM me or comment ^~^
Little background: (I've lived in Canada all my life, and really think Canadian start up culture is lacking compared to SF. We have some of the best engineers in the world right here, and brain drain is taking over because we don't have the best ecosystem for startups to compete with the US. Also imagine if you could put money into these startups like a Venture Capitalist fund without having to go through some B.S. accreditation (200K+ in past 2 years income or over 1M assets)
Very happy to take any pushback of my thesis cuz better to hear it now than from a VC lmao)