Four Leaders Recognized at the 2026 Canadian Women in Private Capital Awards

This morning, CVCA held its fourth annual Canadian Women in Private Capital Awards Breakfast in Toronto, presented by CIBC Innovation Banking. The program recognizes women in Canadian venture capital and private equity who have demonstrated professional excellence and a commitment to advancing others in the industry.

This year’s program recognized recipients across two award categories. The Woman of Achievement Award honours women whose careers reflect sustained impact on value creation, industry visibility, and the advancement of women in private capital. The Rising Woman Star Award recognizes individuals who have delivered notable contributions in the past year and demonstrated clear ambition.

This year’s Woman of Achievement recipients are Janet Bannister, Founder and Managing Partner of Staircase Ventures, and Thecla Sweeney, Founder and Managing Partner of Alphi Capital. The Rising Woman Star recipients are Geetanjali Kanwar, Principal at MKB, and Katy Yam, Investment Partner and FounderFuel General Manager at Real Ventures.

See full details about the winners here.

This year’s recipients were asked the same three questions. Their responses are below.

Janet Bannister, Founder and Managing Partner, Staircase Ventures

What is something investors in Canada were confidently assuming two years ago that you believe is no longer true?

Two years ago it was assumed that companies that raised a seed round would go on to raise a Series A if the company was doing well. Now, with the advancements in AI, it is possible to build company at a much lower cost and as a result, many companies are able to get to cash flow positive after their seed round and continue growing quickly without a Series A funding. As a result, for many successful companies, a Series A is optional, which has significant impact on the fundraising ecosystem. In addition, with the accelerating pace and degree of technological advancements, I believe it is extremely difficult to have a long-term competitive advantage based solely on superior technology.

What is one way investors quietly shape outcomes that most people outside the industry underestimate?

Investors can play a critical role in helping founders accelerate their own development and perform their best every day. Being an investor is not just about selecting the highest potential companies and helping the businesses excel. The bedrock of all companies is the founders and leaders who are building the team and business every day. Therefore, as an investor you must work actively to support the founders and leaders to accelerate their development and help them perform at their best. To do this, you need to have a rock-solid foundation of mutual trust and respect. To paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt, “Founders don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”.

If global capital had to choose today, why should it choose Canada, and where would we lose the argument?

Canada offers numerous benefits for capital allocators: stable governments, highly educated population, access to global markets, and lower costs of building a tech company relative to the US. While Canada has historically been world-leading in research, our commercialization abilities trail that of many other markets. This is an opportunity area for Canada so that the country can reap the benefits of its technical advancements.

Thecla Sweeney, Founder and Managing Partner, Alphi Capital

What is something investors in Canada were confidently assuming two years ago that you believe is no longer true?

That this year everything is going to turn around. The last three years running there has been a predicted “return to normal”. We are in anything but a normal market and likely to remain as such for the foreseeable future.

What is one way investors quietly shape outcomes that most people outside the industry underestimate?

In the lower midmarket we provide a lot more than capital and succession planning. Our investment teams are very active across multiple functional areas: talent; technology; process improvement; sourcing; sales and finance. Often there is also a perception that we cut costs indiscriminately whereas in truth we substantially ramp up investment. In order to set up our companies for a more aggressive growth plan we typically make meaningful investments in the leadership team, capital assets and technology that founders have typically shied away from.

If global capital had to choose today, why should it choose Canada, and where would we lose the argument?

Canada is a stable political and economic environment with one of the most highly educated workforces in the OECD. It is rich in natural resources including oil, minerals, timber, water, land and a largely untapped wealth of rare oxide resources. In light of some of the global macro environment challenges, Canada has recently signaled a desire to invest in nation building projects, to reduce bureaucracy and capitalize on its rich resources which should unlock meaningful investment opportunities. The challenge will be how quickly Canada can demonstrate progress on these initiatives and how well it manages special interests and regional divisions.

Geetanjali Kanwar, Principal, MKB

What is one way investors quietly shape outcomes that most people outside the industry underestimate?

People outside the industry often assume an investor’s role ends once the capital is deployed. What is underappreciated is how much of the real work happens after the check is written. By serving on the board, investors take on a fiduciary responsibility, providing governance, oversight, and accountability. They support founders as they navigate consequential decisions, helping to pressure-test strategy, evaluate tradeoffs, and maintain discipline around capital allocation and risk. This is the more formal, structural side of the relationship.

 Outside the boardroom, as partners to the companies they back, investors help extend a company’s reach through their network, connecting founders to advisors and operators, future sources of capital, key hires, and potential customers or partners. They also bring perspective from having seen similar inflection points across other portfolio companies and can help refine elements of go-to-market and positioning. None of these inputs are transformative on their own, but they compound over time and quietly shaping how a company grows and scales.

If global capital had to choose today, why should it choose Canada, and where would we lose the argument?

If global capital had to choose today, Canada makes a compelling case as a market that consistently produces high-quality innovation. We have a deep bench of technical talent, supported by world-class universities and a steady pipeline of engineering graduates. Layer onto that a stable political environment, predictable regulatory framework, and you have a market that offers both innovation and institutional reliability, an increasingly valuable combination in a more volatile world.

Where the case becomes more nuanced is around scale and speed. Canada has been foundational in areas like modern AI, yet many of the largest commercial outcomes have headquartered and scaled elsewhere. Capital depth at later stages can be thinner, risk appetite more measured, and companies often look south when it’s time to scale. We build strong foundations of great companies, but too often the full value creation story plays out somewhere else. To remain attractive to global capital, this needs to change.

We need to foster deeper and more diversified pools of capital right-sized for stage of growth, greater ambition and risk appetite at both the founder and investor level, and a stronger path from research to commercialization. Combined with the right incentives to keep talent and anchor success stories locally, Canada has all the ingredients to win.

And this is already playing out. Canada has a strategic role in the energy transition. We have the ingredients — abundant clean power, globally significant critical mineral reserves, deep engineering capability and capital. Companies are developing, commercializing, and exporting solutions from that foundation and that is a story both domestic and global capital want to be part of.

What is something investors in Canada were confidently assuming two years ago that you believe is no longer true?

For a long time, the industry has largely accepted interprovincial trade barriers as part of doing business in Canada. Companies have had to work around them, even though they create real friction for those trying to scale locally.

What’s starting to shift now, in the context of changing global trade dynamics, is a more deliberate focus on strengthening the domestic market. In the past year, we have seen more movement on this than in decades, pointing to a broader change in how we think about our own market, industrial policy, grid, and supply chains. There is still work ahead, but the direction is clear, and the urgency is different this time.

Katy Yam, Investment Partner and FounderFuel General Manager, Real Ventures

What is something investors in Canada were confidently assuming two years ago that you believe is no longer true?

Two years ago, we assumed the U.S. would always be our primary free trade partner — the ‘golden market’ for scaling Canadian ventures. Today, that stability is no longer guaranteed. As we enter an increasingly complex era of political nationalism, our founders must fundamentally rewrite the scaling playbook.

For investors, value creation now hinges on geopolitical optionality. With Canada building trade alliances across Europe, Asia, South America, and the GCC, our ventures must scale efficiently by leveraging AI to bridge across geographies — turning our middle-power status into a global advantage.

What is one way investors quietly shape outcomes that most people outside the industry underestimate?

As investors, we consistently make decisions in complex environments with incomplete information, making judgments about people and markets to discern signal from noise. Yet, I believe the quality of our presence and relational skills impacts our founders and shapes the evolution of their companies far more than our term sheets.

By investing in our own capacity to regulate stress, repair after conflict, and pause for clarity, we provide a stabilizing force that helps founders navigate uncertainty. Practicing this ‘antifragility’ strengthens how we lead board governance, influence performance culture, and build long-term market resilience. Ultimately, investor inner development is a profitable investment that shapes outcomes far beyond traditional benchmarks.

If global capital had to choose today, why should it choose Canada, and where would we lose the argument?

The Case for Canada: Canada is a deep-tech powerhouse, funding paradigm shifts that redefine entire industries. With world-class universities and institutions like CIFAR, we backed AI through its ‘winter’ and invested in nanotech, life sciences, and quantum decades before they were mainstream. Today, with 26 Nobel laureates and 6 Turing prize winners as CIFAR fellows, Canada remains a premier destination for capital seeking the alpha generated by scientific breakthroughs. Furthermore, we are a stable, high-trust democracy led by a Prime Minister with deep roots in global finance (Goldman Sachs) and central banking (BoC/BoE) — signaling strong fiscal policy and a sophisticated understanding that private capital and public interest must align for global success.

The Counter-Case: Our challenge is scale. With 41 million residents and an economy still tethered to natural resources and the USD, we lack the economic independence of larger nations. However, what we lack in weight, we gain in nimbleness. Our innovation economy is on a steep upward trajectory across AI, quantum, health sciences, epigenetics, and generative biology. Canada is a middle-power nation well positioned to be the world’s most efficient foundational and applied powerhouse for the next era of global growth.