Funding

From your own money to Series B. Government programme limits are read from each programme’s own page; venture round sizes are market convention and move with the year, so they are marked as estimates.

Tier A amounts were read from sba.gov, bdc.ca and sbir.gov on 21 September 2026. Futurpreneur and the SR&ED tax credit are listed without a figure because their own pages did not state one that could be read.

Eight questions. The answer is who to talk to — and, just as useful, who not to waste a month on.

This is a rule of thumb, not advice. It encodes one honest pattern: venture investors fund a small number of companies that can grow very large very fast, and most good businesses are not built to — which makes them a bank's or a government lender's customer, not a failure. The entry signal on each market says how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control.

The documents each kind of funder asks for. Clean books come first at every stage — an investor who cannot trust the numbers stops reading.

Two of our own products that sit beside this page.

Companies this research names, with the investors whose own portfolio lists them. Only a match the portfolio shows is claimed.

Angels, venture firms and both. Stage focus is the firm’s own where its description names one, and otherwise follows from its type — marked "by type". People are named only where the firm’s public team page names them, linked beside them.