Information Venture Partners

Information Venture Partners was spun out of Royal Bank of Canada in 2014, where Robert Antoniades and David Unsworth had run RBC Venture Partners, and the two have led it as co-founding general partners since. Its own site describes the focus as growth-stage B2B fintech and enterprise software — "banking, security, embedded finance, and technology for the office of the CFO" — and names Verafin, Adaptive Insights, eSentire and BigID among the companies it has backed. The Verafin result is the one it is best known for: Nasdaq bought the St. John's anti-money-laundering software company for US$2.75-billion in the fall of 2020, the largest Canadian software acquisition since IBM bought Cognos, and IVP had held the position since 2009. The firm closed a third fund at US$101-million, reported by The Globe and Mail in May 2021. In October 2024 it told BetaKit it would not raise a fourth, moving instead to single-asset special-purpose vehicles and later-stage cheques on a deal-by-deal basis, on the reasoning that institutional investors had turned away from early-stage funds. Information VP came to TechTO in December 2022 alongside one of its portfolio companies: Jane Podbelskaya, then a principal at the firm, joined Helcim founder Nicolas Beique on a Founders & Funding episode to walk through the round they had just closed together. She told the show she had built the firm's payments expertise from scratch after joining, and that she and Antoniades first spoke to Helcim in early 2020 — roughly two years before the round came together.