Justin Young: Hello, everyone. I’m Justin Young and I’m a partner in Osler’s Emerging and High Growth Companies group based here in Vancouver. And I’m really fortunate and pleased to be here today to speak with our client and my friend, Steven Nairne, the managing partner of Raven Indigenous Capital Partners. Prior to joining Raven, Steven was the managing partner at AHL Venture Partners, a $100 million fund investing in innovative, scalable, small and medium-sized enterprises in sub-Saharan Africa. And prior to that, Steven worked at Export Development Canada and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and was also an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia. So Steven, welcome. We really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me today, and I look forward to a conversation about Raven. Maybe to start with, to that end, you could just provide a brief background on Raven, what you do, give us a little bit of background on the history, the progress you’ve made, and how you see the future.
Stephen Nairne: Great. Thanks, Justin, for the opportunity. So Raven was really set up in 2018 on the heels of the publication of the Truth and Reconciliation report, and some of the recommendations around the ways in which business could participate and support those recommendations. Our headquarters is here in Vancouver. We’re currently managing three distinct venture funds, about $150 million assets under management. We have a portfolio of 28 investments currently and, although we’re stage-agnostic and sector-agnostic, certainly thematically we’re focused in four core areas at this point in time, one of which is health, another around climate, a third related to sustainable foods, and a fourth really around the broader area of technology, which includes increasingly areas like vertical AI applications. And really the origin story of Raven was to become North America’s first Indigenous-led and -owned intermediary, and the reason we wanted to do that was to really create culturally safe pathways and a community of support for founders that historically had been marginalized or excluded from having access to finance. And particularly as a lot of these entrepreneurs pivoted from consumer-facing businesses into tech and tech-enabled businesses, we recognized there was a real opportunity to really develop and provide equity and equity-like instruments that we thought were going to be necessary for those companies to grow.
Justin Young: Fascinating. It’s been really interesting to work with you on your investments over the last several years, and you’ve really carved out a distinctive position within the investment landscape, not just in Canada, but in the United States. So you mentioned some of your sectoral interest and some of the background and focus, but maybe you could tell us a little bit more about your investment thesis, how you prioritize new opportunities, and really interestingly, how do you balance your commitment to supporting the Indigenous-led enterprises that you talked about and the entrepreneurs you talked about with the commercial returns that your investors expect? I know that’s a lot of things all wrapped up into one question.
Stephen Nairne: I think the central question you’re raising is around portfolio construction, and so I think, we’re a little bit distinct from a traditional venture fund in the sense that we don’t really follow a sort of a power law theory where we have two or three outsized wins and a number of other names in the portfolio. So for cultural and practical reasons, portfolio construction also shades toward what we call more risk-adjusted and impact-adjusted returns. So we’re certainly targeting annualized returns in double digits for our investors, but we also have been given the flexibility to invest in companies where maybe we only see a two or a two-and-a-half or 3X return, but we see a transformational impact narrative and a really clear pathway to liquidity. And so, I think our investors recognize, Justin, that we’re cutting trail here. There hasn’t been another Indigenous fund manager, and so we’re exploring a lot of these concepts in real time. But, I think at the center of our thesis, it’s not that different. It’s really about the resilience and the agility of the founder, clarity on the pathway to scale. So a lot of focus on that, and also really the fit with the skill sets of our team and our belief in our own conviction that we’re able to really help this business scale up. And I think the last thing I’d say is that, we’re also a fund that prioritizes ensuring that our investment process expresses and reflects Indigenous values. And so we spend a lot of time, not across the table from our founders, but on the same side of the table, really walking them through cap table scenarios, different investment structures, and especially, as you know, when we get to the term sheets and the long-form transaction documents, just being absolutely certain that the founders understand what the nature of the relationship is going to look like and how that relationship changes over the course of the holding period.
Justin Young: Certainly. And I’ve had the good fortune of meeting a lot of your portfolio company founders and CEOs and watching you in action with them and your team in action, and that resonates. They also span many different industries, verticals, areas of interest. Maybe we can focus on one in particular. So last year, Raven made an investment, I think $2 million seed investment in Calgary-based Advanced Ag. Can you walk us through what attracted Raven to Advanced Ag as an investment opportunity, maybe how that deal came together as a case study, and does that really reflect the type of ventures you’ve been backing?
Stephen Nairne: So Advanced Ag, just by way of background, it is a family-owned business, which I think initially was a curiosity for us, but it’s in the biological space. So really, they’re developing innovative products… that are sold primarily to farmers with one of two objectives in mind: one of which is to increase the yield, and second is to really reduce the use of fertilizers or pesticides. So overall, the target is profitability, but also really helping farmers through climate resilient applications of novel approaches. And I think as we got into this, one of the things that we recognized with humility, of course, is that we didn’t have internally the level of expertise we needed. We did hire an exited founder in this space to do some due diligence for us on the IP portfolio. And I think the most important thing that we learned in the due diligence process is that there’s very few companies in the biological space that have both a strong IP portfolio and who have learned how to sell to farmers. And as many of you know, and I’m sure you know most farmers now are over the age of 55. They are sometimes third or fourth generation farmers, and the first thing they think of when they wake up in the morning is not onboarding new technologies. And so I think the fact that we had a company that had built these sort of trust-based relationships with farmers in Alberta and Saskatchewan and Manitoba, in Montana, and an emerging IP portfolio that had a strong scientific basis, they’re running a lot of active trials because seeing is believing, I think, on farms. And so, going back to the thesis, I think what we most liked about this is it’s one of those rare opportunities where you have positive social and environmental impact embedded in a very robust financial model that has really clear and consistent margins and a pathway to a lot of scale. We also like this opportunity in terms of exit pathways, either to a strategic or potentially, if we continue to grow, into an IPO. So for all of those reasons, this deal made a lot of sense to us. We have huge belief in the founding team, which is the first Iback, which is a brother and sister. Both bring incredible ingredients and medicine, I think, to this business. And, yeah, this is, I think, one of our more prospective companies, so we’re very excited about the partnership.
Justin Young: And that’s great to see. And I know agriculture is such an important sector in Canada, and I think in many ways, you’d agree, probably an under-financed sector from a technology development and sort of venture perspective. So that’s great to see that kind of an opportunity being front and center for you. So on that theme, when we look ahead at the next 12 months, and obviously there’s a lot of discussion in today’s geopolitical climate and in the world about various sectors, whether it has to do with energy transition, or defense or the onshoring of manufacturing or value-added components of supply chains. There’s a lot of discussion today in terms of what’s important and what sectors people should be focused on investing in and supporting. What kind of projects and opportunities is Raven excited about? Are there emerging sectors or regions, either in Canada or elsewhere, North America or in the world, particularly where you see strong potential for Indigenous-led ventures, obviously, given your focus?
Stephen Nairne: So I think there’s a lot of questions there, but I’ll just start maybe with an embarrassing truth, which is I started my career in economic forecasting. So I spend a lot of time thinking about the impacts of CUSMA negotiations later this year, supply shocks, cross-border interdependencies. And so there’s a lot, obviously, to work through. And we try to keep our portfolio companies really on top of how to navigate through what seems to be almost a situation of permanent uncertainty. I think we see still a lot of headwinds, or, sorry, tailwinds, in the Indigenous space. And I’ll maybe just highlight three or four that are particularly relevant.
One is there is much stricter enforcement now of the 5% Indigenous procurement rules, both federally, provincially and, in many cases, with corporations that are moving into reconciliation action plans. We estimate there’s now about $40 or $45 billion in assets held by Indigenous trusts and development corporations that are also becoming more active in private market opportunities, which is good for us, both from a co-invest perspective, but also where majority Indigenous ownership is important at exit. This gives us much more clarity around creating liquidity for our LPs. And I think third is just the level of Indigenous participation now in real estate, in resource development across a number of sectors, which is really bringing, I think, a lot more opportunities generally. To the last question, Justin, I think there’s three areas that we’ve highlighted in 2026 for additional attention. One is housing. Obviously, the Build Canada program offers a lot of opportunities, but there are horrific shortages, both in terms of quality and quantity of housing, both on and off-reserve for Indigenous people. Second, I think, is in the defense sector. Obviously, there’s a huge amount of spending, and obviously we’re not backing companies that are building weapons or anything of that nature, but there are a lot of dual use goods that have applications in that space. And I think third is we see a lot of opportunities for Indigenous people in coastal regions and the Arctic, around things like surveillance, and other technologies, including drones. So those are three new and emerging areas for us in 2026 and going forward.
Justin Young: That’s great. Well, thanks for taking the time, Stephen. It’s encouraging to me to see Raven having had such success and impact on the market and to be connecting those Indigenous-led venture opportunities with private capital in a way that is, I think, novel and really important to the space. And glad that you’re at the helm and that you and your team are really advancing a bunch of causes across the spectrum. So really appreciate it, and thanks for coming today.
Stephen Nairne: I appreciate that, and thank you for all the support both you and your colleagues at Osler have given me since the very beginning.
Justin Young: Thanks, Stephen.
