There hasn’t been this much energy in downtown Vancouver since the 2010 Olympics, says Jack Newton, chief executive of AI legal software company Clio. “It’s just buzzing,” he told The Logic.

At Web Summit’s inaugural Vancouver conference, artificial intelligence dominated panels, pitches and investor chatter. Nearly every company claimed an AI angle, and many credited their momentum to funding and expertise from Silicon Valley. Despite ongoing U.S.-Canada trade tensions, more than 15,000 attendees convened for the event, signalling that geopolitical tensions have done little to dampen cross-border tech ambitions. 

Here’s what attendees on the floor had to say:

Canadian companies want money—and don’t care where from: Venture capital deals in Canada hit a five-year low in early 2025, with investors allocating $1.26 billion over 116 deals while private equity exits though IPOs and mergers and acquisitions also slowed. Yet despite trade tensions, U.S. investors continue to play a major role in most VC deals. 

Talk of tariffs has fallen into the background, Crown corporation investment fund InBC’s chief executive Jill Earthy said in an interview. “There’s a positivity that’s happening here, which I hadn’t felt for a few months.”

The fund’s portfolio companies remain very interested in attracting U.S. capital. At the Series B or C stage, international backing is usually essential, Earthy said. Compared to past years, she has noticed that even though the number of deals has fallen and investors are approaching deals with more scrutiny, they’re also “writing larger cheques.” 

Companies like Vancouver-based legal technology firm Clio, whose record-breaking raise last July valued it at $3 billion, were almost exclusively backed by U.S. investors—Google parent Alphabet and Goldman Sachs among them. “I just haven’t seen the engagement from Canadian VCs,” Newton said, adding that he doesn’t know if the lack of interest from Canadian VCs even “matters all that much” if companies are able to attract international capital. 

Though it might be nice for Canadian investors to reap the returns of domestic companies, the creation of jobs and homegrown talent is the most important thing, he said. “I think it’s just a missed opportunity for Canadian investors,” Newton added.

When Newton co-founded Clio in 2008, that wasn’t the case. U.S. investors were far less likely to take a chance on Canadian startups, he said. But now, “virtually every VC has become increasingly geographically agnostic around where they invest,” benefitting Canadian firms. A company of Clio’s size is seeking out investors that have experience scaling firms—like California-based New Enterprise Associates, which has taken over 280 companies public. 

Newton sees Clio potentially listing on public markets within the next one to two years, but wants to wait for market volatility to ease. “We’ll just be keeping a close eye on how things evolve,” he said.

Toronto-based Tailscale, a secure networking company that works with AI companies like Perplexity and Cohere, also has had far more success with investors in the U.S. than at home. “It’s pretty tough in general to get Canadian investors to invest in anything, and it’s comparatively easy to get American investors to invest in things,” Avery Pennarun, Tailscale’s chief executive and founder said in an interview.  

Second-order effects: Tariffs aren’t directly impacting the investment appetite of investors based in Silicon Valley, as the effect on software companies is limited, Patrick Lor, managing partner at Panache Ventures, said in an interview. “There’s really vague talk of how you tariff a software company. But you’re tariffing all of their clients,” Lor added.

There might be second-order effects in the case of a recession—which some economists have already warned Canada is on the brink of. For investors looking at Canadian companies, the most important aspect is their ability and appetite to go global, Lor said. 

Likewise, founders shouldn’t be “too picky about” what country investors are from, because the inflow of funds will ultimately prop up the Canadian economy, Pennarun said. “It benefits Canada to have this money flowing in from the U.S. so you can hire Canadians,” he said. 

Both Tailscale and Clio, alongside a handful of others at the conference, are examples of Canadian companies that have gone global relying more on Silicon Valley funds rather than Canadian VCs in their larger, recent raises—with Tailscale targeting English-speaking countries abroad first like the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Clio already in more than 130 countries and seeing its strongest growth in EMEA. 

‘Brain drain’ talk is unproductive: Instead of wasting time “worrying and fear mongering around brain drain,” founders need to go south to San Francisco to learn from the expertise and energy there, said Chris Neumann, a Vancouver-based founder and venture capitalist.

“We should be encouraging more founders, more executives, more people to get on airplanes, go down there and spend time to really benchmark against what’s happening globally,” he said in an interview. Vancouver is the only major international city in the same time zone as San Francisco, Neumann said, which is also a “huge competitive advantage.”