Front Row Ventures

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Canada
Montreal, QC
Front Row Ventures

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[FR] Front Row Ventures est le 1er fonds en capital de risque géré uniquement par des étudiants au Canada.. And Montreal is only the beginning.

[EN] Front Row Ventures is Canada's 1st student-run venture fund. [FR] Front Row Ventures est le 1er fonds en capital de risque géré par des étudiants au Canada. Nous investissons dans les étudiants les plus talentueux de Montréal, qu’ils soient investisseurs, entrepreneurs ou passionnés de technologie. Notre équipe interdisciplinaire d’investisseurs étudiants parcourt les universités montréalaises afin de dénicher les meilleurs startups tech bâties sur nos campus. Qu’ils étudient en sciences & technologies, sciences humaines, administration ou ingénierie, nous amplifions leurs audacieuses idées en innovations fracassantes. Plus important encore, Front Row Ventures s’engage à propulser les entrepreneurs étudiants dans les ligues majeurs grâce à un investissement de 25 000$ ainsi que tous les autres ressources à notre disposition.
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[EN] Front Row Ventures, Canada’s 1st student-run venture fund, invests in the most talented students in Montreal - investors, entrepreneurs, and tech enthusiasts alike. Our interdisciplinary team of student investors scout Montreal universities to find the best tech startups founded on our campuses. Reinforced by our diverse backgrounds in science and technology, humanities, commerce, and engineering, we’re dedicated to gathering the most innovative students in Montreal, and amplifying their daring ideas into groundbreaking innovations. Most importantly, as first backer, Front Row Ventures pledges to back student-entrepreneurs with a game-changing investment, plus all our resources, tools, and contacts.

10/07/2026

The founder of MyTrials.ai and the firm that wrote its first cheque, on one stage at UBC. 🚀

On Wednesday, October 14, Omar Asaker, Co-founder & CEO of MyTrials.ai, sits down with Omar Eldesouky, Venture Analyst at FRV, to revisit the early days of MyTrials and the moment FRV wrote the company's first cheque.

Pranav Vinod, Director of ROC Scouts at FRV, opens with how FRV thinks about student founders and early-stage companies. After the fireside, you'll do a short guided activity matched to where you are, whether you're curious or already building. We close with time to meet other students and the FRV team.

You don't need to call yourself a founder. Students from any faculty: bring what you've started, or your curiosity.

📅 Wednesday, October 14, 12:30 to 2:00 PM
📍 Big 4 Conference Centre, 9th floor, Henry Angus Building, UBC Sauder School

Register through the link in our bio.

09/30/2026

A few months ago, we brought FRV’s HQ team together for an AI retreat 🤖.

The goal was very practical: understand what these tools can actually do, where they break, and how AI could help us operate FRV with a much leaner team.

We spent a lot of time experimenting with the shift from chatbots to agents, and specifically with what happens when you stop asking AI to help with isolated tasks and start giving it entire workflows to work through.

Not everything worked. Far from it.

But it reinforced a conviction we’ve been developing since: AI has the potential to materially change what a small VC team can accomplish.

VC is a business with an almost unlimited amount of work. There are always more founders to meet, companies to evaluate, portfolio companies to support, LPs and partners to engage, and information to process.

FRV takes that dynamic even further.

Our model relies on students being our boots on the ground across campuses, close to founders, researchers and emerging technologies. That gives us reach and generates significant volumes of opportunities, information and activity.

Behind them, we deliberately want to keep a very lean HQ: a small team responsible for building the infrastructure, processes and foundations that allow the whole platform to scale and for turning all that activity into something we can actually digest and act on.

That’s where we think AI gets particularly interesting.

A few months after that retreat, agents are becoming part of how we work almost every day.

We’re also building shared AI skills: reusable instructions, context and workflows that capture how FRV does recurring work. When one person finds a better way of doing something, the rest of the team can build on it rather than start again from scratch.

The ambition is to keep humans at the center of venture capital: more humans on the ground, building relationships, finding exceptional founders and exercising judgment, while using technology to make the platform behind them dramatically more efficient.

For us, the question is increasingly:
How much more can a lean VC firm accomplish before the answer has to be “hire more people”?

We’re still early. But we believe learning how to build that operating model will become an increasingly important part of building a great venture firm.

09/23/2026

📣 Meet the 2026-27 Student Directors at Front Row Ventures 📣
They've been hard at work all summer, and we're thrilled to finally introduce the incredible team of Student Directors driving FRV forward across Canada!

Leading our investment teams are Nicolas, heading our Venture Analyst team; Sofia, leading our Venture Scouts (QC); and Pranav, leading our Venture Scouts (ROC). Heading up our Portfolio team is Ian, our Director of Portfolio Management.

With our teams revamped and FRV entering a new era as a fund, this is a big year for us, and we couldn't be more excited to have this group driving the engine forward! 🚀

09/18/2026

FRV was born in Quebec, and we’re incredibly proud of the ecosystem that shaped us and remains at the heart of what we do. But from day one, our ambition has been pan-Canadian.

We believe Canada’s best student founders and talent should have access to networks, capital, and opportunities that extend beyond provincial boundaries. Building stronger bridges between ecosystems has been at the heart of how we’ve structured our team for FRV’s next chapter. And Ontario is a big part of that opportunity. With an incredible concentration of universities, student founders, talent, and tech communities, we knew that deepening our impact there meant strengthening our presence on the ground.

🇨🇦 So we’re very excited to share that Saif Ali Javed, FRV Investment Lead, has relocated to Toronto! 🇨🇦

Saif will continue to lead FRV’s investment activities across Canada, while bringing us closer to Ontario’s campuses, founders, co-investors, and broader ecosystem.

If you’re a founder, student, investor, operator, or ecosystem partner in Ontario, reach out to Saif (his first trip up the CN Tower was a great success!) - he’d love to connect. 👋

09/17/2026

We are proud to announce our investment in Contract-It 🎉

Contract-It is building API-first payment & financing infrastructure for construction, so contractors get paid on time, client funds are protected, and working capital and client financing are accessible in a few clicks. 🏗️

Their technology combines milestone-based escrow with embedded financing, using committed project funds to protect payments, unlock working capital for contractors, and offer flexible financing to their clients. 🔒

By embedding payments into construction software and underwriting around client deposits and the security of escrow-held funds, Contract-It creates high switching costs and a defensible, infrastructure-level moat. 🔗

We're excited to support Contract-It as they build a unified escrow-backed payment and financing network that embeds across the construction ecosystem, unlocking reliable working capital for contractors and accessible financing for their clients. 🚧

🚀 Building something big? Let's talk.
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Nous sommes fiers d'annoncer notre investissement dans Contract-It 🎉

Contract-It développe une infrastructure de paiement et de financement API-first pour la construction, afin que les entrepreneurs soient payés à temps, que les fonds des clients soient protégés et que le fonds de roulement et le financement client soient accessibles en quelques clics. 🏗️

Leur technologie combine des paiements par jalons en entiercement et un financement intégré, en s'appuyant sur les fonds de projet engagés pour protéger les paiements, libérer du fonds de roulement pour les entrepreneurs et offrir des options de financement flexibles à leurs clients. 🔒

En intégrant les paiements aux logiciels de construction et en basant l'analyse de crédit sur les dépôts des clients et la sécurité des fonds en entiercement, Contract-It crée des coûts de changement élevés et un avantage concurrentiel durable au niveau de l'infrastructure. 🔗

Nous sommes ravis de soutenir Contract-It dans la construction d'un réseau unifié de paiement et de financement adossé à l'entiercement, qui s'intègre à tout l'écosystème de la construction, libère un fonds de roulement fiable pour les entrepreneurs et donne à leurs clients accès au financement. 🚧

🚀 En train de construire quelque chose de grand ? Parlons-en.
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09/15/2026

Last weekend, 60 people from across FRV came together for our first national retreat in nine years.

Fellows from across Canada and our HQ team spent the weekend working together, getting to know each other, and connecting outside our usual teams and geographies. For a lot of people who normally work across different campuses and cities, it was the first time spending real time together in person.

Community is one of FRV’s four core values, and as FRV has grown, so has the distance between some of the people who make it work. The retreat gave us a chance to strengthen those connections and spend time together as one team before a big year ahead.

One of the highlights was a case competition that put fellows in founders’ shoes. Each team had an hour to build a pitch for a fictional company, then adjust when new information changed the situation.

They had to make decisions with limited time and incomplete information, find the clearest story, and defend it when the questions started coming. It was a small taste of what founders deal with every day, and a useful perspective for our fellows to bring back to their work at FRV.

The winning team pitched a tool that helps regulated companies manage how employees use generative AI. They took a complicated problem and turned it into a clear, memorable pitch with a story that kept the room involved.

Congratulations to the five fellows who brought it to life: Sofia Mandri, Chaimae Slaoui, Noa Druker, Fraser Duncan, Ian Van Hulle

And thank you to everyone who made the weekend possible.

Looking forward to the year ahead with Team26.

09/10/2026

FRV backs the best founders on campus.

But our role goes beyond investing: we’re also a training engine for the next generation of investors and builders. And we believe in hiring from the talent we help develop.

Four years ago, Martin Chaperot joined FRV as a student. Since then, he’s been an Investment Associate, Investment Director and Director of Product, building much of the technology behind how FRV sources, evaluates and supports founders today. He knows the processes, the team, and probably a few too many Airtable automations and hacks ;)

So we couldn't be more excited to have Martin join FRV full-time as our Tech Lead.

His mandate is an ambitious one: help turn FRV into a technology-enabled venture lab and push us to the forefront of how technology can transform the way a VC firm operates. That means building tools that give our fellows more time to meet founders, ask better questions and make better investment decisions. But this doesn't stop here. Martin will help us rethink how technology can improve the entire firm: from sourcing, diligence and portfolio management to fund operations, data, reporting and the way we serve our LPs.

Our goal is to build a firm whose knowledge, reach and judgment compound over time; where every new cohort inherits the data, decisions, relationships and research of the ones before it; where repetitive work increasingly disappears; and where technology helps surface opportunities and insights that humans can act on.

We want FRV to be not only a place where the next generation learns venture capital, but also a lab for what the next generation of venture capital firms can look like. And we plan to build, test and share as we go. Follow along for the ride.

Welcome to the HQ team, Martin 🚀

09/09/2026

Venture capital opens doors. The problem is that most of those doors are only visible from inside business and finance programs.

Researchers in the social sciences, arts, and humanities are building work that solves real problems. Yet, very few of them ever hear about the funding, networks, and career paths that sit one conversation away.

On September 16, Front Row Ventures is hosting Turning Human Insight into Enterprise at District 3 Innovation Hub -- a panel built for researchers who have never seen themselves in a VC or startup room.

Panelists:
- Phil G. Joseph, Real Ventures (Masters in Kinesiology)
- Cindy Hovington, Ph.D., Curious Neuron (PhD in Neuroscience)
- Andrew Churchill, PhD, PresentBetter (PhD in Education)
- Viktoriya Manova, Promptd (PhD candidate in Clinical Psychology)

Moderated by Jeffrey To.

After the panel, we will close with representatives from QcSE - Quebec Scientific Entrepreneurship from V1 studios, District 3 Innovation, and Front Row Ventures walking through what a concrete next step looks like in either path, or both.

Wednesday, September 16 | 5:00 to 8:00 PM | District 3 Innovation Hub

Link in bio!

Pizza and drinks provided.

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Le capital de risque ouvre des portes. Le problème, c'est que la plupart de ces portes ne sont visibles que de l'intérieur des programmes de gestion et de finance.

Les chercheuses et chercheurs en sciences sociales, en arts et en sciences humaines mènent des travaux qui s'attaquent à de vrais problèmes. Pourtant, très peu d'entre eux entendent parler du financement, des réseaux et des parcours de carrière qui se trouvent à une seule conversation de distance.

Le 16 septembre, Front Row Ventures présente Turning Human Insight into Enterprise au District 3 Innovation Hub -- un panel conçu pour les chercheuses et chercheurs qui ne se sont jamais imaginés dans une salle de capital de risque ou de startup.

Panélistes:
- Phil G. Joseph, Real Ventures (maîtrise en kinésiologie)
- Cindy Hovington, Ph. D., Curious Neuron (doctorat en neurosciences)
- Andrew Churchill, PhD, PresentBetter (doctorat en éducation)
- Viktoriya Manova, Promptd (doctorante en psychologie clinique)

Animé par - Jeffrey To.

Après le panel, des représentantes et représentants de QcSE - Quebec Scientific Entrepreneurship, de V1 Studios, de District 3 Innovation et de Row Ventures viendront expliquer à quoi peut ressembler une prochaine étape concrète dans l'un ou l'autre de ces parcours---ou les deux.

Mercredi 16 septembre | 17 h à 20 h | District 3 Innovation Hub

Le lien dans la bio!

Pizza et boissons offertes.

09/08/2026

🎓 Fall recruitment is here! Front Row Ventures is recruiting Venture Scouts at select campuses in Quebec and Alberta.

Venture Scout is the entry role on our investment team - connecting FRV with ambitious founders, building campus relationships, and supporting early due diligence. It's the first step in a two-year pathway, with top performers invited to continue as Venture Analysts in Year 2.

At Front Row Ventures, students don't just learn about venture capital, they gain hands-on experience by helping run a national venture capital firm.

Swipe to see if your campus is on the list! If you're a student at Concordia, ÉTS, HEC, Polytechnique, or the University of Calgary and excited by technology, startups, and real responsibility, this is your chance to step into the .

🔗 Learn more about the role and apply here: frontrow.ventures/join-us
⏰ Applications close Friday, September 18th at 11:59 PM ET (reviewed on a rolling basis)
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🎓 Le recrutement d’automne est lancé! Front Row Ventures recrute des Venture Scouts sur certains campus au Québec et en Alberta.

Le rôle de Venture Scout est le poste d’entrée au sein de notre équipe d’investissement : vous créez des liens entre FRV et des fondateurs ambitieux, développez des relations sur votre campus et contribuez aux premières étapes de la diligence raisonnable. C’est aussi la première étape d’un parcours de deux ans, les meilleurs éléments étant invités à poursuivre comme Venture Analysts en deuxième année.

Chez Front Row Ventures, les étudiants ne font pas qu’apprendre les rouages du capital de risque : ils acquièrent une expérience concrète en contribuant activement aux activités d’une firme nationale de capital de risque.

Faites défiler pour voir si votre campus figure sur la liste! Si vous étudiez à Concordia, à l’ÉTS, à HEC Montréal, à Polytechnique Montréal ou à l’Université de Calgary, et que la technologie, les startups et les vraies responsabilités vous passionnent, c’est votre chance de rejoindre la .

🔗 Apprenez-en plus sur le rôle et postulez ici : frontrow.ventures/join-us
⏰ Les candidatures se terminent le vendredi 18 septembre à 23h59 HE (elles seront évaluées au fur et à mesure de leur réception).

09/03/2026

We are proud to announce our investment in Elev8 and Perform Inc. 🎉

Elev8 and Perform is on a mission to extend joint health longevity through early joint stress detection, personalized cellular joint recovery, and real-time biomechanical feedback. 🦵

Their smart wearable brace combines multi model sensors, targeted dosages for joint health cellular recovery , and live data-driven app to track, analyse, and preserve their mobility for longer. 🧬

Clinical rigor, elite athlete adoption, and a closed-loop personalization engine gives them a data and network moat versus short-term recovery tools. 🏅

We’re excited to support Elev8 and Perform Inc. as they build a clinically validated and scalable platform that shifts sports medicine from short-term relief to measurable, long-term joint preservation for athletes and aging adults. 🦴

🚀 Building something big? Let's talk.
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Nous sommes fiers d’annoncer notre investissement dans Elev8 and Perform Inc. 🎉

Elev8 and Perform a pour mission de prolonger la santé et la longévité des articulations grâce à la détection précoce du stress articulaire, à une récupération cellulaire personnalisée et à une rétroaction biomécanique en temps réel. 🦵

Leur orthèse intelligente et connectée combine des capteurs multimodaux, des dosages ciblés favorisant la récupération cellulaire des articulations et une application alimentée par des données en temps réel afin de suivre, d’analyser et de préserver la mobilité des utilisateurs plus longtemps. 🧬

Leur rigueur clinique, leur adoption par des athlètes de haut niveau et leur moteur de personnalisation en boucle fermée leur confèrent un avantage défendable en matière de données et de réseau face aux solutions axées sur la récupération à court terme. 🏅

Nous sommes ravis de soutenir Elev8 and Perform Inc. dans le développement d’une plateforme évolutive et validée cliniquement, qui fait passer la médecine sportive du soulagement à court terme à une préservation articulaire mesurable et durable, tant pour les athlètes que pour les adultes vieillissants. 🦴

🚀 Vous bâtissez quelque chose de grand? Parlons-en.
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Espace CDPQ
Montreal, QC

Site Web

http://frontrow.ventures/

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