Owen Matthews is probably a heck of a Scrabble player. Fifteen years ago, he founded the Alacrity Foundation in Victoria (the definition of alacrity: cheerful readiness, enthusiasm and speed). Then, in 2022, he launched the Emend Vision Fund, which invests in early-stage companies working to remedy – or ē.mend – some of the world’s most pressing environmental issues.
“It’s a very lovely, albeit obscure, English word,” he says, giving a short explanation of emend’s etymology before transitioning to the topic he actually wants to discuss: how environmental, social and governance (ESG) demands will ultimately lead to industrial transformation on a massive scale.
But will enterprising families steering traditional industries such as energy, mining, steel, agriculture and forestry be ready to lead the way through innovation and capitalize on these prospects? What’s more, how can other wealthy families fund businesses committed to global impact and not miss out?
“We’re talking about every industry under enormous pressure to change – and it’s a massive opportunity,” says Matthews. “Really, it’s the largest economic mobilization since the Second World War.”
“He tasked me with building a portfolio out on the West Coast,” Matthews says of his father, a serial high-tech entrepreneur who made his fortune with the telecom firms Mitel and Newbridge Networks. “I was supposed to invest in technology companies, and he didn’t offer up any investment dollars. He was just like, ‘Yeah, you work it out.’”
Matthews has a history of creating opportunities. While in university, he founded a software company that became publicly listed on Nasdaq. But it wasn’t until he joined his family’s investment firm, Wesley Clover International, based in Ottawa, that he found his calling. It came when his dad, business magnate Sir Terry Matthews, gave him a mission.
Owen Matthews pulled it off by following his interest in mentoring young, high-tech firms in Canada and built the Alacrity Foundation, a not-for-profit that initially used government grants to help new university graduates turn their tech ideas into successful companies.
Today, the organization offers everything from seed-stage growth programs to ESG training. It has built a venture portfolio that has attracted some $360 million in investment funding and created more than a billion dollars in value, while giving young companies custom guidance and networking opportunities.
But by 2016, creating Canadian companies, investing in them and watching them grow wasn’t enough.
With Alacrity offices now in the U.K., France, Turkey, India and Mexico, the team realized there was a need for more cleantech solutions for large industrial companies. Environmental regulations and customer demand are set to spark a mass upgrade of capital expenditures by 2050, according to McKinsey.
“The biggest thing we learned is that there just isn’t enough early-stage capital for these companies in Canada,” says Richard Egli, Alacrity CEO and Emend managing partner. While other funds are available for software-as-a-service (SaaS) startups, information and communications technology (ICT) businesses and later-stage enterprises, “on the cleantech side, it just wasn’t there.”
Targeting high-potential technologies
Matthews decided to remedy the situation by creating a fund specifically for seed and Series A investing. Enter the Emend Vision Fund, which tasks itself with investing in high-potential “technologies that heal the planet.”
If investing in, say, green energy is today’s new power move, then the Emend Vision Fund is there to help ultra-high-net-worth investors flip the switch – and eventually reap the financial rewards.
Except seed investing is often seen as risky. For every success story, dozens of early-stage companies falter. Maybe the team has compatibility issues, the technology fizzles or they struggle to entice buyers – effective marketing is rarely an engineer’s strength.
But the people behind Emend are there to guide bright new entrepreneurs over those hurdles.
Egli says, “We are operators, too. We are hands-on, high-tech investors who work very closely with our companies. We’re not passive, silent partners that just cut a cheque, sit there and wait for something to happen.” He points out that Emend has played a part in early-stage strategies at the board level and in finance, marketing and sales.
Then there’s the access to Matthews’s network of corporations through his decades of working with his family office. By learning about industry challenges on the cleantech side, the team has a deep understanding of which of their startups may be able to address them.
It’s a “market first” approach that Matthews’s father has long used, too.
More from Owen Matthews: The tech entrepreneur and investor discusses why ESG investing is a future to bank on – and what family offices wishing to be a part it need to know. Read about it in Financial Pipeline.
“We try to offset some of the risk by identifying companies with market opportunities so that everybody will have customers waiting,” says Todd Tessier, CFO and finance partner for Emend. He points to one startup that’s building innovative methane detectors at a fraction of the cost of others on the market. With new rules in effect for oil and gas companies to monitor harmful leaks, their solution is literally tailor-made for the task.
Aiming to partner with other families
Emend is now looking for other families of wealth to partner with. Younger, eco-savvy family members from the next generation are the obvious way in, but parents and grandparents are intrigued, too.
Owen Matthews says, “We’re turning to the senior generation and saying, ‘If you don’t change, your business is going to be under a great deal of pressure and you won’t be as competitive.’”
He says they end up being “really encouraging to both sides. The senior generation wants the younger generation involved in the business. The younger generation wants to change things. Now they can get involved, but they’re doing it in a responsible way and making the business more successful.”
Shane DeGroote, whose Ontario-based family built the transportation company Laidlaw Inc., has done everything from working as an outdoor adventure guide to funding the first homeless outreach program in Squamish, B.C. Not only does he have serious ESG cred, he’s also a board observer for Forthlane Partners in Toronto and is now running his own family office.
When he first met the Emend team, he says, their values – and big-picture view – aligned with his. He points to farmers and other businesses in California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona who will be at risk as rivers dry and dams generate less power.
“Being able to understand that is crucially important if you’re thinking about an investment time horizon of 10 years-plus,” he says, explaining it took only a couple of months before he decided to invest in the Emend Fund. Usually a self-described risk-adverse investor, he wanted in because the team already had a track record of success in cleantech.
Could philanthropy do the job? Sure, but …
But why not simply turn to philanthropy to clean up the planet and right social wrongs?
There’s nothing wrong with that, says Matthews, but investing can create larger successes through impact and leverage. A million-dollar seed investment could eventually snowball into hundreds of jobs, create a scalable green solution and make a pile of money for investors.
“Traditionally, a good family would be philanthropic and give money away, and I applaud that behaviour,” he says. “However, I feel the biggest impact I can possibly make is to take all of my skills, experience, connections and money, and apply them to something that will not just solve the problem, but have an enormous leveraging effect.”
Now, he just has to keep connecting with other industrial families and get the word out.
More about the Emend Vision Fund
For more information about the Emend Vision Fund, please click here. To connect with a member of the Emend team, contact Todd Tessier at todd@emendfund.com.
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