Citrus, Cannabinoids, and Canadian Capital

I’m at the Canadian National Angel Capital Organization (NACO) summit in Ottawa this week, which got me thinking about a conversation I had last summer at Startupfest, one of the better startup events in this part of the world, mostly because it’s not a “conference”. The conversation has aged well, and feels more relevant now than it did then, so I’m kicking off a Startupfest series on Decelerator over the next couple of months. Founders, investors, ecosystem builders… folks who are, for lack of a better phrase, just making shit happen. No hype cycle, no manifestos, just genuinely building.

First up: Kare Chemical Technologies.

Kare makes pharmaceutical-grade cannabinoids out of orange peels. Orange peels. It’s a patented catalytic process already being licensed to pharma manufacturers. The applications they’re most excited about aren’t recreational anything. They’re non-addictive alternatives to opioids and treatments for pediatric epilepsy. They recently closed a $750K pre-seed round with a very small team.

This is the kind of company I think gets undercounted right now. Not a vibes-based AI wrapper. Not a “we’re disrupting [established industry] with [LLM]” deck. Just deep, weird, hard chemistry being done by people who’ve been at it for years and have something real to show for it.

Which is also kind of why I’m at NACO. I’m less interested in what founders are pitching - that’s a known quantity - and more interested in what investors are actually thinking about right now. Not just the sectors they’re chasing (hard tech? health? climate?) but how they’re thinking about the job itself. What’s keeping them up. What they got wrong in the last cycle. How much of their thesis is conviction versus what the LPs will tolerate. And underneath all of that, a question I find genuinely interesting: where does Canadian capital think it’s going? There’s a real conversation happening up here about decoupling from US dependence… Sovereign wealth funds, domestic angel networks, less embarrassment about backing things on home soil like defence, which until recently was a negative signal and now everyone is “in defence”… and I want to know if the people writing cheques believe it or are just nodding politely on panels.

In the meantime: orange peels. Enjoy.