Lise Birikundavyi: Principal of Black Innovation Capital

With Black Innovation Capital, you are the first Black woman to manage an institutionally backed venture fund in Canada. What was the journey like for you to reach this place?

It was quite a nonconventional journey, a journey of trying to be fearless to reach your goals and get a certain type of exposure. I really went out of my way to try to get the impact I wanted to create [and] have the skill set that I wanted to have. From the beginning, for example, I wanted to be a good investor for emerging markets. I decided to move and do a degree in China because I wanted to have that exposure, that understanding. Then when I was on my first maternity leave, I moved to Ghana to be an impact investor there.

I decided to join tech start-ups because I wanted to have an understanding of what it is to be an entrepreneur as well — you cannot understand the path of someone unless you have walked in their shoes. I then also took charge of an impact finance portfolio in Cote d’Ivoire.

Learning has always been at the centre of everything I was doing because I wanted to get better at my job and be unafraid of reaching out to people that I admired and finding ways to collaborate with them. That opened doors all along, I think, and that basically allowed me to get the opportunity to meet with Isaac. We saw eye-to-eye when we met, and we decided to co-create Black Innovation Capital together.

How does Black Innovation Capital aim to create a financially inclusive space for under-represented entrepreneurs?

Because Black Innovation Capital is a small fund [of $10 million], our objective right now is to create a business case for investing in ventures that sometimes look a bit different than what venture capitalists used to look at. People usually invest in their own network.

It’s about telling them if you invest outside of your network [into] somebody who doesn’t exactly speak the same quote-unquote language as you, you can still make that good financial return.

[We are focused on] creating more opportunities for investors from Black communities to get financing from others, but [also] creating those role models. If you are able to create success stories, [they] usually have a ripple effect on all the different communities — that’s really our goal. [Also, if] we’ll collaborate, [that] contributes to the creation of this space [where] usually entrepreneurs that are successful also reinvest in their own community. So, it becomes an investment that never stops investing, to a certain extent.

Aun Abbott | Contributing Writer

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