Welcome to Season 2, episode 3 of Backstage Pass, the podcast by Front Row Ventures taking you behind the scenes into Canada’s tech ecosystem and its success stories.
Today, we’re happy to have Chris Arsenault as our guest.
Chris is the co-founder, President & CEO of Inovia Capital, one of Canada's largest Venture Capital firms with now over $2.2 billion dollars under management.
Chris currently serves as a director on the boards of AppDirect, Groupe Dynamite, Poka, Snapcommerce, LifeHouse; and, until recently, Lightspeed (which IPOed in 2020), and Luxury Retreats (acquired by Airbnb in 2017)
Prior to Inovia, Chris co-founded and launched a number of Software, Mobile and Consumer Internet technology start-up companies, including two spin-offs of telecom giants Microcell and Teleglobe.
His work in the mid-90’s as co-founder and CEO of SIT provided him with the opportunity to play an important part in the initial growth of the Internet.
As one of Netscape’s first external partners and integrators, SIT was sold to Ubizen of Belgium in 1999 for €42 million.
In this episode, we'll cover all of that and more - We deep dive into Chris' entrepreneurial journey before he became an investor.
And how a guy born on the northeastern tip of Quebec, almost 10 hours from Montreal, went on to build one of Canada's largest VC firms.
Without further a due, here’s, Chris Arsenault.