Impression Ventures has held a final close of its second fund, Impression Ventures Fund II, with over $30 million in committed capital. Impression Ventures Fund II held an initial close in August 2016 with $20 million committed capital.
Maor Amar, formerly with BMO Capital Markets and UBS Investment Bank, has joined Impression Ventures as Managing Partner. Maor will be based out of Montreal.
Geoff Belsher, CIBC’s former Co-Head of Wholesale Banking and James Estey, former CEO of UBS Canada have agreed to join as advisors.
Impression Ventures Fund II focuses on investing and leading deals in financial technology companies, raising a late seed (C$3M) to early Series A round (C$6M) and looking to take their beta or MVP product to market locally with a long-term goal of taking the product globally.
Impression Ventures II’s Limited partners include Canadian financial institutions, family offices and entrepreneurs as well as almost two dozen current and former senior executives from Canada’s leading banks and financial institutions. Impressions Limited Partners also include a number of US and European institutions and family offices with an interest in the global fintech space.
“We are extremely proud to have assembled what we believe is the best in class group of Limited Partners within the Canadian VC Fintech space,” said Christian Lassonde, founder and Managing Partner.
“While we are seeing very strong deal flow from all of Canada’s major cities, Montreal’s burgeoning fintech scene is growing rapidly and having a presence here allows us to move decisively when opportunities arise,” said Amar.
Impression Ventures has already executed on a number of deals out of this new fund and has a full pipeline of opportunities ranging from modernizing aging financial infrastructure, to taking advantage of the latest Artificial Intelligence development, to meaningfully improve the performance of established Financial Institutions. The fund will look to deploy the committed capital over the next 36 months.
Impression Ventures was founded in 2013 by Lassonde and Bryan Kerdman.