HAVING established itself as a go-to market for junior miners, marijuana stocks and the odd Mahjong company, a small Canadian exchange now wants to lure tech startups.
”I would love to see more technology companies,” Richard Carleton, 57, chief executive officer of the Canadian Securities Exchange, said in an interview at Bloomberg’s Toronto office.
“But one of the challenges that we’ve got is those kids all watch Silicon Valley, they read all those books, and they think the VC world is the model, that’s how tech companies grow.”
Carleton’s ideal CSE would be like the NASDAQ in the 1970s, rich with patent owners the world hasn’t yet heard of. That won’t be easy: only two Canadian technology firms have raised more than C$100mil (RM326mil) through initial public offerings in the past three years, Shopify Inc. in 2015 and Kinaxis Inc. in 2014.
Technology startup companies won’t easily give up the relative safety of private capital – “contacts, mentorship, knowhow and experience” – for the rough-and-tumble world of public markets, said Mike Woollatt, chief executive of the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association.
Private is patient
”They call private capital…