Earlier this year, Alberta surpassed British Columbia for the No. 3 spot when it comes to total venture-capital activity. The second quarter of 2024 saw nearly $100 million more in activity than our neighbour to the west.
For Christiana Manzocco, that represents a major victory for the province’s innovation sector.
“The venture capital industry as it stands right now, that’s a win,” she says from her 15th floor downtown office. “It’s kind of a 10-year overnight success story. It’s been slow and steady work of a lot of different people in that ecosystem, all collaborating when they could be competing.”
Manzocco, from Windsor, Ontario, moved to Alberta when she was 17 to go to the University of Calgary. From there, she’s worked around the world — coming back to Alberta, then heading out again. Before her most recent move back to Edmonton, she worked in Lisbon for Dutch start-up, Dealroom.co, a pan-European project that she believed in. But, she wanted to get out of sales and instead be a difference maker in the tech space.
“I’ve lived in a lot of different places, but I always seem to come back to Alberta. Living in Lisbon was great, the ecosystem there was very welcoming, nice people. But what we have here in Alberta, and Edmonton specifically, you can’t replicate anywhere else in the world.”
As the director of investments for AEC, Manzocco works with a team that, together, bridges investors with start-ups. AEC is a provincial crown corporation that does not invest directly into start-ups, but instead invests in venture-capital funds. The venture capitalists pick the companies they want to support, and are expected to set up shop in Alberta.
“We’re funding the funds that then fund the start-ups,” she explains.
She says that, in other parts of the world, tech communities tend to be very insular. There are gatekeepers. It’s kind of like high school, where the cool kids sit in one corner of the cafeteria, judging everyone else. But, she says Alberta is “not at all like that — the ecosystem is extremely welcoming.” And Manzocco wants more global investors to know that the province is open for business.
This article appears in the Nov/Dec 2024 issue of Edify
