Chris Arsenault and the art of keeping doors open

Chris Arsenault helped build a company that worked with Netscape when getting onto the internet was still a technical adventure. Years later, he would describe his early entrepreneurial experience as both a success and a failure. The business had given him a career. It had also shown him how much a young founder could miss without experienced people nearby. That awkward combination has proved more useful to his investing than a tidy victory story would have been.

His early company was SIT. As its founder and CEO in the mid-1990s, Arsenault worked in the emerging internet business, with security products and dial-up technology. SIT became one of Netscape’s early external partners and integrators; its technology found a place in Netscape deployments. A company biography records its sale to Belgium’s Ubizen in 1999. Before venture capital became his occupation, software, customers and the task of building a business had already been his education.

That history gives his later career a particular shape. The investor has occupied the seat from which an investor’s advice is received. An elegant financing proposal still has to survive contact with a product and a customer. Arsenault’s experience began at that less elegant end of the transaction.

The founder he remembers being

In a 2018 conversation, Arsenault returned to the absence of mentors when he built his first software company. He recognised something of his younger self in the entrepreneurs he now backed. With hindsight, he believed he could have done better. Mentorship entered his own life later, and he encouraged it for the CEOs and executive teams around him.

He also offered a mischievously domestic way of thinking about venture capital: the relationship with an investor could last longer than a marriage. Anyone selecting a partner for the next several years might sensibly ask questions beyond the size of the cheque. Does this person understand the business? Can they contribute relationships and experience? Will they be useful when the plan changes?

The point is plain enough to be overlooked. Founders need confidence to recruit people and attract money. They also need someone who can challenge that confidence without merely puncturing it. Arsenault’s account of his own beginnings allows both ideas to sit together. Success supplies experience; the recollection of what could have gone better supplies a reason to share it.

“Not panicking is rule number one”

Chris Arsenault, 2018

A firm with its own startup problem

Arsenault joined MSBi Capital in 2002. Inovia followed in 2007, with Arsenault as a co-founder. The transition had the financial suspense familiar to the entrepreneurs it would eventually fund. François Gauvin, who joined as partner and CFO that year, later recalled that the firm could not afford to pay him unless its fundraise succeeded. The fund closed that December with C$112 million in commitments, and the firm took the Inovia Capital name.

There is something pleasingly unceremonious about a venture firm having to make its own payroll conditional on raising capital. Before it could advise other businesses about financing risk, it had a version of that risk sitting in its own office.

Gauvin’s later account traces an organisation changing with its market: a more focused information technology strategy, a co-investment programme, growth funds and eventually a continuation fund. The institution had to evolve alongside the businesses it backed. A firm set up to meet one stage of a company’s life would need new capabilities if it intended to accompany the next.

Bring the product. Spare the theatre.

Asked in 2013 how immigrant entrepreneurs should approach Inovia, Arsenault put relationships and evidence near the front of the queue. An introduction through a portfolio company, co-investor or someone the firm knew could help. So could a concise account of the product and relevant numbers showing momentum.

His preferred meeting sounded rather more conversational than ceremonial. Slides could be useful beforehand, but a demonstration of the product carried more weight. Customer information mattered more than general market research. His compact description remains a useful antidote to the over-rehearsed pitch: “Our best meetings take the form of a conversation rather than a formal pitch.”

That preference fits an operator’s curiosity. What does the software actually do? Who uses it? What happens when the customer tries it? A presentation can organise these answers, but it cannot manufacture them. There is a little mercy for the founder in this approach, too. A useful meeting need not depend on delivering every sentence with the timing of a stage actor. It needs something worth discussing.

The company gets bigger. So must the advice.

In 2018, Inovia brought in Patrick Pichette, formerly Google’s CFO, and Dennis Kavelman, formerly CFO and COO at RIM-BlackBerry. Arsenault announced the additions alongside plans for a London office and larger teams in San Francisco, Montreal and Toronto. The firm was preparing to work across more of a company’s life, including the demanding period when growth makes familiar routines inadequate.

The recruits had experience inside organisations whose operations were considerably larger than an early startup’s. Their arrival made Arsenault’s argument about mentorship concrete. A founder hiring internationally, considering an acquisition or rebuilding a management team needs advice suited to those decisions.

At the 2018 CEO gatherings, scaling leadership itself became part of the conversation. Guests included Mila’s Yoshua Bengio and Valerie Pisano, and Cirque du Soleil’s Jonathan Tétrault. Those connections brought research, technology and creative business into the same discussion. The variety mattered: a company can outgrow its original habits in more than one industry. Growth does not politely wait for a founder to finish learning the previous job.

Seven years between a meeting and a market

Lightspeed offers a way to see the time involved. Inovia first met the Montreal company in April 2012. It led a Series B in July 2013, when Arsenault joined the board as an observer. A Series C alongside Accel followed in 2014, then participation in the Series D in 2015. In March 2019, Lightspeed listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. A New York Stock Exchange listing followed in September 2020.

The dates resist the temptation to compress company building into a funding announcement and a celebratory photograph. Between the first meeting and the Toronto listing lay nearly seven years. Each round addressed a different moment in the business, while the work continued between them.

Inovia’s growth strategy gave that longer relationship a financing structure. Its first growth fund, announced in early 2019, was US$400 million. In March 2021, Arsenault announced a US$450 million second growth fund. He described a problem familiar to Canadian and European companies: when later-stage talent and capital were difficult to obtain, founders could choose an early sale. More resources could make continued growth from home a practical option.

An exit with more than one door

Arsenault’s recurring word for this is optionality. In his April 2024 essay on the subject, he argued for conversations about possible outcomes well before a company needed to act. A founder’s ambitions and a fund’s timetable can diverge. Talking early gives both sides time to prepare.

Poka supplied a specific example. Before its acquisition by IFS in 2023, the company had cash, interested buyers and the possibility of raising growth capital. Arsenault wrote that discussions with Alexandre Leclerc and Antoine Bisson had begun two years before the acquisition. The founders could examine alternatives while they still had alternatives.

The same essay described Inovia’s 2021 continuation fund as a way to connect older funds with companies that needed more time to grow. An investor could obtain liquidity without requiring the whole company to change ownership. These arrangements are less photogenic than an opening bell, but their purpose is considerable. A deadline should not automatically become a company’s destiny.

Optionality asks for preparation while circumstances still allow it. It makes the apparently distant conversation part of the current job. The reward is room to decide, rather than the thrill of improvising at the last possible moment.

Canada needs customers, too

By May 2026, Arsenault was directing a related argument at Canada itself. Speaking to the Canadian Club of Montreal, he described his origins in Bonaventure, in Quebec’s Gaspé region, and an early encounter with a TRS-80 computer. His enthusiasm for technology had become a concern about where the resulting businesses could grow.

The challenge he identified was adoption. Researchers and entrepreneurs needed domestic organisations willing to use what they built. He wanted governments and large enterprises to become customers for Canadian innovation, and he tied that demand to companies creating jobs and intellectual property at home while competing internationally.

A fund can support a company’s development. Customers give it something else: evidence that its work belongs in the market. Arsenault’s appeal takes the discussion beyond venture investors to the people making purchasing decisions. The future of a technology business can depend on who is prepared to sign the first substantial contract.

His public appearances continued into the third quarter of 2026, including a fireside conversation with Cohere’s Aidan Gomez at the Canadian Global Growth Forum in Toronto. The subjects have changed since dial-up software. The concern with turning technical possibility into a functioning business has stayed recognisable.

A catalyst, still close to the work

On his personal profile, Arsenault describes enjoying the role of catalyst for other technology founders. It is a useful word for the career he has built. Inovia’s current biography lists him as a growth partner in Montreal, with board roles at AppDirect, Super.com and Talent.com, and membership in the C100 network connecting Canadian technology with Silicon Valley.

His outlook has also found an outlet in writing, from an earlier personal blog to essays on company growth and exits. At SAAS NORTH in 2024, discussing Canadian software, he supplied a line that allows confidence and impatience to coexist: “Canada is hitting above its weight. It doesn’t always feel like that.”

The interesting feature of Arsenault’s story is how often it comes back to the conditions around a founder. Experienced colleagues. A customer willing to try the product. Financing that can follow growth. An ownership arrangement that permits more time. None makes the work easy. Each can make a decision possible.

A young entrepreneur once discovered how useful better advice might have been. The investor he became has spent years arranging for other founders to encounter it earlier. The doors stay open because somebody does the work before they need to be opened.