Peter-Paul Van Hoeken missed the SeaBus. That was inconvenient for his commute and rather useful for his story. Waiting to get from downtown Vancouver to North Vancouver, he went for a drink. At the bar, he noticed a coaster belonging to a craft brewery that had recently raised capital through FrontFundr, the investment platform he had founded.
The bartender liked the brewery. He also liked its fundraising idea. There was a website called FrontFundr, he explained, where someone like him could invest. He was considering putting in some money. Van Hoeken said he had heard of it, then produced his business card. They laughed. A customer had just explained the founder’s business to the founder. The sales department could have taken the evening off.
The episode offers a small, unusually concrete picture of his ambition. A person serving a beer was contemplating owning a piece of the business that made it. The investment conversation had escaped the boardroom and arrived at the bar. For Van Hoeken, who had spent years inside banks, that change of venue was the point.
The banker who wanted to stay for the ending
His route to that counter began in the Netherlands. He studied at Erasmus University Rotterdam, earning a master’s degree in economics and finance. Before finishing his studies, he worked at a boutique consultancy with midsized growth companies. Entrepreneurship was already within view, even while a career at a large bank remained attractive.
His banking career included ABN AMRO and Royal Bank of Scotland. Corporate strategy, commercial banking and investment banking gave him experience of the machinery that moves money. He has described finance’s original appeal in practical terms: its connection to the real economy. Over time, he became more critical of the industry’s opacity and the concentration of its benefits.
In 2010, he moved with his wife and two daughters to Vancouver. Working with young Canadian companies exposed him to fundraising from the other side of the desk. Here were businesses seeking money, and here was a process still heavily dependent on introductions to a relatively small investor pool. His next venture would put his banking experience to work on that problem.
There is a revealing continuity in this career. Consulting introduced him to growing businesses; banking taught him how capital was organized; helping founders in Canada showed him who struggled to obtain it. The sequence helps explain why his answer involved both an investment business and a website. He knew enough about each side to see the distance between them.
Two queues, one door
The underlying company, Silver Maple Ventures, was created in 2013. FrontFundr’s public platform launched in May 2015. Those dates describe different steps: establishing the business and making its technology available. The distinction matters in a venture where the legal ability to distribute securities was as necessary as the ability to display a campaign online.
An Ivey Business School profile describes the founding problem as a mismatch. Small startups had trouble raising equity. Small investors were shut out of private markets. Van Hoeken’s proposition joined those two complaints. A company could reach beyond its usual funding contacts; someone outside the customary investment circles could consider a stake in a private business.
The platform operates as an exempt market dealer. Its business sits inside the Canadian securities system, using applicable prospectus exemptions to distribute private investments. The pleasingly simple idea of a crowd helping a company grow therefore comes with less photogenic companions: disclosure, registration and an investment process. They do not make especially good coasters. They make the proposition workable.
FrontFundr describes the crowd as a company’s customers, social networks and the public. It also describes benefits beyond the money raised: shareholders may become repeat customers, introduce expertise and provide feedback. Those are possibilities rather than automatic results. Still, they explain why Van Hoeken keeps returning to the relationship between a company and the people already interested in its success.
- 2010Moves to Vancouver
- 2013Creates Silver Maple Ventures
- 2015Public platform launches
- 2025Ten-year platform anniversary
A platform takes its own advice
FrontFundr needed capital too. By early 2017, it had raised $650,000 through its own platform from 200 investors. The reported funding followed work helping nine other Canadian companies raise money. Van Hoeken had become a customer of the system he was selling, with a company to explain and a public to persuade.
At the time, he described the task as building a market. Investors needed to understand that the opportunity existed, then understand the process for participating. The company had grown from three people to a reported 13 employees, including 10 full-time staff. Its own raise would support expansion, marketing and further investment in the platform.
By February 2019, FrontFundr was launching its third campaign for itself. Van Hoeken called using the platform “drink our own whiskey.” The minimum for that particular campaign was $500. The expression has the advantage of making corporate finance sound briefly hospitable. It also captures a useful test: the company asking others to trust a process had to experience that process itself.
He offered founders a blunt qualification: “you’re not outsourcing your funding to us.” A platform could provide a route to investors, but the company still had to do the work of explaining its business and mobilizing interest. The distinction gives his pitch some ballast. Putting a fundraising campaign online does not make the founder’s responsibility disappear.
“you’re not outsourcing your funding to us.”Peter-Paul Van Hoeken, 2019
The crowd still needs a considered decision
Van Hoeken’s enthusiasm for access comes with an insistence on investor understanding. In a later conversation about raising capital in Canada and the United States, he explained FrontFundr’s suitability work: the platform considers an investor’s circumstances, experience and tolerance for risk when assessing a proposed investment. His example involved someone proposing to commit a large proportion of their available assets to one company.
That example makes the meaning of access more precise. Opening a market creates an opportunity to consider an investment. It cannot guarantee the business will succeed or that the investment is appropriate for every person. In his account, the dealer’s role includes helping investors understand the decision and helping companies navigate the process.
The language of a customer becoming a co-owner is attractive because it is easy to picture. The language of concentrated exposure is less sociable. Both belong in this story. A company people love can still face business problems, and enthusiasm for a product is only one part of assessing an investment. Van Hoeken’s regulated model acknowledges that gap.
His 2026 writing suggests that this concern continues. An April article was titled “Private markets need better access, not just more of it.” Its public introduction emphasized structure, liquidity and risk alongside wider participation. The title places a condition on the expansion he has spent years advocating. More people entering the room raises the importance of what they understand once inside.
A decade measured in participation
In June 2025, FrontFundr celebrated its tenth anniversary in Toronto. Van Hoeken sat down with angel investor Joe Canavan to discuss investing and the people behind businesses. A separate panel brought together Blossom’s Maxwell Nicholson, HOVR’s Christian Alicpala and FrontFundr’s Trieste Reading, moderated by Fasken’s Kate Grant. The evening gave the founder’s argument several voices.
The celebration reported 269 campaigns and more than $285 million raised. Peggy Van de Plassche, who had invested in FrontFundr and served on its board, wrote about attending the anniversary at OneEleven. Her account adds a connection across the table: someone who had backed the platform itself was there to consider the market it had helped build.
The company’s fiscal 2025 results supplied a later snapshot. FrontFundr reported $81.4 million in investment volume and 5,729 transactions for the year ending September 30. It counted 58,335 registered users and 20,148 active investors. Those categories describe different kinds of participation; an account registration and a completed investment are different events.
Revenue was reported at $1.85 million, while the EBITDA loss narrowed to $45,000. That last figure belongs beside the growth figures. Connecting investors and companies is also a business that must pay for its operations. The founder’s mission has a commercial test, just as the companies using his platform do. The money passing through a marketplace is separate from the money the marketplace earns.
Who gets to own the next chapter?
Van Hoeken’s examples tend to move from finance toward familiar activities. Watching a television investment show prompted the thought that ordinary Canadians could participate in backing businesses too. In a Toronto interview, he singled out Key Living, a company exploring a different approach to homeownership that had raised capital through FrontFundr. The recurring interest is participation in things people can recognize.
He has also made public conversation part of the work. In 2021, FrontFundr announced Coffee & Crowd, an Instagram series in which he would discuss investment crowdfunding. An early session paired him with investors Darylle Johnson and Lyle Notice. Questions could flow toward the founder as well as away from him; explaining the market was part of operating it.
By June 2026, his published question was “Who Will Own Canada’s Future?” The introduction argued for broadening ownership as an innovation priority. In April, he had also announced plans to join the Startup Canada Tour in Halifax, emphasizing clarity about funding paths and investor alignment. His focus had expanded from getting a transaction online to the quality of the relationships around it.
That is why the bartender remains such a useful character in Van Hoeken’s story. A potential investor had a reason to care about a business before he had a reason to study its securities. FrontFundr offered a place for the next conversation. Whether it ended in an investment would require more questions. The founder’s achievement was making that conversation possible at all.