Why Sitting Around and Waiting for an Exit in VC Isn’t Enough: Interview With Inovia Capital’s Chris Arsenault

The Sohn conferences went to Montreal for the first time this year, bringing with them a long list of fabulous Canada-based speakers. Among them was Chris Arsenault of Canada-anchored venture capital firm Inovia Capital. Hedge Fund Alpha scored an interview with Arsenault, who spoke about how he got into VC - and why he doesn’t just sit around and wait for an exit to happen.

Chris Arsenault on Sohn Montreal

Arsenault described the Sohn conferences as "the Super Bowl of the financial world."

"I think the fact that it crosses through venture, hedge funds to public investors… it's one of the main events," he said. "It's global. It's the first time in Montreal, which is amazing. I’m very happy because it also brings in new faces and new speakers and presentations. Because Sohn basically captures… where the world is going from an investment perspective."

Converium Capital’s Aaron Stern, who served on the host committee for the 2025 Sohn Montreal Conference, recruited Arsenault to speak at the conference.

Background on Chris Arsenault

Arsenault is a tech entrepreneur with roots in the 1990s, so he saw the birth of venture capital across Canada, falling into VC via his entrepreneurial roots in technology because people wanted to invest in the same deals he was looking at — the next generation of companies that would potentially grow into category leaders.

The effort started in mid-2000 and came together as Arsenault’s first fund in 2007. Inovia is the largest full-stack fund in Canada, with investments at the discovery, venture and growth stages.

"So we have one firm, three investment teams, three investment categories," Arsenault added. "We're managing US$2.5 billion of active capital at work, and an additional $1.2 billion of GP/LP co-invest, which are basically capital from our LPs that we put to work into our portfolio companies over and beyond our fund investments."

Inovia is headquartered in Montreal with offices across Canada, including in Waterloo, Toronto, and Calgary and Vancouver on the West Coast. The firm also has a presence in San Francisco and an office in London, with a team of 60 people spread across all these offices, all doing software venture investments in all three stages of companies’ growth.

Tapping into Netscape

Growing up in a small village of about 2,800 people on the Gaspe Coast, Arsenault came from an entrepreneurial family. He said everyone always created their own jobs and built their own companies, so he built his own technology company.

"Netscape was the first browser to come to the market with that visual interface to the internet," Arsenault explained. "I'm the guy who sat down with Mark Andreessen and talked to him about all of the other languages other than English. And Mark basically said, ‘The U.S. is the market, so if you want to translate the software and do something elsewhere, fine.’ So I ended up having the source code of Netscape, translating it or localizing it into seven different languages, and it just went global, Canada, then Europe."