Brian Hunter

Brian Hunter has more than 35 years of experience providing debt and equity financing to privately- and publicly-held businesses in Southern Ontario. He began his career with Roynat Capital, Canada's leading private merchant bank, where he rose to Director and District Manager of the Kitchener office, helping hundreds of entrepreneurs meet their long-term capital needs. He earned both his BA in Economics and his MBA from the Ivey Business School at the University of Western Ontario.

In 2009, Hunter co-founded NorthSpring Capital Partners with Sol Algranti. Headquartered in Cambridge, Ontario, NorthSpring operates as a venture and private-equity fund dedicated to "the next generation of great Canadian companies," providing risk capital to both traditional-industry firms and early-stage technology startups. Hunter serves as the firm's President. He conducts his angel-stage investing under the North Innovation Fund banner ([hidden]) and is an active member of the Golden Triangle Angel Network (GTAN), through which NorthSpring co-invests in seed and Series A deals across the Toronto–Waterloo corridor.

Hunter's angel leadership earned him GTAN's Angel of the Year award in 2017, presented at the network's 6th annual Pauli Awards in Kitchener, in recognition of his active role leading due diligence and closing successful investments. Beyond investing, he is a long-serving community leader: a 20-year member of the Kitchener-Conestoga Rotary Club (including a term as President and chairing fundraising drives that raised roughly $1 million), for which he was named a Paul Harris Fellow in 2014.

• Stage: Seed and Series A rounds for tech startups, plus later growth/PE deals for revenue-generating SMEs.
• Check size: NorthSpring typically writes ~$250K–$1M; angel-syndicate checks via GTAN are smaller and often co-invested alongside other angels.
• Sectors: Robotics, medtech/life sciences, AI, and SaaS on the tech side; manufacturing and distribution on the traditional-industry side.
• Geography: Strong regional bias to the Toronto–Waterloo corridor and Southern Ontario — NorthSpring's PE mandate explicitly targets companies "within a two-hour drive of Cambridge, Ontario."
• What makes him say yes: A hands-on, diligence-driven investor. In his own words: *"One of the things I do every morning is I read the press releases that come out, just scan them, and usually every day there's some press release that some company issued that relates to a client that I've got an investment in."* He favors founders he can actively support and monitor closely post-investment.