Dominic Lau

Dominic Lau is a Partner at Ripple Ventures, a Toronto-founded early-stage venture firm where he leads investments and now heads the firm's West Coast office in Vancouver. He began his career in accounting and finance — including time at KPMG — before pivoting into the startup ecosystem, where he mentored student founders through the DMZ Sandbox Basecamp program and freelanced for early-stage startups and emerging fund managers. He launched his venture career with EVP, helping build the University of Waterloo Student Venture Fund, and was a Waterloo student when he first reached out about a role at Ripple.

Lau joined Ripple Ventures in 2018 as one of the firm's first employees — famously the only applicant to Ripple's first job posting who tracked down founder Matt Cohen's phone number and called him directly to make his case. Over the following years he was promoted from Associate to Principal and, in 2022, to Partner, becoming the firm's first investor at partner level outside the founder. By the time of his partner promotion he had worked alongside Cohen for nearly five years and helped deploy two full fund cycles, backing more than 20 companies.

In late 2023, Lau relocated from Toronto to Vancouver, opening Ripple's first West Coast office (the firm opened its Vancouver location on November 1, 2023) as part of a "coast-to-coast" strategy heading into Fund III. Fund III, anchored by the Royal Bank of Canada and the federal government's Venture Capital Catalyst Initiative through BDC Capital (including a $7.5M VCCI commitment), continues Ripple's pre-seed B2B SaaS focus and has backed roughly 20 companies since late 2022.

Beyond direct investing, Lau is the founder of the RippleX Fellowship — a 12-week, remote, extracurricular program that teaches students startup-building and investing fundamentals. It has run 11+ cohorts (~25 fellows each), reached 1,000+ students across 60 universities and 25 countries, maintained 50%+ gender diversity and ~90% BIPOC representation, and seen alumni collectively raise over $50M and ~25 graduates placed into VC roles. It is described as one of Canada's largest student founder and VC networks.

• Invests at true pre-seed and seed — "inception to first revenue" — with an operators-first, post-investment support model.
• Check sizes of ~$250K–$750K in Fund III for pre-seed rounds.
• Focuses on B2B software: systems of record, workflow-automation tools, and "transitory software enabling frontier technology adoption," plus AI healthcare, commerce operations, construction trade credit, and regulatory compliance.
• Has publicly framed his coverage as leading "pre-seed and seed stage investments into enterprise software, developer tools, and web3 infra companies."
• Strong conviction on founder access and grit — his own origin story (cold-calling the founder to win the job) reflects the kind of resourcefulness he values.
• Mission-driven angle via RippleX: "empower underrepresented student founders and aspiring VCs across the world," motivated by "the struggles that every student out there faces when it comes to learning and gaining access to industry experts."