Chima Ubani: I'm Chima Ubani, Chair of Osler's Venture Fund Formation Group and a partner in Osler's Emerging and High Growth Companies Group. I'm pleased to welcome Dion Madsen from Amplitude Ventures for this quick chat today. With a career that has spanned venture capital and corporate innovation, Dion has more than 25 years of experience working with innovative startups and scaling groundbreaking companies. As a managing partner and co-founder of Amplitude Ventures, he has been instrumental in creating and growing the Amplitude platform. Prior to founding Amplitude, Dion founded or led investment activities at BDC Capital's Healthcare Venture Fund, Unilever's Corporate Venture Fund and Physic Ventures, and occupied numerous other roles in the investment and innovation ecosystem. And lastly, but certainly not least, Dion's a founding member of C100 and deeply committed to fostering Canadian innovation. So Dion, thanks for joining us today.
When did you form Amplitude?
Dion Madsen: Chima, thank you for the invitation and thank you and your team for being such a supportive partner for us in our most recent fundraising. So let me talk a little bit about Amplitude Ventures. So we formed Amplitude in 2018 with this concept that Canadian innovation was really fantastic and world class, but wasn't being supported by a financing partner that was really capturing the full innovation value of what was occurring here at Canada's great universities like McGill and University of Toronto and UBC. And we felt that there were certain investment strategies that were being deployed in the U.S. and Europe and in Asia that were really building great, world-class companies and we just didn't see them in Canada. And we asked ourselves the question why. And it wasn't that there were a lack of innovators or entrepreneurs here, but it was a lack of a supportive partner that was operating at the scale of these other venture capital investors and who had the vision to take these companies and really build them and scale them into public companies and companies that went deep into clinic or became commercial.
So with that concept, we started Amplitude. We currently manage about $500 million from Canada's largest institutional investors, including large pension funds like Caisse de dépôt and large financial institutions like Royal Bank of Canada. We operate out of four main offices. The three are located in the major innovation centres of Vancouver, Toronto and Montréal. And then we have a venture and company creation activity that we launched in conjunction with our second fund here in Montréal called Pre-Amp. So we invest in precision medicine companies targeted primarily at therapeutics, but do some medtech and some other investments, but really looking to scale companies globally and build them into really world-class and competitive entities.
How is Amplitude looking at itself as a firm its portfolio of companies?
Chima Ubani: Great. So thanks for that overview. So maybe to get into the first question: so it's 2025, interesting economic, social, political times, interesting times generally. Maybe just let us know a little bit about how Amplitude is looking at it with respect to itself as a firm and with respect to its portfolio companies generally.
Dion Madsen: Yeah. I don't know if in the middle of the year last year anyone could have predicted the situation we're in. So things happen fast, but it's a strange environment right now. It's an environment where— and normally when you're doing predictions about outcomes, you are kind of looking at a normal distribution of things. You say, "Well, here are the most likely outcomes and then here are very unlikely outcomes," and they sit on either end of the tail of that normal distribution. And I feel like we're in an environment where people are looking at the current situation and assigning almost equal probability to all outcomes, even the most unusual ones because it's really difficult to understand, in the current environment, what the regulatory environment's going to look like, what the inflation environment's going to look like, what the economic environment's going to look like. Because of that, I think investors are really pulling back. They're looking at all of this external risk in the environment and they're saying, "Well, we don't want to take additional risk in our portfolios, so we're going to go to areas of safety." So we're seeing a lot more investors either just pulling back and sitting on cash for now and trying to see how things settle out or they're going for much more mature assets. And it's really been impactful on earlier-stage companies where there's a lot of executional risk or scientific risk or competitive risk. So we're really seeing an environment where I think investors have become overall risk-averse.
What is Pre-Amp? What does Pre-Amp do?
Chima Ubani: Yeah, definitely something to keep an eye on and we'll see how things continue to evolve. You mentioned Pre-Amp briefly before. Can you talk a little bit more about that? What exactly is Pre-Amp? What does Pre-Amp do?
Dion Madsen: Yeah, we saw that there was a gap in the Canadian market. We are focused, about 70% of our investment activities are in Canada, about 30% internationally. We just were not seeing companies that look like the kinds of companies we wanted to invest in — either the technology wasn't broad enough or the management teams weren't set up correctly. And we felt like, well, those are heavy lifts to go in and try to fix things that need to be fixed in order for that company to really scale. And we thought — looking at a few other venture firms in the U.S. like ARCH, Flagship, Atlas who were doing a lot of their own internal company creation — that maybe that was a better way. We had our ideas about what the market need was, given all of the companies that we see and all the deal flow that we see.
We felt like, well, maybe we could start some of our own companies that way, and we could start them to look like the kinds of companies that we wanted to invest in and we could launch them with some scale. So when we went out and raised our second fund, we put together a syndicate of complementary limited partners who could really help that acceleration and enable us to launch these businesses in a much more rich and efficient manner. And then we set up the Amplitude fellowship, which enables us to bring in six to eight PhD and PhD candidates each year to work with us and really look at blue sky opportunities, like where's the future of biology, where's the future of different technologies that could really solve some of the ongoing issues in drug development. And through that process we do a bunch of venture hypotheses and we investigate them fully.
And then we have four full-time staff members who are working on training those into real rich and robust business ideas. And through that we end up investing in the best ones and we've leveraged that into two methodologies of starting companies. One is our traditional method of doing real white sheet of paper, blue sky kinds of opportunities. And we've launched a company recently called Stereo, a company building out a platform technology in nano T-cell receptors, which we think is really world class and world leading. Then we also do what we call accelerated company creation, where we find entrepreneurs and innovators who have had experience and we apply all of the depth of experience that we have and the bench talent we have to flesh out that kind of opportunity and launch those companies with a full-fledged management team. And we've been pretty successful at that. And we're building a company right now in the antibody drug conjugate space that's the next generation, with Ali Tehrani, one of our partners, who's really driving that forward. So a couple of different methods that we do to launch companies, and that's about half of our portfolio that we'll do companies that we create on our own or we launch or co-build with entrepreneurs.
Are there any interesting investments in your portfolio?
Chima Ubani: That's great. So through Pre-Amp and the fellowship, I mean, company creation, you clearly have the early-stage and very early-stage pre-creation, even, pipeline, well covered. You also do sort of more traditional investing in established, maybe a little bit later-stage, companies. Are there any particularly interesting investments or themes you want to highlight in that space for your portfolio?
Dion Madsen: The other half of that we balance out because creating companies is a heavy lift and we can't do that for the whole portfolio. So what we try to do is try to find more mature companies and we use the international part of our portfolio to do that. We've invested in a couple of more mature companies that give us real insight as to what's going on in the regulatory side, what's going on in the competitive side, what's going on in the financing environment, and gives us a real network to enable us to bring talent to some of our earlier-stage opportunities. And one to profile, a company that we invested in quite early in fund two called Evommune, was a management team that we had known for a long time from two different companies. So one company called Dermira, which had been acquired by Eli Lilly, and that management team that spun out with a couple of assets from Lilly.
And then another company, Kadmon, that we had had some experience with, was acquired by Sanofi. And the Kadmon people joined with the Dermira people to form Evommune, and that entity had already raised some capital. We came in in series B, and it's going quite well in the area of autoimmunity and it's an entity that recently raised a crossover round. We thought that maybe there would be an IPO opportunity this year. But I think as they continue to move forward with their pipeline, I think there's really good opportunities for that company to take those products to market and be amazingly successful. So it just shows that in our minds, innovation is really important, but the most important thing is to find great management teams that you can work with who really can execute well.
Chima Ubani: Right. Very well said. I mean, yeah, certainly great demonstration of the full-stack philosophy right from the beginning and all the way through. I mean, that was a great chat, really always like catching up with you, hearing what you have to say. I just wanted to take a quick moment to say thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.
Dion Madsen: My pleasure.
Chima Ubani: And wishing you and the Amplitude team all the best for 2025 and the years to come.
Dion Madsen: Great. Thanks, Chima. Thanks to you and your team. Thanks.
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