Ontario Pension’s Venture Fund Has Eye on Bitcoin, CyberSecurity Startups

Last week, TechVibes.com interviewed two top officials from OMERS Ventures, the venture capital arm of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System.

The officials, Managing Director Jim Orlando and Director Sid Paquette, had some interesting things to say about what the fund is looking to invest in – including the fund’s interest in bitcoin start-ups.

From TechVibes:

We consider ourselves to be a broad ‘TMT’ investor – tech, media, and telecom. In media, where we are most intrigued, is the emergence of new ad technologies, and in particular as being applied to video. In the next five years, there will be more video delivered over the Internet, and there will be an opportunity for some advertising capabilities in that regard.

Cybersecurity is another area we have been looking at, specifically in FinTech as Sid mentioned, and in particular what bitcoin and block chain capability bring in terms of differentiated opportunities. We hope to find a couple of investments for Fund II related to bitcoin and the block chain, and the security side of that whole paradigm.

[…]

We’re looking for innovation, an innovative solution as opposed to a minor tweak on something else that is successful in the market today. We are looking for companies that have a global opportunity and a strong management team. The management team needs to have some evidence that they can execute on the vision.

You have also got to take a look at your business and understand where you are on the potential growth curve, and if you’re not forecasting exponential growth that is capital efficient it just may not be a VC-fundable company.

As part of OMERS Ventures, OMERS co-invests alongside BMO Financial Group and Cisco Investments.

Photo by Atana via Flickr CC License