Adrenaline Fund

The Adrenaline Fund is designed to enable access, by the broadest group possible of accredited investors, to create a portfolio of 30 or more companies over a 5 year period. Adrenaline passively co-invests with experienced angel investors in a diverse cross section of portfolio companies.

Rather than actively seeking investments, Adrenaline follows internal rules to participate in investments made by angel investors when certain triggering criteria are met.

Our Mission

In addition to seeking a superior return through the unique passive Adrenaline model, the fund allows angel investors to “give back” through our Purpose, which includes:

  • Helping to build future prosperity for Canada by helping to build more Scale Up companies that bring jobs and prosperity to our country
  • Helping founders to fill the huge funding gap at the angel and seed stage compared to other countries.
  • Help angel deal leads to fill such early-stage rounds to enable them to provide mentoring and oversight to early stage company founders, and
  • Give back a portion of the Carried Interest income from investment success to support and grow our Angel and start up ecosystem.

Our Focus

Adrenaline focuses on seed-stage start-ups with strong, research and data-driven IP in:

Technology
Sustainability
Health Tech
Industry 4.0

Portfolio

2022-10-17T18:39:00+00:00
Cheetah Networks
Gallery

Cheetah Networks

Cheetah Networks delivers visibility into the Quality of Experience (QoE) of machines and people at the edge of the network. Their PulseViewTM Solution provides operators of public and private networks with actionable, real-time IoT network analytics.

The Adrenaline Team

Amber French
Principal

Amber has extensive experience in private capital placement and a passion for working with entrepreneurs. Amber is currently the Director of Capital Services at Communitech and most recently, Managing Partner & Co-founder of Catalyst Capital. Amber’s previous roles:

  • Co-founder, Catalyst Commons
  • Chief Executive Officer, Supply+Protect
  • Founder & Principal, Verity Financial Canada

Benton Leong
General Partner

In his career, Benton has served as teacher and researcher in computer science at Penn State University and University of Waterloo, serial entrepreneur, angel investor, coach to many startups, innovation ecosystem builder and community activist.  Some highlights include:

  • Communitech’s Executive-in-Residence for social entrepreneurs.
  • Canada’s National Angel Capital Organization (NACO)’s Angel-in-Residence.
  • Co-founder of MapleSoft, a venture that developed an algorithmic system for performing difficult symbolic math computations, adopted by research institutes, universities, and firms world-wide. MapleSoft was acquired by Cybernet Systems Group in 2009.
  • Coach for Team Canada, a cohort of 15 Canadian startups that swept the podium in 2019 at the Innovation and Entrepreneurship International Competition in Shenzhen, outshining teams with the best startups from Silicon Valley, London, Berlin, Tokyo, and Tel Aviv.

A business developer at heart, Benton identifies opportunities that are not obvious at first glance and he puts together teams with complementary expertise to capitalize on those opportunities.  As well as serving on the board for tech ventures, Benton also helps in the general community as a board member or volunteer for organizations that serve people under stress, recent immigrants, and those without shelter.

Randall Howard
General Partner

A prolific technology visionary, CEO, investor and philanthropist, Randall has a distinguished career  building and funding global firms based on innovation. Some current roles, both investment and operating include:

  • Since 2001, as Managing Partner at super-angel boutique, VERDEXUS, Randall has pioneered an “activist” model to choose, manage and monetize a portfolio of next generation companies.
  • Co-founder and Partner at Cognition Fund planned to be a $150M venture fund to revolutionize deep IP commercialization around the University of Waterloo research and innovation.
  • From 1984 to 2001, co—founder and CEO of MKS Inc. a software company, a leader in Application Lifecycle Management, which he grew from scratch to a public company with US$50M in revenue with 7 acquisitions and 1 divestiture. In 2011, MKS was sold to PTC for US$304M.

In the Waterloo-Toronto Tech Corridor, Randall is well known as a co-founder of Communitech and a major driver of GTAN, the local angel organization. Randall graduated from the University of Waterloo with an honours degree in computer science and mathematics.

Althea Wishloff
Venture Partner

  • Althea is a founding team member and the Head of Growth & Operations at Koble, a healthtech company focused on supporting new and expecting parents, based in Toronto, Canada. Althea has also previously held active roles in the tech ecosystem, both company-side and investing-side, including:
    • Investor and founding team member at Panache Ventures, Canada’s most active pre-seed and seed-stage fund, where Althea co-lead over thirty investments in the Ontario region.
    • Co-founder at the Diversity and Inclusion Small Council (DISC), an organization led by venture capitalists, aimed at providing under-represented founders with access to venture funding and feedback.
    • Fellow at Sidewalk Labs (Toronto).
    • Board Member at Georgian Triangle Angel Network (GTAN).

Althea is also currently an Instructor at the Schulich School of Business at York University, where she teaches classes on venture capital and private equity.

Mike Janzen
Venture Partner