# Harvest Venture Partners — full content

> Early-stage venture capital fund in Calgary, Alberta, investing first checks in financial technology — wealth, insurance, and commerce. Founded by Alex Gold (Founder & General Partner) with Adam Froese (Venture Partner). Site: https://harvest.ventures · Contact: hello@harvest.ventures

## Portfolio

- **Neo Financial** (Fintech) — Spending, saving and rewards, rebuilt for Canadians. — https://www.neofinancial.com/
- **OneVest** (Wealth) — Wealth-as-a-service for the platforms everyone builds on. — https://www.onevest.com/
- **Drillbit** (Payments) — Every job paid on time — invoicing, collections and cash flow for the trades, on autopilot. — https://www.drillbit.com/
- **Flex** (Payments) — HSA and FSA money, spendable anywhere. — https://www.withflex.com/
- **Cybrid** (Payments) — Developer rails that take fintechs into Web3. — https://www.cybrid.xyz/
- **Walnut** (Insurance) — Insurance embedded where people already buy. — http://www.gowalnut.com/
- **Summit** (Insurance) — Commercial cover, automated end to end. — https://www.summitcover.ca/
- **Eventual** (Insurance) — Bringing stability to U.S. real-estate insurance. — https://www.reinsurancene.ws/eventual-raises-7-5m-to-bring-stability-to-us-real-estate-insurance/
- **PointOne** (Fintech) — Legal billing that bills itself. — https://pointone.ai/
- **SecondShop** (Commerce) — Re-commerce built for Canadians. — https://secondshop.ca/
- **WindBorne** (Data) — The weather API for finance. — https://windbornesystems.com/

## Articles

## WindBorne’s Planetary Nervous System Takes Shape
*Portfolio update · Aug 2026 · 3 min read · https://harvest.ventures/thoughts/windbornes-planetary-nervous-system-takes-shape*

Two years ago we wrote that WindBorne sat at the forefront of a once in a generation revolution in weather forecasting. This month, we’re excited to report that the market agrees.

We’re pleased to share that WindBorne Systems has closed an oversubscribed $37 million Series B, co-led by Khosla Ventures and Galvanize, with participation from Translink Capital, Biprogy, Lux Capital, and existing investors. The round brings WindBorne’s total funding to more than $62 million, and it follows a year in which the Company tripled revenue and tripled the size of its balloon constellation.

When we joined WindBorne’s Seed round, the thesis was simple: traditional weather data collection was falling behind a changing climate and a vertically integrated platform that owned its own observations could out forecast anyone. At the time, the balloons flew for up to a month and the forecast accuracy gains were measured against models that had barely changed in decades. The bet was on engineering depth and a team we had known for over a decade.

What has changed since then is scale, and with it, proof.

### From Better Data to Best Weather Model

The most important development of the past year isn’t the round itself. Earlier this year, WindBorne released WeatherMesh 6, which now sits at the top of publicly available forecasting benchmarks, ahead of both the leading AI weather models and the traditional physics based systems run by government agencies. That is the vertical integration thesis playing out exactly as designed: the balloons gather observations from parts of the atmosphere nobody else is sampling, and those observations feed a proprietary model that compounds in accuracy as the network grows.

WindBorne’s data is now assimilated into NOAA’s Global Forecast System, the public backbone behind much of the consumer weather infrastructure in North America. A growing share of the forecasts people see every day already carry WindBorne’s fingerprints.

### Who is Buying

When we first invested, we pointed to investment funds and insurance carriers as the customers who would pay first for a longer, more accurate forecast horizon. Trading firms were indeed among the earliest commercial adopters and demand from government agencies has grown remarkably over the past two years — by a factor over close to 10X. The Series B capital is earmarked for expanding the sensing network and the compute behind WeatherMesh. That’s just more fuel for the flywheel here.

### Why This Still Matters

Our original excitement was about cost: a platform that could eventually drive the price of atmospheric data low enough that nearly any customer could build proprietary weather applications on top of it. A constellation of close to 1000 balloons, a benchmark leading model, and a revenue base that tripled in twelve months is what that trajectory looks like from the inside. Extreme weather is only getting more expensive, and the value of knowing what’s coming a few days earlier is being repriced upward across energy, agriculture, infrastructure, and emergency response.

Congratulations to John Dean, Dr. Andrey Sushko, Kai Marshland, and the entire WindBorne team. We said this was one of the most technically complex but rewarding opportunities we had seen. It still is, and it’s getting even bigger.

Read WindBorne’s full announcement here.

## It’s About Time: PointOne’s Extraordinary Progress
*Portfolio update · Aug 2026 · 2 min read · https://harvest.ventures/thoughts/its-about-time-pointones-extraordinary-progress*

Two years ago we said PointOne was taking a contrarian approach to Generative AI in law: help attorneys bill even more. The market has now caught up.

We’re pleased to share that PointOne has closed a $16 million Series A led by 8VC, with continued participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Y Combinator, and existing investors. Total funding to date now stands at $20 million.

When we joined PointOne’s Seed round in 2024, the thesis was simple and, at the time, unfashionable. Nearly every legal AI startup was pitching a future with fewer lawyers — and then trying to sell that future to lawyers. PointOne went the other direction. It built infrastructure around the one metric the profession actually runs on: billable time. Capture it automatically, capture it accurately, and the incentives of the firm and the software point the same way.

That alignment has compounded. Over the last six months, PointOne has grown revenue 10X. Its customers now range from boutique practices to some of the largest law firms in the world, and the product has expanded well beyond timekeeping into intelligent bill review, Outside Counsel Guidelines compliance, and pricing intelligence. Clean time data turns out to be the foundation for everything a firm does downstream; pricing, staffing, and profitability. PointOne isn’t just positioning itself as that data layer — it is that data layer.

A few things stand out to us about PointOne.

First, headcount and building the organizational design of the future. PointOne has gone from four people to just under twenty in a year and has been explicit that it intends to stay lean. In a category where competitors have raised far more and hired far faster, a 10X revenue ramp on a small team is the more durable model.

Second, timing. We wrote in 2024 that market timing might be PointOne’s real edge, because generational change in legal practice tends to take exactly that — generations. What’s changed is that AI adoption inside law firms is no longer a strategic question; it’s a present tense competitive one. Firms that build their data foundation now will define what the next decade of legal services looks like, and PointOne is the infrastructure underneath that shift.

Congratulations to Katon, Jeremy, and the entire PointOne team. We’re proud to have been early, and we look forward to what comes next.

## Why We Invested in Flex
*Deal memo · Sep 2025 · 3 min read · https://harvest.ventures/thoughts/why-we-invested-in-flex*

Flex is quickly emerging as the definitive leader for FSA/HSA payments; one of the nation’s fastest growing payment categories.

We are thrilled to announce our partnership and investment in Flex, a pioneering platform revolutionizing the way health and wellness brands accept Health Savings Account (HSA) and Flexible Spending Account (FSA) payments. By streamlining benefits-based transactions, Flex empowers health and wellness leaders to unlock new revenue streams while automating regulatory compliance. Targeting a $150 Billion USD market growing at 15% annually, Flex recently secured $10 Million USD in Series A funding led by First Round Capital.

The ballooning value of HSA and FSA accounts has created a unique opportunity for both health and wellness brands to unlock hundreds of billions of tax advantaged spending dollars for products that enhance the lives of consumers.

And yet, the HSA and FSA payment process often overwhelms both customers and brands at checkout. First, consumer eligibility for any single purchase needs to be verified by a physician with a Letter of Medical Necessity. Second, there are complex IRS and tax reporting regulations that fall squarely on over-stressed brands who would rather not accept these types of payments than face penalties for non-compliance.

Unlike traditional payment processors that treat HSA/FSA as an afterthought, Flex offers a seamless plug-and-play solution that integrates both with e-commerce leaders like Shopify and any brand’s custom APIs. This enables brands to offer tax-advantaged payments without disrupting their existing workflows; driving up to 30% higher checkout conversions and 50% increases in average order value. Rather than forcing brands to overhaul their systems, Flex’s technology embeds directly into the checkout experience, automating eligibility checks and compliance in real time using Generative AI. For consumers, the result is seamless; similar to any normal checkout experience using their credit card.

The timing for Flex couldn’t be better. As consumers increasingly prioritize health and wellness, spending via HSA and FSA accounts is surging. The infrastructure to support these transactions has lagged — until now. Flex is filling this gap with a comprehensive vertically integrated platform addresses the entire payment lifecycle; from integration to transaction processing. This sets Flex apart as a category leader.

Leading Flex is Co-Founder and CEO Sam O’Keefe, who we have known for over a decade. Mrs. O’Keefe’s experience in fraud prevention from her time at Unit21 drives the company’s vision. Joining Mrs. O’Keefe is Co-founder and CTO Miguel Toledo, a former machine learning engineer at Lyft, whose leadership is complemented by experts in financial technology, compliance, and e-commerce scaling. Together, they are building a platform that not only meets today’s demands but anticipates the future of consumer health spending.

We are excited to join Flex on this transformative journey, supporting a team that is redefining how health and wellness brands connect with their customers and change their lives.

## Why we started SecondShop
*Origin story · Aug 2024 · 3 min read · https://harvest.ventures/thoughts/why-we-started-secondshop*

Our third internally incubated business, SecondShop is transforming and modernizing re-commerce for millions of Canadians.

SecondShop is a vertically integrated re-commerce platform that connects wholesalers, retailers, and consumers in the second market for large purchases like home appliances. SecondShop sources returned or excess inventory from major retailers and re-sells those products back to consumers with first-to-market financial technology products. Harvest incubated SecondShop with founder and CEO Cedric George, and is the company's first and only institutional investor in its $2MM CAD series seed financing.

To understand why SecondShop is a breakthrough, start with a story we all know. You move to a new home and order a sofa online. It arrives, you don't love it, and you click Return — then never think about the product again. What happens next is critically important: an inveterate black box of labour, machinery, systems, delivery trucks, warehouses, auctioneers, and liquidators kicks into high gear to extract value from the sofa you just want to forget.

Highly fragmented and under-regulated, the re-commerce space processes 45 million (yes, you read that right) products a year in Canada. Currently worth over $20 billion CAD, it is projected to nearly double to over $40 billion CAD within the next decade. Yet with a myriad of fragmented salvage operators, the space has struggled to reach mainstream consumers — purchasing experiences are nothing short of baffling and Kafkaesque. Don't believe us? Watch the CBC's experience on Marketplace.

And yet a generational change is occurring in both how retailers sell and how consumers buy. Retailers are embracing re-commerce partners as a channel that keeps first-market sales viable in a more competitive market: with online return rates for soft goods now over 40% and close to 15% for hard goods like appliances, paper-thin margins are under extraordinary pressure as return shipping and restocking fees make easy return policies hard to sustain.

Similarly, Millennial and Gen Z consumers are rapidly adopting second-market products as their first purchasing option. No longer relegated to thrift and novelty buying, they now consider second-use products for hard goods like couches and even refrigerators — with 62% indicating that second-hand would be their “first choice.”

With these market transformations, we built SecondShop around a dual value proposition: a turn-key, one-stop shop for national retailers, and a new first destination for Canadian consumers for the most important products in their lives.

The team is led by CEO and founder Cedric George — one of the top entrepreneurs in Alberta and Canada overall, who bootstrapped Custom Delivery from his home in suburban Calgary into the country's top last-mile delivery company, working with Costco, Home Depot, Leon's, Hudson's Bay, IKEA, and many other leading retailers. Custom Delivery was acquired in 2019 by Metro Supply Chain, after which Mr. George grew the company to $160 million CAD in revenue. He is surrounded by experts in the space, including Derek Keyes, former Chief Merchandiser of Hudson's Bay, and Mark Winter, a former executive at Metro Supply Chain.

We're excited to take this journey with the entire SecondShop team and transform the shopping journeys of millions of Canadians.

## Why we invested in PointOne
*Deal memo · Jul 2024 · 2 min read · https://harvest.ventures/thoughts/why-we-invested-in-pointone*

PointOne is taking a contrarian approach to generative AI in the legal profession: help attorneys bill even more.

We're excited to announce our partnership and investment in PointOne: a vertically integrated legal technology platform that leverages generative artificial intelligence to automate legal time sheets, invoices, and predictive billing. Rather than employing AI to reduce our dependency on lawyers, PointOne is using this emerging technology to help attorneys automate time sheets and, as a result, bill their clients even more. Targeting a market worth over $10 billion USD and growing at 12% CAGR, PointOne has raised over $3.2 million USD in seed financing. We joined this round alongside Bessemer Venture Partners, 8VC, and General Catalyst.

A long list of emerging companies are seeking to replace attorneys with generative AI. The paradox, of course, is that these same platforms have to sell their products to attorneys themselves. The perceived threat to the profession — and the fear amongst attorneys of a long, slow transformation — cannot be understated, especially in the context of how lawyers become, well, lawyers.

When graduating law school and joining a practice, the single most important metric for making partner is a young attorney's contribution of billable hours. Sorry, but that's really it. Given the entrenched incentives of the profession, any potential disruption to this process is likely to be greeted with hesitation, if not outright hostility.

Rather than seek to immediately disrupt this system, PointOne aligns incentives — employing AI to augment attorneys' ability to bill more and save time. PointOne ingests client communications and information from laptop and mobile, then interprets time sheets on a customized basis, under the structure and billing format of each independent firm. PointOne saves attorneys up to 20% of the total work time they normally spend on time sheets.

Critically, while we don't believe one strategy for AI in law is guaranteed to win or lose, we do believe the question of market timing favors PointOne — generational shifts in legal practice often take just that: generations.

PointOne's team is led by founder and CEO Adrian Parlow, a former corporate lawyer at Fenwick & West and the former General Counsel of WeFunder, surrounded by leaders from across the legal and technology space as the company rapidly scales.

We are excited to take this journey with PointOne and watch as the team modernizes one of the world's oldest professions.

## Our partnership with Summit
*Deal memo · Jul 2024 · 2 min read · https://harvest.ventures/thoughts/our-partnership-with-summit*

Summit is modernizing the $18 billion CAD commercial insurance market at a breathtaking pace.

We're excited to finally announce our partnership and investment in Summit: a commercial insurance solutions provider that works with businesses to provide custom coverage and brokerages to develop unique software applications. Summit is creating the brokerage platform of the future by applying technology to automate the procurement of commercial insurance across a multitude of client verticals. Uniquely, the company is now taking its technology stack to others and powering the work of other brokerages. Harvest was the first institutional investor in Summit and joined the company's most recent financing round with IA Capital.

Worth close to $18 billion CAD and with M&A deal activity increasing by 60% in just one year (2022–2023), the commercial insurance market is now staring down the largest change opportunity since the end of World War II and the proliferation of independent brokerages.

And yet, disruption in the commercial insurance space is not as obvious for a few key structural reasons. First, policies often require an extreme level of customization, as the perils of each business, construction project, or even, say, a film shoot are extraordinarily varied. This challenges how far and how fast embedded solutions may work, as the space requires a more consultative approach. Second, close to 70% of commercial insurance policies are mandated by either regulation or business contract. Given varied party interests, this ensures longer binding and contracting periods than more standardized P&C policies.

Summit is building into both of these long-established marketplace traits and creating a new breakthrough product. Summit places brokers first through the deployment of advanced technology, powered by generative AI, to augment the roles of humans and automate the tedious day-to-day. The company hopes to eventually automate most administrative work that plagues margin accretion in the space.

Summit is also turning the multi-stakeholder model of insurance contracting on its head and into an advantage. Summit's software understands the interdependent needs of customers in commercial insurance — the requirements of one customer often trigger changes for another, as risks are inter-related. Summit intends to automate those inter-related policy dependencies, turn them into a waterfall effect, and get customers to sign up for even more insurance.

Summit's team is amongst the best we've ever seen. Led by founders Joshua Pillsbury and Davis Gilbert, the team iterated toward product-market fit with a sales-led strategy first, then built technology on top of significant demand — on both the customer and brokerage side.

We are excited to take this journey with Summit and watch as they transform one of the most complex but rewarding opportunities we've ever seen.

## Our Partnership with Windborne
*Deal memo · Jun 2023 · 2 min read · https://harvest.ventures/thoughts/our-partnership-with-windborne*

WindBorne sits at the forefront of a once in a generation revolution in weather forecasting.

We’re excited to announce our partnership and investment in WindBorne: a vertically integrated weather platform whose data insights power critical decision making for financial institutions and government partners. WindBorne designs, builds, and launches high altitude weather balloons that capture critical data from the atmosphere, which is then employed to develop proprietary weather models for real world applications. Accurately predicting weather 2X further into the future, WindBorne helps investment funds and insurance carriers develop more accurate forecasting and actuarial models. We joined WindBorne’s Seed financing round with Footwork VC, Khosla Ventures, Ubiquity, and Pear VC.

Traditional weather data collection methods are fast becoming obsolete as climate change creates new levels of atmospheric unpredictability. Short duration weather balloons and incremental forecasting flights stuffed with archaic equipment are struggling with current climate patterns and will be rendered useless as time moves forward. One does not have to look hard to see the marketplace impacts of climate change in real time, like State Farm’s recent decision to pull out of insuring California homeowners due to increased fire risk.

WindBorne is coming into this space as a vertically integrated solution; tying hardware, software, and services together. WindBorne’s stratospheric balloons have a duration of up to a month; a significant improvement over traditional methodologies and a number that’s only increasing. In turn, this increases forecast accuracy by 30% all the while collecting over 10,000X more data points — per flight. Uniquely, this allows WindBorne to capture current market opportunity in basic weather forecasting while simultaneously, creating the product for and market of the future.

And that’s what really excites us about WindBorne. By design, the Company’s technology will decrease the cost of data collection enough, over time, to eventually allow nearly any customer the ability to create their own proprietary weather applications via an automated input mechanism. The potential impacts of this on predictive and actuarial modeling are hard to quantify because this an entirely new market opportunity.

WindBorne is, first and foremost, an engineering driven company with extremely deep technical expertise. We first met Kai Marshland, one of the Founders, over 10 years ago, while he was still in high school and won numerous programming competitions. Once we got to know the rest of the team including John Dean, the CEO, and Andrey Sushko, the CTO, we became convinced that if there was a team to create disruptive change in this space, this was the one to do it.

We are excited to take this journey with WindBorne and watch as they transform one of the most technically complex but rewarding opportunities we’ve ever seen.

## Our Partnership with Feather
*Deal memo · Dec 2022 · 2 min read · https://harvest.ventures/thoughts/our-partnership-with-feather*

Feather sits at the forefront of a $35 Billion market expansion in 401K access throughout the United States.

We’re thrilled to announce our partnership and investment in Feather; an embedded modern 401K platform for employers, CRM systems, HR platforms and PEOs. With Feather, through a set of APIs, any partner platform or distributor can offer a modern 401K plan in mere minutes. We joined with Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, FF, and other investors in this fundraising round.

Feather aligns with our broader thesis of building value in embedded opportunities; technology centric products that offer significant value to end customers via a partner distribution channel. Similar to our existing portfolio companies like OneVest and Walnut, Feather will drive accretive value into the partners and businesses they support, who in turn, can offer more value into their own customer base with a new offering that is nearly instantaneously embeddable. Similar to how OneVest provides embedded wealth management and Walnut provides embedded insurance, we view Feather as a complimentary embedded offering; this time in the benefits space.

Feather is riding one of the most important marketplace tailwinds we have ever seen. In the past two years, 14 US states have passed legislation mandating that all companies with 5 or more employees are legally required to offer 401k plans. An additional 16 states are expected to pass legislation in the next 12 months alone. Combined, this legislation opens up a $35 Billion expansion of the 401k market virtually overnight. We believe that the Company is well positioned to capture a material segment of this new market expansion as the product’s embedded positioning through HR and benefits providers places their offering within arms reach of the end customer.

Feather is, first and foremost, a technology centric business and the founders of the Company, Aahan Sawhney and Saurabh Jain, are some of the more talented we have ever seen tackle this unique market.

We’re excited to take this journey with Feather and watch them transform modern 401Ks for small businesses across the United States.

## Our Partnership With Cybrid
*Deal memo · Apr 2022 · 2 min read · https://harvest.ventures/thoughts/our-partnership-with-cybrid*

We’re thrilled to announce our partnership and investment in Cybrid; a Banking as a Service (BaaS) platform for financial institutions, neo banks, and alternative financial providers to offer Web3 applications to their client base in near record time.

Employing Cybrid, financial institutions and neo-banks can offer their clients Web3 trading products, high yield savings options, and payment/remittance products through a set of APIs. We joined with Golden Venture Partners and Luge Capital in making this investment.

We have strong belief that Web3 applications will power the most important technological transformation of our time and likely exceed the extraordinary benefits of the Internet Revolution.

And yet, even with this promise, we have a very long way to go. Only 12% of Americans and about 4% of Canadians have ever interacted with a Web3 product. And while this market is growing at about 12% CAGR, regulatory and governance uncertainties cast a pallor over mainstream adoption.

Our central conviction is that Cybrid will play a critical role in accelerating the mainstream adoption of digital currencies and underlying Web3 applications by bringing the technology to where consumers already are like neo-banks, financial institutions, and even alternative financial platforms like loyalty programs.

For legacy financial institutions, moving into the Web3 space is critical, if not existential to their long-term survival. As a testament to this risk, even at this very nascent stage, over 80% of Millennial millionaires have Blockchain/Web3 investments; and all of them (yes, you read that right) are not using traditional financial institutions to purchase and/or trade in these assets.

For neo-banks and financial technology firms, the ability to quickly provide Web3 applications will be a significant differentiator in their go-to-market function as seen by the stratospheric growth of trading applications on Robin Hood and Public in the United States.

Cybrid’s team is uniquely qualified to tackle the immense challenges that exist in this space. Avinash Chidambaram, the company’s Co-Founder and CEO, was formerly the CPO at Thinking Capital and previously started Ario, a platform that was acquired by Purpose Financial in 2020. The Company’s CTO Brent Carrara was the Head of Security at Ario and spent close to a decade in enterprise security at CSIS.

While the mainstream adoption of Web3 applications may still be some ways off, our conviction is that Cybrid will play a significant role in accelerating this process and opening up new opportunities for everyone.

## Why We Started Harvest Venture Partners
*Origin story · Nov 2021 · 5 min read · https://harvest.ventures/thoughts/why-we-started-harvest-venture-partners*

In the middle of the night close to 30 years ago, my father woke me up and said: “We have to get to the factory — now!”

We had just spent the past year building out what had quickly become North America’s largest cotton candy manufacturer. We patented our own plastic bag. We signed deals with big box retailers at the time when Wal-Mart was on the cusp of being a thing.

And now, in the middle of the night, our factory was being robbed.

Racing to the factory, we were greeted by the night manager who told us he had caught a disgruntled employee stealing. Calling the authorities, we settled into hours of backup work to not only trace the events but also get the factory back on track.

Just another day at the office, right?

Looking back, I consider myself quite lucky to have gone through that experience. I learned about entrepreneurship through the hardship of it. The grind of it. Every single day.

These are lessons you cannot pick up in business school; or any school for that matter.

After personally investing in over a dozen companies and starting two myself, what’s become clear is that starting a business is an exhilarating journey. However, it can also turn on a dime to become harrowing and frightening.

Fortunately, many founders intuitively understand this. So, they seek out counsel at the start of their business. Many believe that if they get assistance at inception with a group of great advisors, they will be ok.

Unfortunately, too many founders underestimate the longevity of the support they will need. Recruiting isn’t just about finding the right team leaders; it’s about building long term culture. Branding isn’t just about the logo; It’s about ensuring the right messaging and targeting every day. The scope of counsel is often too short term to drive lasting impact and build game changing businesses.

We started Harvest Ventures to solve for that exact reason: to provide generational support to founders along their journey to building breakthrough businesses. Just writing a check and saying you’re there “to help” is no longer enough; you need to be a true lifetime partner with the resources, agility, and capacity to see it through to the end. While we start with the check, we provide unwavering support because, as founders ourselves, we know that at the core of every great company is an extraordinarily dedicated and skilled team.

### The Resources

Too often, founders underestimate the resource drain associated with services like recruiting, growth marketing, and accounting. In fact, close to two thirds of all founders admit to repeatedly underestimating the cost of these types of resources and services.

Harvest Venture Partners’ relationship with Harvest Builders, a venture studio platform, ensures that founders have access to path breaking resources at virtually no cost. Harvest Builders has over 40 full time staff dedicated to helping you build your business. In a way, Harvest becomes your fractional co-founder, scaling up the gaps in staffing and resources when you need it and ratcheting down when you don’t. These resources are available for the entire lifetime of your business; not just during the earliest stages of your company.

Building a new tech team? Harvest’s recruiting team has successfully built a hiring engine for the largest tech companies in Western Canada; hiring at a pace of about 20 people — a day.

Designing and deploying a new marketing funnel? Harvest’s growth marketing team is amongst the best in the business, having successfully built the marketing plans for over two dozen startups including 4 of the top 10 venture backed businesses in the country.

Yet we do not stop there as we back this up with financial planning, accounting, and back office support so you can focus on going heads down and building product.

### The Agility

Harvest is built by founders for founders. That means we understand the speed with which deals need to get done and the counsel you’ll need when you encounter the bumps along the way. We’re operators supporting other operators; it’s just that simple.

Speed is critical in venture. You want to spend less time on deals and more time on building.

That’s why we’re comfortable saying our goal is to close our deals in five days or less from the time of decision with the right team and company. With documentation now pretty much standardized, our focus is squarely where it should be: helping founders succeed.

Our diligence process is also different. Harvest’s core team and close advisors bring close to 50 years of entrepreneurial experience to the table as your direct counsel. We leverage this to help you with introductions to crucial customer connections, key hires, and other investors because we believe the best diligence takes place by being helpful. If we can create value together right out of the gate, who knows what we can achieve in the future.

### The Capacity

First time founders focus on product. Second time founders often focus more on scaling distribution. We not only believe that distribution is what differentiates; we have strong conviction it’s the secret unfair advantage underpinning true category winners.

Central to our funding process is providing portfolio companies access to key anchor distribution partners to supercharge growth right out of the gate. By starting the flywheel towards accelerated scale, we can take advantage of embedded distribution channels, lower the cost of customer acquisition, and speed up the product development cycle.

With partners like Neo Financial and ATB and over 20 other financial technology leaders globally, we cover the gamut of the types of relationships we know you’re looking for.

### Why We Focus on Founders

At the core of every great company is an extraordinary founding team. A team that is dedicated to making one small dent in the world that could eventually grow to disrupt how we live and work every day. From the earliest days of Silicon Valley and the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor to more recent entrants like Airbnb and Doordash, this is how it’s always been.

And will always be.

We never set out to start a venture fund because we wanted to be fund managers. In fact, we started a venture fund so we could do what we love best: helping great people bring extraordinary things to life. If we can do this for just one founder or just one team, we will have succeeded.

After all, as Walt Disney said:

> “You can design and create and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.”

Alex Gold is the Founder & General Partner of Harvest Venture Partners.

## Why We Invested in Walnut
*Deal memo · Nov 2021 · 3 min read · https://harvest.ventures/thoughts/why-we-invested-in-walnut*

Walnut is at the forefront of unlocking a $200 Billion opportunity in the generational transformation of insurance.

We’re excited to announce our partnership with Walnut; a breakthrough embedded insurance business. Our partnership brings both growth capital and distribution acceleration with leading challenger Neo Financial to Walnut’s already impressive growth trajectory. Currently offering subscription based Life and Cyber policies, Walnut will soon be expanding to offer a select range of P&C products as well.

As financial technology investors, we are continually monitoring advancements in the insurance vertical. We’ve seen the rise of successful Direct to Consumer (D2C) offerings in the United States like Lemonade and Kin; both of which went public well above $1 Billion in value. We’ve also seen the development of platforms like Qantas Assure in Australia which ties behavioural economics to underwriting and rewards clients for positive behaviour.

Yet in many ways, things haven’t changed. Legacy carriers take months, if not years, to integrate with. Policies advertised as instantaneously binding often just mean an instantaneous phone call from a broker.

It’s no wonder why leading market research firm Ipsos indicated over 70% of respondents would never recommend their insurance policy to a friend; the lowest score ever recorded by the firm.

Walnut aims to change this model by incorporating some of the best elements of emerging marketplace winners across the insurance product stack. By embedding distribution with channel partners, Walnut can reduce acquisition costs by up to 40%. By offering insurance as a subscription product, Walnut is opening up the vertical to new policyholders. And by eventually incorporating behavioural elements into the consumer experience, Walnut aims to reduce their claims loss ratio.

Walnut has built the entire stack for embedded insurance from the ground up; allowing them to integrate with any carrier and distribution partner in a matter of hours. Further, as a Managing General Agent (MGA), Walnut has the capacity to work with carriers to create truly instantaneously binding policies and has already done so with RBC Life Insurance Company in Canada and SBLI in the United States.

Walnut’s model of embedded distribution through channel partners like challenger banks and large financial institutions is aligned with our approach of providing unfair advantage to our portfolio companies in this area. In the short time that Walnut has been working with us, the company has increased their addressable market by close to 2 million customers through partnerships with Neo Financial and others within the Harvest network.

Yet what impressed us the most is Walnut’s founding team. Derek Szeto, Walnut’s Co-founder and CEO, is one of the most accomplished entrepreneurs in Canada. As the Founder of RedFlagDeals, Derek grew the business to become the largest consumer savings platform in the country before selling the business to Yellow Pages in a landmark deal. Adrien Niblock, Walnut’s Co-Founder and CPO, has the product and technical expertise to make this work, spending the past five years as a senior product leader and engineer at FullScript.

We’re very excited about Walnut’s trajectory and being one small part of their journey to creating an easier and better insurance experience that everyone will enthusiastically recommend.