Laurier alum gives students a real money lesson in funding high-tech startups

By Alex Kinsella | Jan. 20, 2025

Wilfrid Laurier University students graduate with more than a degree. They leave campus with a strong community of students, alumni, and professors whom they can rely on for support throughout their careers.

Lazaridis School of Business and Economics alumnus David Whyte (BBA ’12) joined students in the Fall 2024 BU460/660 Laurier Startup Fund course to share his experiences at Laurier and how the community has supported him throughout his journey as an entrepreneur.

Whyte and fellow Laurier alumnus Mark Fasken (BA ’11) founded a fintech startup called Irwin in 2017. On Oct.28, 2024, Whyte and Fasken announced the sale of Irwin to FactSet, a major global financial data and software provider, and a $20-billion public company. 

Whyte has been passionate about entrepreneurship since a young age and said it was reignited when he approached his co-op placement.

“I knew I always wanted to do something entrepreneurial, and the reason for that was my grandfather was an entrepreneur. I was able to see the impact he had on so many people's lives. It was very inspiring,” Whyte told the students.

His first co-op placement was at Paradigm Capital in Toronto. He studied capital markets to understand businesses, how they are formed, and how they are financed.

During his co-op placements, Whyte had a front-row seat to see how capital markets worked—and didn’t work. He said capital markets serve an important purpose, but the people involved can sometimes be difficult. One experience even led him to switch co-op placements in the middle of a term.

“I ended up at UBS Asset Management, and halfway through the term there was a massive scandal when an EFT trader nicknamed the ‘London Whale’ lost over $6 billion,” Whyte said. “UBS was in a tailspin because of it. I came in the next morning and the office was empty. They fired everyone, but they said to me, ‘You’re a co-op student, we’re not going to fire you.’”

Whyte was moved to the investment banking floor but was not excited about the prospect. He phoned a friend at CIBC and was offered a chance to work at their trading desk.

“I think I'm probably the first co-op student in history to have quit a placement. It worked out because I ended up at the CIBC trading desk, and that was the type of finance that I really gravitated towards. I learned a lot and fell in love with it,” Whyte added.

After graduating, Whyte took a role with Credit Suisse in institutional equity sales. It was during his time with Credit Suisse that Whyte saw a shift in how investment companies approached corporate access. Whyte described corporate access as the business of connecting investors with companies. It is a $30-billion business that he said often flies under the radar.

“A lot of people think that a company is public, and therefore it's just going to find investors that are right for it at the right time. That's not how it works. It's very much a relationship-based business, just as if it was between a private equity firm and a private company. The reason for that is because of cost of capital,” Whyte said.

Whyte said it is critical for a public company to find long-term investors who believe in its management team and hold onto a stock for the long term. Whyte added that such long-term investors are less likely to sell a company’s shares in the event of a wider stock market downturn. This means the company will have a lower beta, a measure of its sensitivity to overall market movements and a widely used measure of risk.

“When you lower your beta, you're lowering your cost of capital, and you're accelerating your business's ability to grow. For that reason, corporate access is a very important business,” said Whyte.

“If you're going to invest in a business, you're going to want to know who runs that business and understand who they are as a person, and whether you trust them, and you trust their leadership abilities and their vision. The only way you can know that is by getting to know them, and that's why it's such a big part of capital markets.”

The idea for Irwin emerged from these experiences working in capital markets, where Whyte saw the inefficiencies and friction in how investors and companies connected. He said companies faced numerous challenges in meeting the right investors to build long-term partnerships.

“I got tired of taking leaders around to meetings and them saying, ‘Dave, what are we doing here? Why are we meeting with these folks?’, and not having a good answer,” said Whyte. “You experience an almost visceral reaction to the service that you're providing. It was pretty clear, from my perspective, to see that the future of how capital market relationships are built, sourced and maintained was one that was digital and not encumbered by third-party intermediaries.”

Whyte’s initial idea was a digital marketplace that would connect investors and companies directly, bypassing traditional intermediaries. Before building anything, he said he wanted to make sure it would work outside of the existing network of banks.

The next step was finding a great co-founder, who he found in Fasken.

“He asked about the idea and when I told him, he asked amazing questions. He got it right away. We met up for a beer to talk more about it and he said he wanted to be my co-founder,” Whyte said.

Building with a co-founder is one of Whyte’s most important pieces of advice.

“Don't do it without a partner, because it's impossible,” said Whyte. “I feel like the great companies all had partners. He's way more impressive than I am in every single way. So, I'm very, very lucky, and we just worked really well together.”

“Mark [Fasken] and I brokered these corporate access road shows by ourselves, and we did about 30 S&P 500 companies,” Whyte said. “It was great for two reasons. First, I learned that investor relations software was a thing. Second, I learned my idea wasn't going to scale. Building software wouldn't matter. No one would come because you have to have the perfect amount of demand and supply and frequency on both sides.”

During the early days of the business, Whyte ran into a contact from a Canadian investment bank who was interested in what they were building. A series of meetings led to a proposed $500,000 equity investment offer. The night before signing the deal, Whyte said he realized the business would not work as he hoped.

“I called Mark, who had gotten married and had a kid on the way, and told him I had a better idea – that became Irwin. We went back to the investment bank and said we’re going to make sure that we understand this market and what we're doing, but we'll come back and present it,” Whyte said.

Two months later, they met with the bank and the partners were sold. Armed with fresh capital, they hired a development team to build the first version of Irwin and signed its first few customers. From there, business took off, and they could hire a chief technology officer, in-house software engineers, and salespeople.

“We would just talk to the market emphatically and consistently to make sure our vision solved their problems,” Whyte said.

Scaling Irwin required additional capital, but while sales were coming in, fundraising for the startup was more challenging. Whyte said investors doubted the size of the investor relations software market.

“There are 41,000 public companies,” Whyte said. “At our pricing, we did the math and it was a $300-million market, but they didn't believe that we'd be able to do that.”

Thankfully, Whyte and Fasken could tap back into the Laurier community for support. In 2019, Irwin raised a $1.5-million seed round led by MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund (IAF) and Blindspot Capital. The seed round also included $25,000 from the Laurier Startup Fund. The connection to Laurier was made by Aaron Bast (BBA ’06), currently a Managing Director at Graphite Ventures in Toronto, who volunteers as an advisor to students in the Startup Fund class.

“I attended the Irwin Investment Committee meeting in Toronto with Craig Leonard and the rest of the IAF team. The guys mentioned there was a gap in the funding round and I spoke to them after the meeting to make them aware of the Laurier Startup Fund. We connected them with Brian [Smith] and the team to fill out the syndicate. Brian had taught David and jumped on the opportunity to back up the founders and the IAF,” Bast said.

In 2021, Irwin secured $25 million in funding from K1 Investment Management, allowing it to expand and solidify its position as an investor relations software leader. These milestones weren’t just financial—they validated Whyte and Fasken’s vision to reshape how companies connect with investors.

Professor Brian Smith said the Laurier Startup Fund was the brainchild of local angel investor Mike Stork (BBA ’77). Mike and Hennie Stork donated $1 million to start the fund with an additional $500,000 from the Marsland Family.

“The idea was to have students learn about angel investing by doing it. So as part of this experience, each term students undertake due diligence of early stage technology companies and present their analysis of these companies to the fund’s Investment Committee,” said Smith. “This process of analyzing and funding these early stage companies has become the domain of institutions such as Graphite Ventures and we are fortunate to work with them to help the students learn about early stage investing.”

Students in the Laurier Startup Fund course apply their knowledge from their business program, including understanding product-market fit, management capacity, market potential, competitive position, intellectual property protection, financial forecasting and deal structure. The course is open to undergraduate and graduate business students.

“At the end of their analysis, they have to demonstrate why an investment makes sense. Over the course of the term, the students learn how to present in a very clear and concise way, because the Investment Committee is composed of very busy people, including Aaron Bast, Mike Stork, David Ceolin (BBA ’89) and Frank Erschen (BBA ’81),” Smith added.

The Laurier Startup Fund has made nearly 30 investments with multiple successful exits, including Irwin’s acquisition by FactSet this year. Smith said that as many early stage technology companies seek capital to grow, there will be new opportunities for Laurier graduates interested in investing and venture capital.

“The Laurier Startup Fund is an opportunity to give our students that kind of exposure. It reflects a trend within the finance industry to having more private company financing and relatively less activity in the public markets,” said Smith.

Reflecting on their journey, Whyte said the best advice he received was not to succumb to analysis-paralysis.

“You can start to question whether you’re going in the right direction instead of doing what you need to do to build the business,” Whyte said. “You have to have a vision for yourself and look into the future, but don't anchor on that. Instead, just focus on adding small, incremental pieces of value to whatever it is that you're doing every single day. The power of compounding is incredible, because what happens is those small, incremental pieces of value compound such that six months later or a year later, you look back and are amazed at the value you created.”