Craig Hunter came to venture capital after building companies himself, having worked on Uber’s early team, led Bitmaker as CEO through its acquisition by General Assembly, served as GM at Ritual, and won Ivey’s Canada’s Next Top Entrepreneur award. At Amplify, he focuses on backing hard science and deep tech companies in areas like energy storage, carbon capture, and quantum hardware, pointing out that Canada makes up only about 0.5% of the world’s population yet produces world-first breakthroughs in these fields, while also staying active as a teacher and mentor through roles at Ivey Business School, Techstars, and BloomTech.

• Passionate about climate tech, energy, and grid infrastructure as core investment themes. Strongly believes innovations in the energy sector are currently more exciting than data centers, highlighted by enthusiasm for a massive Canadian hydro and wind project and direct backing of grid optimization through an investment in ThinkLabs AI.
• Drawn to challenging and heavily regulated technical spaces over easy consumer plays. Specifically favors critical industries that lack simple solutions and are inherently harder to get right, which is evident in public support for hardware and automation startups like Lumina Vehicles and Forge Automation.
• Deeply rooted in the Canadian technology ecosystem and proud of it. Frequently champions domestic startups and talent, noting a deliberate choice to stay out of San Francisco and regularly seeking local designers and agencies while proudly representing the national flag in posts.
• Interested in high quality brand design and aesthetics. Pays close attention to how companies present themselves visually, demonstrated by recently refreshing the brand for Amplify Capital and crowdsourcing the network to find top tier independent designers and creative merchandise agencies.