Saud Aziz wants to fix how Canadian businesses manage money — and he's not waiting for the banks to do it.
As co-founder of Venn, Saud is building what he calls the financial operating system for Canadian SMBs: multi-currency accounts, same-day transfers, corporate cards with granular spend controls, automated invoicing, and accounting integrations that eliminate month-end chaos. The company has crossed 10,000 business customers and recently closed a $21.5M Series A — without actively going out to raise.
Saud's path to Venn started with a cold email. After studying finance and working at a Canadian bank branch, he spotted a YouTube ad for a scrappy fintech called CoHo, messaged the CEO, and joined as employee number five doing customer support. He eventually made his way to Revolut, where he led the company's Canadian expansion — until COVID changed the calculus and the company wound down the market. Rather than pivot to the U.S. work Revolut was pivoting toward, Saud and his co-founder Amid kept talking about what they'd seen: a real gap in Canadian business banking that nobody was filling with any urgency.
They founded Venn (originally called Vault) in late 2021. It took over a year just to build the infrastructure — because the vendor ecosystem for multi-currency, business-first banking in Canada didn't exist at the quality they needed, so they built it themselves. They launched in January 2023 and have been growing fast since.
The early customer acquisition was unglamorous: thousands of cold outreaches, direct pitches, total transparency about being a startup. What unlocked the first hundred customers, Saud says, was the honesty of the ask — "we think business banking is broken; help us build something better." Canadian business owners, he found, responded to that.
The core insight driving Venn's product is simple but consequential: more than 90% of their customer base transacts in USD, but Canadian banks still make cross-border business banking painful. Canadian businesses are still receiving physical checks from U.S. customers because they can't accept ACH. They're sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars while their corporate card limit is $3,000. Their finance person is still manually chasing receipts weeks after travel.
Venn is solving all of it — not as a wedge, but as a primary banking relationship. Payroll and revenue collection are the two transactions no business can afford to get wrong. That's the trust Venn is earning, one feature at a time.
Saud sees a generational shift underway in Canada: more nationalism around buying Canadian, more corporate jobs leading people toward entrepreneurship, more second-generation founders taking over family businesses and pushing them to grow faster. Venn wants to be the platform that powers all of them.
Advice for our audience from Saud:
- Cold email the founder. Take any role. Starting at the ground floor is an advantage, not a disadvantage.
- When selling something that holds people's money, transparency about being a startup beats polish every time.
- Don't optimize for the edge-case wedge. If you want the primary banking relationship, go after it directly from day one.
- Build your own infrastructure if the vendor ecosystem can't support your core differentiation — don't compromise on the thing that makes you different.
- Raise from a position of strength, not desperation. Keep the team lean, don't chase growth at all costs, and let the product do the talking.
- Think globally about capital. Canadian investors are great, but limiting your fundraise to one market is an unnecessary constraint.
- The pain points you solve need to be strong enough that people are already Googling for a solution — that's what makes performance marketing work in B2B.
- Real-time financial insights are more valuable than year-end summaries. Help people know about a cashflow pinch two months out, not two days out.
- Focus on building a durable, sustainable business first. Good fundamentals attract capital — you don't always have to go looking for it.
