One of Canada’s top investors, John Ruffolo, is back from the brink with a new $500 million fund

John Ruffolo isn’t as famous as some investors, but he’s very well-known in Canadian business circles. The longtime head of Arthur Andersen’s tech, media and telecommunications practice, he joined OMERS roughly a decade ago when a former colleague became CEO and brought him aboard the pension giant to create a venture fund.

The idea was to back the most promising Canadian companies, and Ruffolo steered the unit into investments like the social media management Hootsuite, the recently acquired storytelling platform Wattpad and the e-commerce platform Shopify, among other deals. The last was particularly meaningful, given that OMERS owned around 6% of the company sailing into a 2015 IPO that valued it at roughly $1.3 billion at the time. Alas, owing to the pension fund’s rules, it also began steadily selling that entire stake, even as Shopify’s valued ticked upward. (Its market cap is currently $130 billion.)