Janet Bannister is a Canadian business executive and venture capitalist. She is the founder and managing partner of Staircase Ventures.^[1] Prior to launching Staircase in 2023, she was the managing partner at Real Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm.^[2]

Bannister was a varsity long-distance runner and a national triathlon champion in Canada finishing 8th in the world at the Long Distance Triathlon World Championships in 1996.^[3] She holds a degree from the Ivey Business School at the University of Western Ontario.^[4]

Bannister started her career as a brand manager at Procter & Gamble and then as an engagement manager with McKinsey & Co. In 2001, she spent four years at eBay in Silicon Valley. In 2004, she launched Kijiji.ca which became one of Canada's most-visited websites.^[5][6][7]

Bannister is the co-chair of C100^[8] and on the boards of the Ivey Business School and LEAP,^[9] a social venture accelerator, as well as serving as a mentor at Creative Destruction Lab at the University of Toronto.^[10]

She also founded and was CEO at a venture-backed start-up prior to joining Real Ventures in 2014.^[11] In 2017, she was announced as part of a team to guide fintech strategy for the province of Ontario^[12] and the Canadian Economic Strategy Roundtable on Digital Industries.^[13]

Launched by Bannister in 2023, Staircase Ventures closed their first fund by collecting C$34 million^[14] with investors including the Royal Bank of Canada.^[15] The fund focuses on leading seed-stage financings of B2B software companies in Canada.^[16]

In October 2023, it led the Calgary fintech startup Fillip to a C$5m seed round of fundraising.^[17] By February 2024, the firm had also led seed rounds of funding for other Canadian startups including AI drug discovery platform Biossil and Rhenthi, a marketing automation platform, along with a C$6m round for AI-focused Sibli.^[18]

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