Is There an Optimal Funding Season? What 1.3 Million Canadian Transactions Told Us About When to Raise

Every founder has heard some version of it. Don’t launch your raise in the summer, the VCs are all at the cottage. Don’t bother applying for anything in December. January is when the money comes back.

We wanted to know if any of that is actually true, so we pulled the data: every federal grant and contribution agreement disclosed by the Government of Canada — 1.33 million records — plus thirteen years of Bank of Canada lending data, quarterly venture numbers from the CVCA, and Carta’s analysis of 42,000+ US funding rounds. Here’s what the calendar really looks like for each type of capital, and more importantly what it means for when you should engage funders.

Grants Run on The Government’s Clock, Not Yours

Filter those 1.33 million federal disclosure records down to for-profit businesses and count agreements by the month they start, and the pattern is almost comically strong: in a typical year, about 34% of all federal grant agreements with businesses begin in April. In Ontario it’s even more concentrated — 37%. The worst month? November, at 3.2% of the year’s agreements. April sees roughly ten times as many funding agreements start as November.

Why? April 1 is the start of the federal fiscal year. Program budgets refresh, and new funding agreements get dated to the fiscal year they’re funded from. There are smaller bumps in July, October, and January — quarterly intake cycles — and troughs in February–March (budgets exhausted) and November–December.

But here’s the part that flips the takeaway on its head: agreement start dates are not application dates. The money that starts flowing in April was applied for months earlier. If you wait until you see April announcements to get interested in grants, you’ve already missed that year’s cycle.

When to apply — and how long it takes: work backwards from April 1. Fall and early winter — the exact months that feel dead — are prime application season for programs funding out of the next fiscal year. Track intake windows for your target programs (IRAP, regional development agencies, CanExport and the like); many open in autumn. November isn’t when grant money moves. November is when grant money is won.

Business Banking Has a Year-End, Too

The Bank of Canada publishes monthly data on new funds advanced to businesses by chartered banks. Across 2013–2025, the seasonal pattern is consistent: December lending runs about 13% above the yearly average, June about 8% above, while January–February run 10–13% below and August dips 7%. December and June came in above average in 12 of the last 13 years.

Corporate borrowers close financings before calendar year-end and half-year-end, and bankers — who have targets and fiscal calendars like everyone else (the big Canadian banks’ fiscal year actually ends October 31) — push to get deals done inside them. Then everyone goes quiet in January and February.

One honest caveat: this series measures dollars, not the number of loans, and no Canadian source publishes monthly loan counts. A few large corporate facilities can move the totals. But the rhythm is stable enough, across enough years, to treat it as real.

When to apply — and how long it takes: here’s an uncomfortable transparency gap — no Canadian source publishes official time-to-money statistics for business lending (Statistics Canada’s SME financing survey measures request and approval rates, but not wait times). In practice, a straightforward operating line or term loan typically moves in two to six weeks; anything involving security registration, a government guarantee like the CSBFP, or commercial real estate runs longer. So, start the conversation in early fall or early spring, so your file is moving while lenders are motivated to close — and not sitting in a queue during the January–February lull. If you walk into a bank in mid-December asking for speed, you’re at the back of a year-end line. If you walk in during the first week of January, you may be waiting for the machine to restart.

Venture Capital: The Q4 Sprint and The January Hangover

Venture data for Canada is quarterly (the CVCA tracks it; nobody publishes monthly Canadian VC), but the pattern is unmistakable. In 2025, Canadian VC limped through three quarters — 116, 147, and 123 deals — then closed 165 deals and $3.8 billion in Q4, the strongest fourth quarter on record for dollars. The very next quarter, Q1 2026, collapsed to 104 deals: the lowest quarterly count since 2017.

That’s not a Canadian quirk. Carta’s dataset of 42,000+ US funding rounds (2018–2024) shows December is the single busiest month for round closings at 10.8% of the year — while January (6.8%) and February (6.9%) are the slowest. And the supposed summer dead zone? May through August accounts for over a third of the year’s rounds. July alone (8.4%) beats a uniform month.

The mechanism is boring and human: funds want deals signed before year-end, lawyers and founders push to close before the holidays, and then everyone spends January taking meetings rather than wiring money.

When to apply — and how long it takes: work backwards from the close, and be honest about how long the middle takes. DocSend’s research on successful raises found the average pre-seed round took 16 weeks to close, with founders contacting 54 investors to get there; at seed, successful founders averaged around 77 investors contacted and 40 meetings held. And “closed” isn’t “funded” — after the handshake comes confirmatory diligence, legal documents, and the capital call, each typically measured in weeks. Practitioner estimates for the full journey, first outreach to money in the bank, cluster around five to nine months for early-stage rounds. Call it two quarters as a planning number.

That math is what makes the calendar actionable: kicking off in September positions you at the December close rush; kicking off in January or February positions you at a late-spring/June close. The one genuinely bad move the data supports: launching a process in late November, will land your first meetings in the January hangover. And don’t postpone a summer raise out of superstition — the “VCs disappear in July” myth is the one this data most clearly kills.

Private and Alternative Lenders: No Season at All

Non-bank business lending — private credit, asset-based lending, invoice factoring, equipment finance — is the least transparent corner of the market. The best available Canadian data (a Statistics Canada survey of financing suppliers) is only semi-annual, and it shows non-bank finance company disbursements essentially flat between halves of the year, hovering around $14–17 billion per half since 2020.

That opacity contains a useful truth: this capital is mostly event-driven, not calendar-driven. Factoring facilities get opened when a big order lands or receivables stretch; asset-based loans close when the borrower needs them to. There’s no fiscal-year spigot and no December sprint.

When to apply and how long it takes: This is the channel that’s open when the calendar is against you everywhere else, and it’s also the fastest. Setting up a factoring or asset-based facility typically takes days to a couple of weeks, and once a facility is in place, individual invoices are usually funded within a day or two. (These are industry-typical figures — like everything else in this corner of the market, nobody publishes official statistics.) If it’s February, the bank is asleep, the VCs are hungover, and grant intakes are closed — the alternative lending market will still pick up the phone.

Does The Calendar Change The Terms You Get?

Here’s the more interesting question underneath all of this. If fewer transactions happen in certain periods, does supplier power increase — do you get worse terms raising in a slow month? Or is it the opposite: when everyone’s transacting, does the cost of capital get bid up?

Within a single year, month to month, we found no evidence that terms move with the season. The December close rush affects speed, not price — nobody’s getting a worse valuation because the wire went out on December 19th rather than October 19th. The honest answer to “which month has the best terms” is: that’s not where the leverage lives.

Across the cycle, though, the data gives a clear — and for many people counterintuitive — answer. For equity, transaction volume and founder-friendly terms move together, not inversely. 2021 was the highest-volume year in Canadian VC history ($15.4B, 842 deals) and also the peak of valuations — capital had never been cheaper for founders. 2023 saw US deal counts fall to their lowest levels since 2018–19, and terms got worse, not better: down rounds ran at 19–20% of all transactions on Carta for four straight quarters (the highest since their records begin in 2018), structured terms became more common, and by Q4 2023 45% of Series A financings were bridge rounds — the highest rate on record.

So the “fewer transactions means supplier power means worse terms” intuition is correct  but not because of seasonality. It’s because in equity markets, volume is a symptom of capital supply. Deal counts fall because investors have pulled back, and investors who have pulled back drive harder bargains. Researchers documented the flip side decades ago — Gompers and Lerner called it “money chasing deals”: when money floods into venture funds, valuations inflate. Cheap capital and crowded markets arrive together.

Debt works differently. The price of a loan mostly tracks the policy rate, not deal volume — average SME borrowing costs peaked around 9% in 2023 and fell to under 6% by 2025 as the Bank of Canada cut. What moves with the credit cycle is availability: through the 2022–2024 tightening, approval rates and risk appetite contracted, then loosened again in 2025. In lending, a bad market doesn’t usually mean a worse price — it means “no.”

The practical takeaway: the year you raise in matters far more than the month. Timing your raise to a season buys you process efficiency. Timing your raise to a cycle — raising when capital is abundant, before you’re desperate — is what actually changes your terms. Which is one more argument for the oldest advice in finance: raise when you can, not when you must.

The Short Version

Grants are won in the fall and start paying out in April to June. Banks close deals in December and June and hibernate in January. VCs sprint to December and spend Q1 recovering — but they’re working all summer, whatever anyone tells you. Private lenders don’t own a calendar. And none of it matters as much as the state of the capital cycle when you show up.

Methodology

Grant figures from the Government of Canada’s Proactive Disclosure of Grants and Contributions (1,325,770 records, retrieved August 2026), filtered to for-profit recipients and counted by agreement start month; seasonal shares average 2019 and 2022–2025, excluding COVID-distorted 2020–21. Bank lending from Bank of Canada monthly funds-advanced data (business loans, chartered banks, 2013–2026), dollar volumes, not seasonally adjusted. Venture data from CVCA market reports as first published and Carta’s analysis of 42,000+ US primary rounds (2018–2024). Non-bank lending from ISED’s Biannual Survey of Suppliers of Business Financing. Timelines: CanExport SMEs published service standards (Global Affairs Canada); SR&ED program service standards (CRA); DocSend pre-seed and seed fundraising research; bank and alternative-lending timelines are industry-typical ranges, as no official Canadian statistics exist. Full dataset and charts available on request.

Sources

Government of Canada, Open Government Portal — Proactive Disclosure: Grants and Contributions — https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/432527ab-7aac-45b5-81d6-7597107a7013
Government of Canada — Grants and Contributions search — https://search.open.canada.ca/grants/
Bank of Canada, Funds advanced and outstanding balances for new and existing lending by chartered banks — https://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/banking-and-financial-statistics/funds-advanced-and-outstanding-balances-for-new-and-existing-lending-by-chartered-banks/
CVCA, Year-End 2025 Canadian Venture Capital Market Overview — https://www.cvca.ca/insights/market-reports/year-end-2025/
CVCA, Q1 2026 Canadian Venture Capital Market Overview — https://www.cvca.ca/insights/market-reports/q1-2026/
CVCA Intelligence, Venture Capital Q1 2026 data — https://intelligence.cvca.ca/reports/venture-capital/2026/q1
The Logic, "Canadian VC ended 2025 with its strongest fourth quarter on record" — https://thelogic.co/news/canada-venture-capital-startups-2025/
BetaKit, "Canadian VC sees lowest quarterly deal count in nearly a decade" — https://betakit.com/canadian-vc-sees-lowest-quarterly-deal-count-in-nearly-a-decade/
Carta, Data Desk (State of Private Markets) — https://carta.com/data/
ISED / Statistics Canada, Biannual Survey of Suppliers of Business Financing, first half 2025 — https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/sme-research-statistics/en/biannual-survey-suppliers-business-financing-data-analysis-first-half-2025
ISED, Small Business Credit Condition Trends, 2015–2025 — https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/sme-research-statistics/en/research-reports/small-business-credit-condition-trends-2015-2025
Global Affairs Canada, CanExport SMEs — Application results and service standards — https://www.tradecommissioner.gc.ca/en/our-solutions/funding-financing-international-business/canexport-smes/application-results-service-standards.html
Canada Revenue Agency, SR&ED Program Service Standards — https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/scientific-research-experimental-development-tax-incentive-program/program-service-standards.html
DocSend, The pre-seed round in 2022–23 — https://www.docsend.com/blog/docsend-pre-seed-fundraising-report/
DocSend, Seed fundraising in 2023 — https://www.docsend.com/blog/seed-fundraising-round-in-2022-23/
Gompers & Lerner, "Money Chasing Deals? The Impact of Fund Inflows on Private Equity Valuations," Journal of Financial Economics — https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=57964

CVCA Intelligence — Venture Capital Q1 2026 data — https://intelligence.cvca.ca/reports/venture-capital/2026/q1

BetaKit — “Canadian VC sees lowest quarterly deal count in nearly a decade” (press coverage) — https://betakit.com/canadian-vc-sees-lowest-quarterly-deal-count-in-nearly-a-decade/