Mark Scott on building venture capital for Ottawa tech
The co-founder of N-Able and Fully Managed, now a partner at Top Down Ventures, discusses why Ottawa remains a critical tech hub and where the real opportunity lies.
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Mark Scott doesn't live in Ottawa anymore. But he hasn't stopped watching.
Scott helped launch two companies in the city that sold for more than $250 million combined—N-Able, which makes remote IT monitoring software, and Fully Managed (formerly TUC), a managed services provider. He then moved to Toronto. Yet he remained close enough to the city's tech ecosystem that in 2024 he founded Top Down Ventures with two former Fully Managed executives, Joel Abramson and Chris Day.
The fund focuses narrowly on early-stage software companies in the managed IT services space—a sector now worth $600 billion globally. It's a departure from the traditional venture approach of investing horizontally across many categories, the way Terry Matthews and Celtic House do. Instead, Scott and his partners identify companies a few years old with about $1 million in recurring revenue and write cheques of $1 million to $3 million US to help them scale to the next phase.
In two years, Top Down has invested in 28 companies. Its first Founders Fund closed at US$28 million, beating its US$25-million target.
Scott credits his operating background—he's a chartered accountant and a chartered professional accountant—with shaping his investment philosophy. "My approach, whether it was from N-Able or Fully Managed, was definitely, 'Let's solve a business problem first and leverage technology to be able to execute on it,'" he said in an interview with the Ottawa Business Journal.
What distinguishes Top Down in the venture ecosystem, he said, is the presence of actual founders and operators making decisions. "I think it's a big missing thing, frankly, in the Canadian venture capital ecosystem where you don't have a lot of real operators—people that have actually sat in those CEO shoes, bootstrapped the company and built it."
Scott remains bullish on Ottawa as a tech source. The city produced two major wins in his portfolio, and he keeps a close eye on emerging founders and companies. The managed IT services space is particularly ripe for disruption from younger companies willing to build with operators' hands-on experience rather than venture playbooks.
"There's nobody funding those types of businesses," Scott said of the gap Top Down identified. For a city that built its reputation on successful tech exits, the question now is whether the next generation of founders will stay and build in Ottawa, or whether they'll follow Scott's path and head elsewhere to raise capital.