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The HarbourVest Toronto Team

Sophia Maizel, CFA

Vice President

Toronto

About Sophia

Sophia Maizel joined HarbourVest in 2015 to help expand the Firm’s local presence in Canada. She focuses on sourcing, reviewing, executing, monitoring, and reporting on direct co-investments and partnerships, primarily in the Canadian market. Sophia has been involved with several of the Firm’s direct co-investments, including Q4 Inc, Sonder, and Wave Financial and several partnerships including those managed by Avrio Capital, Genesys Ventures, Georgian Partners, Golden Ventures, Information Venture Partners, iNovia Investments, McRock Capital, Novacap Investments, Real Ventures, Vanedge Capital, and Versant Ventures. She also serves on the Young Professionals’ Committee of the Canadian Venture Capital Association. 

Sophia joined the Firm from Export Development Canada, where she was an associate focused on the evaluation, execution, and monitoring of direct and private equity fund investments. 

Sophia received a BA in Economics and Finance from McGill University in 2012. In early 2017, she received the Chartered Financial Analyst designation. She speaks fluent Russian and French.

Continuation solutions encompass a host of transaction types in which a GP secures interim liquidity and/or additional primary capital for their LPs in a strongly performing asset, or set of assets, that the GP will continue to own and control. Specifically, they include continuation funds, new funds created by GPs for the purpose of acquiring the asset(s) that continue to be managed by the same GP and capitalized by one or several secondary buyers, or equity recapitalizations involving a direct equity or structured equity investment into a portfolio company. These transactions can also include a parallel investment from the GP’s latest fund into that same pool of assets (a “cross-fund trade”).