Emily Mercy and Elliot Warner were final-year students at Ivey Business School when a capstone assignment ran directly into a problem they were already living. Blake Bunting, a fellow Western student, joined them after the class ended. They kept going to sustainable investing events, hearing about projects that were changing communities, and asking how to invest in them. The answer was always some version of you can’t, unless you were accredited, wealthy, or well connected. Everything else available to everyday Canadians was full of greenwashing and vague promises.
The class ended. The problem didn’t. That’s what became Goparity Canada, now a licensed Exempt Market Dealer registered across six provinces, connecting everyday investors to real projects, with a track record that includes its first fully repaid loan and its largest campaign to date. I asked Emily about turning a class project into a regulated business, what building Goparity Canada has taught her about trust, and what it’s like leading alongside two co-founders who see every problem differently than she does.
Take us back to the beginning. Goparity Canada started as a New Venture Project at Ivey. What was the original idea, and what made you, Elliot, and Blake decide to actually build it rather than leave it as a class project?
The first thing they teach you in business school is to ask what problem you’re solving for. Every business solves a problem for their customer. At Ivey, our capstone project was to create a new venture, and it asked us to stay entirely focused on a single problem.
We didn’t have to go looking for one. We were already living it. Elliot and I were in our final year, going to sustainable investing events and listening to people talk about projects that were changing communities. Then we’d ask how we could invest in them, and the answer was always some version of “you can’t.” You needed to be accredited, or wealthy, or well connected. Meanwhile the products we, and the vast majority of Canadians, could access were full of greenwashing, vague claims and empty promises. We were being told to invest in our future, but the future we cared about wasn’t for sale to people like us. Most Canadians were in the same position.
When the course ended, we got our grade. The problem was still there. Everything we’d built in class to solve it hadn’t solved anything. So we kept digging. Blake joined us, and we took the idea through Student Energy’s fellowship. Our professors, TechAlliance, Western University, the Morrissette accelerator and some early grant funding gave us enough support to keep going. Then in 2021 we met the Goparity team in Portugal, who had already proven this model in Europe. Looking back, we never really made a decision to build it. We just couldn’t stop working on it.
Going from a student project to a licensed Exempt Market Dealer registered across six provinces is a serious regulatory and operational climb. What was hardest to get right, and what surprised you about that process?
Being young and naive turned out to be one of our biggest blessings. At the time we had serious imposter syndrome. We didn’t have the experience or the know-how, and we assumed that meant nobody would take us seriously. Some people didn’t. But the ones who mattered did: our lawyer, our early investors, our partners in Portugal. Not knowing what we couldn’t do meant we tried to do everything ourselves. Blake had around 40 free 30-minute calls with lawyers across the country. Each call taught him a little more, and bit by bit he put together a picture of the regulatory landscape while working out which lawyer would be the best and most efficient partner for us. We learned securities law thirty minutes at a time.
The hardest part was that we couldn’t just copy what worked in Europe. Canada has one of the most complex securities markets in the world, so we had to rebuild almost everything: a new investment product, a new onboarding and KYC process, and a compliance framework regulators could understand. We spent nearly two years preparing and waiting before we got the final OK.
What surprised me most was how much my view of regulation changed. At first, I saw securities law as something that stifled innovation. It seemed built for the big banks and institutions already here, and it made things hard and expensive for anyone new to break in. Every requirement felt like another wall between us and the people we wanted to serve. Now I’m grateful for it. The rules exist to protect the same person we were building for: someone investing for the first time, who deserves not to get hurt. From the moment we launched our investment product, we’ve operated under a comprehensive regulatory framework that does its job of protecting investors. All of our early work is the reason people can trust us today.
Your first fully repaid project supported Barkley Project Group’s clean energy work with Indigenous communities in Western Canada. What did seeing that loan repaid in full mean to you, and what did it prove about the model?
When that loan was fully repaid, Blake, Elliot and I were all in Newfoundland doing a roadshow for our launch in the province. One of the people who came out that day was a local beekeeper. That evening we mentioned to him that our very first project had just been repaid in full. He drove back to his farm and came back to our hotel to give us a bottle of his homemade mead, in true friendly Newfoundland fashion.
As a founder, you’re always thinking about what’s next. You’re focused on the big picture and on whatever task gets you to the next milestone. A $50K repayment could easily have been one more line on a to-do list. But reflecting on that win, the first of many, gave us a much-needed pause. And celebrating it gave us perspective.
It also proved something about the model. Barkley was our first project when we opened in June 2023. Until it was repaid, everything we’d said about Goparity was a promise. After it was repaid, we had a track record. Investors got their money back with interest, and the clean energy work happened, so impact and return weren’t a trade-off. And repayment is where the cycle starts again. When a loan comes back, investors can put that money into the next project, so even a small investment can keep working and growing long after the first project is done.
Impact investing asks people to trust a platform with their money and their values at the same time. How do you think about earning that trust with everyday investors who might be putting in as little as $20?
Every investor deserves access to good investments, no matter how much they’re investing. On our platform, everyone gets the same terms for the same project, whatever the amount.
That’s been tested in practice. One of our most recent examples is 7Gen Fleet Decarbonization, a Vancouver-based company that helps fleet operators switch to electric vehicles. Every month those fleets are on the road, they earn carbon credits, but those credits aren’t paid out until the following spring, sometimes up to a year later. So we created a way for investors to finance the future value of those credits today. 7Gen passes those savings on to fleet operators through lower monthly lease payments, which makes it easier for them to go electric. When we launched the first campaign, Thrive Impact Fund came in as an anchor investor. They invested on the same terms as individual investors, and it gave our community the confidence to support the project. To date, we’ve raised half a million dollars for 7Gen, making it our single largest campaign ever on the platform: $200,000 from Thrive Impact Fund and $300,000 from individuals investing anywhere from $20 and up. All on exactly the same terms.
To me, that’s how trust is earned: you bring people into the deal instead of leaving them on the outside of it. Most people have been told for a long time that the good opportunities aren’t meant for them. You can’t fix that with a marketing message. You fix it by actually opening the door.
Transparency is the other half of it. We put the risks of every investment at the forefront, not in the fine print. We explain investing risks in plain language, and want people to go in with their eyes open. Our borrowers are real businesses doing hard work, often in places where they’re up against forces they can’t control. When one of them hits a challenge, we share it with our investors openly, even when the outcome is still uncertain. Those updates aren’t easy to write. But every time, our community has responded with understanding, and often with encouragement for the borrower. People want to know what’s happening with their money, and they want to know the people behind the project too. I think that’s a big part of why people come to us, and why they stay. They don’t expect every project to go perfectly. They expect to know what’s going on, the good and the hard parts alike.
Building something with co-founders changes how decisions get made. What has that partnership taught you about leading together rather than alone?
Elliot, Blake and I came into this as co-founders with very different minds. Blake has a mechanical engineering background and a persistent nature, which enabled him to call forty lawyers to get one answer. Elliot is a software engineer who sees how all the systems connect. I come from the creative, storytelling side of business. Put the three of us in a room and we’ll often see the same problem three different ways. The best decisions we’ve made were rarely ones any of us walked in with. They came out of the argument.
Our partnership was never just the three of us. When we met the Goparity team in Portugal in 2021, we were students with an idea, and they had already built this model in Europe and proven it. They could easily have treated Canada as an expansion to run from Lisbon. Instead they backed us as founders, gave us their brand, platform and investment, and trusted us to rebuild the model for a very different market.
The perspective of our partners in Europe, and Nuno, Goparity’s CEO, brings another kind of difference to the table, and it’s an incredibly important one. Nuno has years of experience building and running Goparity, and he’s already faced many of the challenges we’re only now meeting. What we bring is the Canadian context: our regulators, our investors, our communities and the way business gets done here. Neither side has the full picture alone. When we bring both perspectives into the same conversation, that’s where our best decisions get made. Overall, the partnership has taught me that disagreement is a gift, and the importance of welcoming a conflicting perspective. It’s also taught me that you can’t hold onto every part of the business. You have to trust the people next to you to carry their part as well as you would carry it yourself, or better.
For a founder trying to turn a student project or side idea into something real and regulated, what’s the one lesson from your journey you’d want them to hear?
Seek the guidance of others and always trust yourself. You don’t have to know everything, and you won’t. Bringing in outside perspectives from people with the right expertise is one of the most valuable things you can do. Experts are often more willing to help than you’d expect, especially when you’re a student. Use that. Ask the question, book the call, then do it again. Lean on others, but remember that you’re the driving force. Advice can show you the way, but you’re the one who will get this over the finish line.
Key Takeaways
- A class project is only a starting point if the problem is still there after the grade. Goparity Canada exists because the gap it identified didn’t close when the assignment ended.
- Not knowing what you “can’t” do can be an advantage. Forty cold calls to lawyers, thirty minutes at a time, built the regulatory knowledge an experienced operator might have outsourced too early.
- A single repaid loan can matter more than its dollar value. $50,000 repaid in full turned a promise into a track record, and gave the model its first real proof point.
- Trust compounds when everyone gets the same deal. Anchor investors and $20 contributors investing on identical terms is what makes the platform’s credibility real, not just claimed.
- Transparency includes the hard updates, not just the wins. Sharing setbacks openly, even with uncertain outcomes, is what kept the community’s confidence rather than eroding it.
- Co-founder friction is a feature, not an obstacle. The best decisions came from disagreement between three people who each saw the same problem differently.
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