Pouya Farmand

- Co-founded an early-stage venture fund focused on pre-seed and seed-stage companies across fintech, deep tech, and emerging markets in Western Canada. - Operate as a founder-first investor - engaged at the board level during product formation, go-to-market, and early capital strategy. Not a passive check. - Built portfolio positioning and thesis from the ground up; sourced and led investments without institutional backing infrastructure. - Invested in 8 companies to date.

- Co-founded a psychedelic biotech company at the intersection of mental health therapeutics and emerging psychedelic medicine regulation. - Raised $10m+ across 200+ investors and listed on the CSE. - Led company formation, capital strategy, and regulatory navigation in one of the most politically complex sectors of the early 2020s. - Built and managed a cross-functional team through a science-heavy, capital-intensive product cycle under compressed timelines. - Wound down and handed over control in February 2022. The lesson: regulated biotech is a decade game and a nine-figure game. A clean exit beats a slow grind in the wrong market structure.

- Worked on over 50 transactions / $1B+ across capital markets mandates: equity raises, M&A advisory, and deal structuring for growth-stage companies in Western Canada & USA. - Gained direct exposure to the analytical frameworks and institutional infrastructure that serious capital runs on the same infrastructure retail traders have never had access to. - Developed fluency in deal architecture, financial modeling, and investor-grade diligence that now informs how I evaluate and fund companies at Darkhorse.

- Traded equities independently for four and a half years - no firm, no desk, no quant support. Just capital, a thesis, and execution. - Developed pattern recognition in market structure, position sizing, and risk management the hard way: by having real money on the line with no one to bail you out. - Built a discipline for separating signal from noise before "AI-powered signal filters" was a product category.