Damien Steel is a longtime operator-turned-investor who founded and exited a tech-enabled healthcare business before joining OMERS Ventures, where he uses the pension fund's broader asset base—highways, ports, real estate, and operating companies—as a value-creation tool for startups, such as pairing autonomous trucking startup Embark with OMERS-owned infrastructure assets. He has publicly criticized the venture ecosystem's fixation on headline valuations and unicorn labels, arguing for focus on deal quality and fundamentals over hype, and recently made the uncommon move of leaving his senior VC role to become founding CEO of Deep Sky, a carbon-removal company OMERS helped seed. Damien Steel is a longtime operator-turned-investor who founded and exited a tech-enabled healthcare business before joining OMERS Ventures, where he uses the pension fund's broader asset base—highways, ports, real estate, and operating companies—as a value-creation tool for startups, such as pairing autonomous trucking startup Embark with OMERS-owned infrastructure assets. He has publicly criticized the venture ecosystem's fixation on headline valuations and unicorn labels, arguing for focus on deal quality and fundamentals over hype, and recently made the uncommon move of leaving his senior VC role to become founding CEO of Deep Sky, a carbon-removal company OMERS helped seed.