1 week ago
42
Radical Ventures just closed over $1 billion for a new late-stage growth fund, making it the largest venture capital raise in Canadian history. The Toronto-based firm, which has built its reputation backing AI companies like Cohere and Waabi, is now placing a very big bet that the next wave of trillion-dollar companies will come from its own backyard.
The Radical Breakouts Fund, announced on September 15 during Prime Minister Mark Carney’s inaugural Canada Investment Summit, is backed primarily by the country’s most powerful institutional investors.
Who’s writing the checks
The fund’s anchor investors read like a who’s who of Canadian institutional finance. The Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments), Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), and the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP) are all in. Major banks including TD and BMO have also committed capital.
Radical Ventures plans to deploy checks as large as $250 million per company, targeting an initial slate of roughly 12 investments.
Managing Partner Jordan Jacobs framed the fund as a way to keep decision-making and returns within Canada. That’s a pointed reference to a well-known problem in Canadian tech: promising companies reach a certain size and then look south of the border for the capital they need to grow, often relocating their headquarters in the process.
Filling the late-stage gap
The problem isn’t early-stage funding. Canada has a reasonably healthy seed and Series A ecosystem. The gap opens up at the growth stage, where companies need hundreds of millions of dollars to hire aggressively, build infrastructure, and compete globally. Without domestic sources of that capital, Canadian AI firms have typically turned to Silicon Valley investors, often accepting terms that pull the company’s center of gravity toward the US.
Radical Ventures is explicitly trying to plug that hole. The firm’s portfolio already includes Cohere, the enterprise AI platform that competes with OpenAI; Waabi, an autonomous trucking company founded by AI researcher Raquel Urtasun; and Xanadu, a quantum computing startup.
The Breakouts Fund brings Radical’s total assets under management to roughly $2.5 billion, a significant jump from the $800 million fund the firm launched in 2024. Radical has ambitions to grow the Breakouts Fund to as much as $4 billion, which would make it competitive in size with some of the larger US growth-stage vehicles.
The timing and the politics
The announcement’s timing at Carney’s Canada Investment Summit was no accident. The Canadian government has been increasingly vocal about the need to retain and grow domestic technology champions, particularly in AI.
The $250 million maximum check size positions Radical squarely in competition with US firms like Tiger Global, Coatue, and Thrive Capital for late-stage AI deals.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
English (US) ·