A Toronto and London venture capital firm led by former Canada Pension Plan Investment Board chief executive Mark Machin has closed a US$525-million artificial intelligence fund, roughly $730 million Cdn, with 55 per cent of the money coming from outside Canada.
Intrepid Growth Partners announced the final close of its inaugural fund on Monday, the opening day of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Canada Investment Summit in Toronto, a conference built on the argument that Canada must attract foreign capital to grow. The fund closed US$25 million above its target, according to the firm’s announcement carried on Business Wire.
Machin told The Globe and Mail that 45 per cent of the fund came from Canadian investors, 30 per cent from Asia and the Middle East, 15 per cent from Europe including the United Kingdom, and 10 per cent from the United States.
More than 80 limited partners backed the fund, according to BetaKit. They include Singapore’s Temasek, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council and the British Business Bank, alongside two Canadian Crown corporations, Export Development Canada and the Business Development Bank of Canada. Canadian commercial backers include CIBC, Scotiabank, HarbourVest Canada Growth Fund, Northleaf Capital Partners and Telus.
Intrepid was founded in 2023 by Machin, former OMERS head of growth equity Mark Shulgan, and Ajay Agrawal, the University of Toronto professor who co-founded Creative Destruction Lab. The firm invests up to US$50 million per company and says it has already backed nine, including Toronto adtech company StackAdapt, tax research software firm Blue J, engineering collaboration company CoLab Software and London-based PhysicsX.
That cheque size is the detail worth pausing on. Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association data for 2024, cited by BetaKit, found that 67.5 per cent of Canadian venture rounds of $50 million or more were funded by syndicates combining Canadian and American investors, a pattern that reflects how rarely domestic firms lead a large round on their own. Intrepid is writing cheques at precisely the size where that dependence begins, which is the part of the funding ladder Canadian founders most often have to leave the country to climb.
The close also sits differently from most of the numbers this week’s summit is generating. Canadian banks, pension funds and asset managers have declared intentions to deploy more than $100 billion in the country over the next decade, and the summit itself is aimed at catalyzing $1 trillion over five years. Those are commitments to invest later. A final close is capital that investors have already committed and that a fund can call now, and Intrepid made its nine investments before announcing the fund at all. For a Canadian company raising at the growth stage this autumn, that distinction is the whole difference.
Machin’s role is worth stating plainly, given where some of the money originated. He resigned as CPPIB chief executive in February 2021 after travelling to the United Arab Emirates and receiving a COVID-19 vaccine at a time when most Canadians were still waiting for theirs, as reported by CBC News and other outlets. The Globe and Mail subsequently reported that he had told the board the previous autumn he intended to leave in 2021 in any case. He is now raising capital from the Abu Dhabi Investment Council, among others.
What the close does not settle is the harder question behind the summit. Canada’s shortage has never been only money at the beginning. It has been companies that scale here and then sell or list somewhere else, taking the returns with them. Growth funds are judged on exits rather than on closes, and Intrepid’s first fund will not answer that for years.
