Toronto-based Radical Ventures has raised more than US$1 billion for what it calls the largest venture capital fund in Canadian history, betting that Canadian pension money can keep homegrown artificial intelligence companies from following the well-worn path south of the border.
The firm announced the first close of its Radical Breakouts Fund on Sept. 15, 2026, at Prime Minister Mark Carney’s inaugural Canada Investment Summit in Toronto, according to a company news release. Limited partners include the Public Sector Pension Investment Board, CPP Investments, the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan, TD Bank Group, BMO Financial Group, CI Global Asset Management and OPTrust.
Jordan Jacobs, Radical’s co-founder and managing partner, said in the release that Canada has “never had a shortage of world-class AI companies,” but has lacked “capital at the scale required to keep them here as they grow.” The fund targets late-stage AI companies that are staying private longer and raising successive multi-billion-dollar rounds on the way to what Radical calls trillion-dollar valuations, a strategy meant to keep ownership, jobs and eventual public listings in Canada rather than losing them to an acquisition or a move south.
The gap Radical is trying to close shows up in the numbers. Purely Canadian-backed investors made up roughly one-third of the country’s seed-stage rounds in 2022, according to OECD data cited by The Logic, but their share of later-stage financing had fallen to just nine per cent by the time growth capital was needed most, pushing founders toward American venture firms instead. Miles Schwartz, founder of Montreal-born payments company Zum Rails, told the outlet that after his company raised US$7.5 million from Arthur Ventures, a U.S. investor, in 2024, he relocated to Miami as the business expanded south, saying American venture capitalists were “hungrier, faster” than the funding available at home.
Radical’s fund is the third major Canadian capital vehicle aimed at that stage of company-building to surface within roughly a week. Royal Bank of Canada said Sept. 9 it would mobilize $1.4 billion for a new RBCx growth fund for Canadian technology companies, and Toronto-based Intrepid Growth Partners, led by former OMERS, CPP Investments and Creative Destruction Lab executives, closed a separate US$525-million fund on Sept. 14 to back AI-native companies. All three announcements landed in the same window as Carney’s investment summit and a federal tax measure, unveiled Sept. 15, that cut the marginal effective tax rate on new business investment to 6.4 per cent, the lowest in the G7.
Radical’s existing portfolio includes Toronto-based Cohere and self-driving truck developer Waabi. The firm previously raised an US$800-million growth fund in 2024. Before this week, the largest comparable Canadian vehicle was Georgian’s 2021 alignment fund, which also topped US$1 billion. Radical has not disclosed a target size for the Breakouts Fund beyond describing it as multi-billion-dollar, and did not say when a final close is expected.
