Three Canada-linked investment funds worth a combined US$2.5 billion launched within a single week this month, all aimed at a problem the country’s tech industry has been warning about for months: a shortage of growth-stage capital that pushes homegrown artificial intelligence and technology companies to sell to foreign buyers or relocate south of the border.
The announcements came during Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Canada Investment Summit in Toronto, a gathering of 100 major global institutional investors that organizers say is meant to help attract $1 trillion in investment over five years. A running tally by industry publication BetaKit counted more than $400 billion in commitments and new funds during the summit’s first week, spanning banks, pension plans and private investors.
Among them: RBC announced Sept. 9, 2026, that its new RBCx Growth Fund would target US$1 billion (C$1.4 billion) for Canadian technology companies in sectors including enterprise software, healthtech, cleantech and agtech, with the bank contributing up to US$300 million and the remainder coming from third-party investors. “When they’re ready to scale, too often they get pulled elsewhere,” RBC president and chief executive Dave McKay said in a statement announcing the fund. “The RBCx Growth Fund I is about changing that.”
Five days later, on Sept. 14, 2026, Toronto and London-based Intrepid Growth Partners said it had closed its debut fund at US$525 million (C$730 million), US$25 million above target. Intrepid, co-founded in 2023 by former Canada Pension Plan Investment Board chief executive Mark Machin, former OMERS growth-equity head Mark Shulgan and University of Toronto professor Ajay Agrawal, invests up to US$50 million per company with what it calls a focus on the “Canada-U.K. corridor.” Its backers include Temasek, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council, the U.K.’s British Business Bank, Export Development Canada and the Business Development Bank of Canada, and it has already backed four Canadian firms, including Toronto adtech company StackAdapt.
Then on Sept. 15, 2026, Toronto’s Radical Ventures announced its Breakouts Fund had a first close above US$1 billion (roughly C$1.4 billion), backed by seven Canadian pension and financial institutions, including the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, PSP Investments, HOOPP, TD, BMO, CI Global Asset Management and OPTrust. The fund targets late-stage AI companies aiming to stay private through valuations of $100 billion or more. “Canada has never had a shortage of world-class AI companies,” Radical co-founder Jordan Jacobs said in a statement. “What we have lacked is capital at the scale required to keep them here as they grow.”
The funds respond to warnings that built through 2026. A Council of Canadian Innovators report, based on interviews with 31 founders at 30 companies, concluded Canada is “systematically” losing promising startups to foreign acquirers, according to Laurent Carbonneau, the council’s vice-president of policy, who cited insufficient growth capital as one of four recurring obstacles alongside thin domestic customer bases, scarce specialized talent and a fragmented scale-up ecosystem. Separately, the Dominion List, a database launched this year by venture investor Antoine Nivard, has tracked 552 companies with Canadian-connected founders building in the United States, including 53 unicorns that have together raised more than US$600 billion.
Whether the new capital changes that trajectory is untested. Nivard has argued Canadian founders succeeding abroad “should be a point of pride rather than a grievance.” But the wager behind RBC’s, Intrepid’s and Radical’s funds is that with enough late-stage money available at home, fewer of Canada’s AI and technology companies will need to look elsewhere to grow.
