Canada’s venture capital landscape hit a new milestone this month as two of the country’s most prominent private investors — Toronto-based Radical Ventures and the Weston family’s Wittington Ventures — unveiled funds aimed at keeping homegrown startups funded, and headquartered, in Canada.
Radical Ventures announced the first close of its Radical Breakouts Fund, which it describes as the largest venture capital fund ever raised in Canada. The late-stage strategy has secured more than US$1 billion in commitments from a roster of major pension funds and banks, including PSP Investments, CPP Investments, the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan, TD Bank Group, BMO Financial Group, CI Global Asset Management and OPTrust. The fund will target artificial intelligence scale-ups on a path to becoming trillion-dollar businesses.
Why Late-Stage Capital Has Been Canada’s Gap
Radical co-founder and managing partner Jordan Jacobs said Canada has never lacked world-class AI companies but has consistently lacked capital at the scale needed to keep them growing domestically. “For decades that meant our best companies looked to the United States to fund their most important years, and much of the value they created went with them,” he said, adding that the Breakouts Fund is designed to close that gap.
The fund’s backers echoed that framing. CPP Investments chief executive John Graham said the firm has partnered with Radical since its first institutional fund in 2019 and that the new vehicle extends that relationship into companies scaling at a later stage. PSP Investments president and CEO Deborah K. Orida said her organization has been an anchor investor in Radical since its earliest fund, while HOOPP president and CEO Annesley Wallace said the investment deepens the pension plan’s exposure to “transformative AI technologies.” TD’s Raymond Chun and BMO’s Darryl White both framed their banks’ participation as support for scaling Canadian companies into global champions, pointing to prior Radical-backed firms such as Cohere, Waabi and Xanadu.
The announcement came at the inaugural Canada Investment Summit in Toronto, a gathering convened by Prime Minister Mark Carney alongside CPP Investments and PSP Investments that is seeking to attract $1 trillion in new investment to Canada over five years. The same summit produced a separate $50-billion infrastructure vehicle, the Maple Fund, jointly launched by CPP Investments and Brookfield Asset Management to back large-scale projects, underscoring a broader push by the country’s largest institutional investors to deploy capital domestically.
Weston Family Deepens Its Startup Bets
Separately, billionaire Galen Weston Jr. expanded his venture capital commitments through Wittington Ventures, the private capital arm of his family’s holding company. The unit launched a new $180-million fund — its third dedicated venture vehicle — that will back Series A and Series B startups in sectors tied to the family’s commercial and philanthropic interests, including commerce, healthcare, consumer goods, climate and food, according to managing partner Jim Orlando.
The new fund brings Wittington’s total venture capital commitments to $400 million across three funds, on top of two earlier vehicles that deployed $100 million and $120 million, largely into U.S.-based startups. Including its early-stage and later-stage growth strategies, Wittington has now committed $820 million across five private capital funds since launching seven years ago. Its early-stage fund, focused on turning Canadian research into startups, has backed Toronto-based Grey Matter Neurosciences and led a $4.9-million seed round for Vancouver’s ViewsML Technologies.
“The numbers matter not because getting bigger was the objective, but because they show what the platform is now capable of doing,” Orlando said, adding that the approach remains rooted in “patient capital” and hands-on operating support.
Recent Canadian Venture Capital Commitments
A Broader Investment Picture — With Caveats
The fresh venture commitments arrive alongside a wider debate about the quality of capital flowing into Canada. Foreign direct investment reached nearly $100 billion last year, the highest level since 2007, but a large share has been driven by mergers and acquisitions rather than new business formation. BMO chief economist Doug Porter has noted that M&A — largely U.S. buyers acquiring Canadian firms — made up the bulk of the recent FDI upturn, which he described as “somewhat unfortunate” compared with new investment such as factory construction.
Jim Balsillie, chair of the Council of Canadian Innovators, has argued that Canada’s policy of promoting all foreign investment without distinguishing between physical-asset acquisitions and intellectual-property-generating tech investment obscures how much value is actually being retained domestically. Against that backdrop, venture vehicles like the Radical Breakouts Fund and Wittington’s expanded platform are being positioned by their backers as mechanisms to keep late-stage capital — and the returns it generates — inside Canada rather than flowing abroad.
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