Intrepid Growth Partners has now completed its inaugural fund at $525m, with operations launching from Toronto and London simultaneously. The three founders—Mark Machin, Mark Shulgan and Ajay Agrawal—established the firm in 2023 and have already assembled a portfolio of nine companies, including PhysicsX in London and StackAdapt in Toronto.

The investor composition reveals significant government involvement. Beyond 80 limited partners overall, five are state-controlled or state-backed entities: Temasek, Abu Dhabi Investment Council, the British Business Bank, Export Development Canada and the Business Development Bank of Canada. The last two are Canadian Crown corporations, collectively channelling public capital from four nations into a single private growth vehicle.

Government officials publicly endorsed the fund's launch. Canada's minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation, Evan Solomon, characterized the vehicle as a mechanism for converting Canada's research capabilities into globally scalable enterprises. Britain's newly appointed cabinet-level AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, who took office in July, highlighted investor recognition of British founders. While neither government provided direct grants, both treated the fund's closure as a significant national achievement.

The founding team emerged from Canada's institutional investment ecosystem. Machin previously served as president and chief executive of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Shulgan held a growth equity position at OMERS, Ontario's municipal pension fund. Agrawal is an economist based at the University of Toronto. Their backgrounds within the institutional capital system facilitated the assembly of such a large investor base.

Machin's transition warrants attention given that two Canadian Crown corporations now serve as limited partners. He departed CPPIB in February 2021 following a trip to the United Arab Emirates to receive a COVID-19 vaccine at a time when Canada discouraged non-essential international travel. The Globe and Mail reported at that time that his departure had already been in preparation.

The advisory roster is notably extensive for a debut fund. Richard Sutton, who shared the 2024 Turing Award with Andrew Barto for work in reinforcement learning, serves as senior adviser. The bench also includes Sendhil Mullainathan from MIT, Sir Mike Wigston, former Chief of the Air Staff, and Harley Finkelstein, Shopify's president.

The rise and spread of AI teaches us not to assume today's methods define tomorrow's possibilities. The most important advances have come from systems that learn and discover for themselves. We are now approaching another transition: from AI built predominantly on human data to AI that learns continually from experience. That will create new opportunities for entrepreneurs. Intrepid's focus on AI's longer-term trajectory, and on backing people building towards it, makes the firm distinctive.

Richard Sutton, Senior Adviser to Intrepid

AI makes prediction dramatically cheaper. Prediction is a key input to decision-making. When the price of an input falls, its scarce complements become more valuable: judgment, proprietary data, distribution, workflow redesign, and the ability to reorganize entire systems. As investors, that is where we are looking: not simply for companies using AI to make an existing task faster, but for founders working towards a vision that exploits low-cost prediction to dramatically improve how some critical goods are produced or a service is delivered and, in doing so, builds enduring global businesses.

Ajay Agrawal, Co-founder and Partner

The fund targets growth-stage companies pursuing transformative applications of AI rather than incremental efficiency gains, with geographic emphasis on the Canada-UK corridor alongside the US and Europe.

An interesting dynamic exists within the portfolio. PhysicsX, which develops simulation models for engineering applications including aircraft design tools trained on 25 million geometries, raised $300m in June at a $2.4bn valuation in a round led by Temasek, with Intrepid participating. This arrangement makes Temasek simultaneously a limited partner in the fund and a co-investor alongside it.

StackAdapt, operating an AI-powered programmatic advertising platform, secured $235m at a $2.5bn valuation in February 2025. Intrepid also led a $72m Series C investment in CoLab, based in St John's, last November.

In the context of 2025 AI fund closures, $525m represents a modest sum. Accel raised $5bn in April for late-stage AI with an average cheque of $200m, while both Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive have closed funds exceeding $10bn. Intrepid is positioning itself through specialization and geographic focus rather than capital scale, entering a market where UK venture funding alone doubled to $10.5bn in the first four months of 2026.

Six of the nine portfolio companies remain unnamed. The fund has also not disclosed its term, target returns, typical cheque size, or individual limited partner commitments.

Source: The Next Web