Intrepid Growth Partners, a specialist growth investor dedicated to AI, has launched a longside the final close of its inaugural $525 million fund.
Intrepid was founded in 2023 by Mark Machin, former president & CEO of Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), Mark Shulgan, former head of growth equity at OMERS, and Ajay Agrawal, Professor at the University of Toronto and a leading AI economist.
Their shared vision has been to position Intrepid as a specialist AI-focused growth investor dedicated to backing the next generation of AI leaders.
Intrepid’s first fund is backed by more than 80 global Limited Partners, including multiple institutional investors and sovereign wealth funds – notably Temasek, Abu Dhabi Investment Council, British Business Bank, Export Development Canada (EDC), and Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) – alongside US and global institutions and leading family offices.
Intrepid invests in companies with demonstrated commercial traction across a range of sectors, taking a high-conviction approach to backing businesses applying AI to transform established industries and solve complex real-world problems.
It has a particular focus on the Canada-UK corridor, with its deep pool of research and engineering talent, as well as the United States and Europe.
Intrepid has investment professionals across two core offices in Toronto and London as well as a network of growth partners, senior advisers, and AI scientists. This network includes Richard Sutton, 2024 Turing Award winner and pioneer of reinforcement learning, Sendhil Mullainathan, MIT professor and MacArthur Genius, Sir Mike Wigston, former chief of the air staff, Royal Air Force, and Harley Finkelstein, president of Shopify.
“We are singularly focused on finding and backing the next generation of ambitious AI founders,” said Machin. “We are grateful for the confidence our Limited Partners have placed in Intrepid and in the team we have built.”
Shulgan said: “AI is changing the investment landscape as profoundly as it is changing business and creating new category leaders. As the range of outcomes widens, investors need to be prepared to challenge established assumptions and think much further ahead.
“We start by developing a view of how AI could redefine an industry over the next decade and work backwards from there. We’ve already put that approach into practice with an exceptional group of companies and founders who are on the path to becoming global leaders.”
Agrawal added: “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.”
Sutton, senior adviser to Intrepid and artificial intelligence research pioneer, said: “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.”
UK AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said: “Britain is producing some of the most exciting AI founders anywhere in the world, and investors are taking notice. Intrepid’s commitment will help more of those companies turn big ideas into global businesses, creating jobs, attracting investment and strengthening the UK’s position on the world stage.”
Christine Hockley, managing director and co-head of funds at the British Business Bank, said: “The UK’s depth of AI research, engineering talent and entrepreneurship gives it a real opportunity to build the next generation of globally significant technology companies.
“Realising that potential requires deeper pools of scale up funding and specialist investors with the capital, expertise and international networks to support companies through their next phase of growth. Intrepid brings that combination, and its commitment to the UK strengthens the ecosystem available to ambitious AI founders building global businesses.”
Jacomo Corbo, CEO and co-founder of PhysicsX, said: “We believe AI’s next frontier is the physical economy – transforming how the products, machines, and infrastructure the world depends on are designed, manufactured, and operated.
“Building for a shift of that scale requires investors who understand both the magnitude of the opportunity and the ambition and patience required to realize it. That is what we value about Intrepid: they combine a deep understanding of AI with the experience, global perspective, and long-term conviction to help build companies of lasting consequence.”
Intrepid was advised by Osler on legal matters and by Deloitte on financial matters.