Ajay Agrawal (from left), Mark Machin and Mark Shulgan, co-founders of AI growth investor Intrepid Growth Partners. Credit: Intrepid Growth Partners Intrepid Growth Partners has closed its first fund at $525m and launched formally from offices in Toronto and London. Mark Machin, Mark Shulgan and Ajay Agrawal founded the firm in 2023, and it already holds nine portfolio companies, among them PhysicsX in London and StackAdapt in Toronto. The backer list is where this gets interesting.
More than 80 limited partners committed to the fund, and five of the named ones are state or state-backed: 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. Between them, those five carry public money from four countries into a private growth vehicle. Two of those governments put ministers on the record.
Evan Solomon, Canada’s minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation, framed the fund as a way to turn Canada’s research strength into companies that scale globally. Kanishka Narayan, who became Britain’s first cabinet-level AI minister in July, said investors were taking notice of British founders. Neither government is making a grant here, yet both treated a private fund’s final close as a national milestone. The founders come out of Canadian institutional capital.
Machin was president and chief executive of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Shulgan ran growth equity at OMERS, the Ontario municipal pension fund. Agrawal is an economist at the University of Toronto. Two of the three spent their careers inside the system that supplies limited partners, which is generally how an 80-investor raise gets assembled.
Machin’s departure from CPPIB is worth stating plainly, because two Canadian Crown corporations are now his limited partners. He resigned in February 2021 after travelling to the United Arab Emirates to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, at a point when Canada was advising against non-essential foreign travel. The Globe and Mail reported at the time that he had already been preparing to leave the pension fund that year. The advisory bench is unusually heavy for a first fund.
Richard Sutton, who shared the 2024 Turing Award with Andrew Barto for reinforcement learning, is a senior adviser. “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,” said Richard Sutton, Senior Adviser to Intrepid and artificial intelligence research pioneer. So are Sendhil Mullainathan of MIT, Sir Mike Wigston, a former Chief of the Air Staff, and Harley Finkelstein, the president of Shopify. “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,” said Ajay Agrawal, Co-founder and Partner. Intrepid is looking for companies exploiting that shift rather than companies making an existing task run faster, at growth stage, with a stated focus on the Canada-UK corridor alongside the US and Europe. The portfolio shows one overlap worth noting. PhysicsX raised $300m in June at a $2.4bn valuation in a round Temasek led and Intrepid joined, which makes Temasek both a limited partner in the fund and a co-investor beside it.
PhysicsX builds simulation models for engineering, including an aircraft design tool trained on 25 million geometries. StackAdapt, which runs an AI programmatic advertising platform, raised $235m at $2.5bn in February 2025. Intrepid also led a $72m Series C for CoLab in St John’s last November. Against this year’s AI funds, $525m is modest.
Accel raised $5bn in April for late-stage AI at an average cheque of $200m, and Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive have both closed vehicles above $10bn. Intrepid is pitching specialism and a geography instead of scale, into a market where UK venture funding alone doubled to $10.5bn in the first four months of 2026. Six of the nine portfolio companies have not been named. Nor have the fund’s term, its target return, its cheque size, or how much any single limited partner committed been named.
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