Radical Ventures
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Last reviewed
Jun 7, 2026
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Radical Ventures is a Toronto-based venture capital firm that invests exclusively in artificial intelligence companies. Founded in 2017 by Jordan Jacobs and Tomi Poutanen, the firm was among the first dedicated AI venture funds in North America. It writes early checks into seed and Series A AI startups through its core early-stage funds and follows them with capital from a later-stage growth fund. Radical operates from offices in Toronto, San Francisco, and London, and by 2025 it managed roughly US$2.5 billion in assets across its funds. The firm is closely tied to Canada's deep-learning research community: co-founders Jacobs and Poutanen also helped establish the Vector Institute, and the firm counts Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li among its backers and partners. Its portfolio includes Cohere, Waabi, Twelve Labs, World Labs, and Untether AI, among others.
Radical Ventures was founded in 2017 in Toronto by Jordan Jacobs and Tomi Poutanen, the entrepreneurs who had earlier co-founded the enterprise machine-learning company Layer 6 AI in 2016. TD Bank Group acquired Layer 6 about 15 months after it was founded, and the team joined the bank, with Jacobs taking on the role of Chief AI Officer for business and strategy. The two soon left to build a venture firm focused entirely on AI, a thesis that was unusual at the time because most generalist funds treated AI as one vertical among many rather than the organizing principle of the firm.
The first vehicle, Radical Fund I, was small. A 2019 BetaKit account put it at just under C$13 million, effectively a seed fund used to back early Canadian AI companies such as the antibody-search startup BenchSci. Early reporting also named Benji Sucher and Maks Volkovs among the people involved in the firm's formation alongside Jacobs and Poutanen. The leadership team expanded over the following years as Radical scaled into an institutional manager. Salim Teja, formerly of the Toronto innovation hub MaRS, joined as a partner, and Aaron Brindle joined as a partner leading public affairs. Both are sometimes described loosely as part of the founding group, but the firm itself credits Jacobs and Poutanen as its co-founders.
Radical's defining characteristic is that it invests only in artificial intelligence. The firm has framed its work around a conviction that AI will rewrite essentially all software over the coming decade, and it concentrates on backing the researchers and operators it believes can build category-defining AI companies. This focus distinguishes it from generalist Silicon Valley funds and from the broader category of generative AI and AI agents investing that became fashionable later. Radical describes itself as writing first checks into AI companies, then supporting them through their growth.
The firm's roots run directly into Canada's academic AI ecosystem. Jacobs and Poutanen were instrumental in founding the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Toronto in 2017, which they pitched to Geoffrey Hinton and University of Toronto professor Richard Zemel. Vector launched the same year with C$135 million in combined government and industry funding and became one of three national centres anchoring Canada's AI strategy. Hinton, often called a godfather of deep learning, has served as Vector's chief scientific advisor. That shared lineage gives Radical unusually deep access to the Toronto research community, and the firm has leaned on those relationships when sourcing and diligencing technical founders.
Radical scaled rapidly from its small first fund into a multi-billion-dollar manager. In 2019 it announced its first institutional fund, a roughly US$350 million (about C$471 million) vehicle, marking the point at which Jacobs left TD Bank to run the firm full time. It later raised a US$100 million Opportunity Fund for follow-on investments into its best companies.
In January 2023, Radical announced it was raising a US$550 million fund aimed at North American AI companies at the Series A stage. Backers of that fund reportedly included the family office of former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li. In August 2024 the firm announced a US$800 million growth fund, its first vehicle dedicated to later-stage AI businesses, allowing it to write larger checks into bigger companies, including its own portfolio companies as they matured. At announcement, Radical said it had already closed the majority of the fund, and reporting at the time put the firm's total assets under management at about US$1.8 billion. The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) was an anchor limited partner, contributing US$75 million to the growth fund as part of a relationship that exceeded US$200 million across Radical's funds since 2019.
In October 2025, Radical held a final close of US$650 million (about C$907 million) for a new early-stage fund, which it described as its fourth fund in the early-stage category and its sixth fund overall. CPP Investments again committed US$75 million, bringing its cumulative investment in Radical to roughly US$280 million since 2019. Other limited partners across the firm's funds have included pension funds, endowments, and large institutional investors, along with strategic backers such as TD, the Public Sector Pension Investment Board, and Wittington Investments. By 2025 the firm reported managing more than US$2.5 billion in assets and operating from three global hubs in Toronto, San Francisco, and London.
Radical's portfolio is concentrated in AI across infrastructure, foundation models, applied software, and autonomy. Its best-known investment is Cohere, the Toronto-based large-language-model company building enterprise AI; Radical was an early backer and participated in Cohere's US$40 million Series A in 2021, which was led by Index Ventures. By 2025 Cohere was valued at roughly US$5.5 billion.
In autonomy, Radical is an investor in Waabi, the autonomous-trucking company founded by University of Toronto professor Raquel Urtasun, which raised a US$200 million Series B in June 2024 led by Uber and Khosla Ventures with participation from NVIDIA and others. In AI chips, Radical was an early investor in Untether AI, a Toronto designer of energy-efficient inference processors; Untether wound down in 2025 after struggling to raise further capital, and AMD hired its engineering team in an acqui-hire announced in June 2025.
Radical also backs a number of applied and frontier-model companies. It was an early investor in Twelve Labs, a video-understanding company, joining its seed round and continuing into its US$50 million Series A in 2024 that was co-led by NEA and NVIDIA's NVentures. The firm co-led the 2024 launch financing of World Labs, the spatial-intelligence startup co-founded by Fei-Fei Li, alongside Andreessen Horowitz and NEA. Other portfolio companies include Reka, an AI research and model company; V7, a UK-based data and AI tooling company; Hebbia, which builds AI agents for knowledge work over legal and financial documents; Xanadu, a quantum-computing company; and Aspect Biosystems in AI-enabled biotechnology. Radical has stated that despite meeting thousands of AI startups, it has invested in only around 60 companies, reflecting a deliberately concentrated strategy.
The table below summarizes several notable AI investments and Radical's role in each.
| Company | Round / Year | Radical's role |
|---|---|---|
| Cohere | Series A, 2021 (US$40M, led by Index Ventures) | Early backer, participant |
| Untether AI | Series A, 2019 | Early investor (company wound down 2025) |
| Waabi | Series B, June 2024 (US$200M, led by Uber and Khosla Ventures) | Investor |
| Twelve Labs | Seed and Series A, 2024 (US$50M Series A co-led by NEA and NVentures) | Early investor, participant |
| World Labs | Launch financing, 2024 (US$230M total) | Co-lead, with Andreessen Horowitz and NEA |
| Hebbia | Early rounds | Early backer |
| V7 | Growth round | Investor |
| Reka | Growth round | Investor (led by Rob Toews) |
Radical's most distinctive asset is its network of senior AI researchers, who serve variously as backers, advisors, and partners. Fei-Fei Li, the Stanford professor who created the ImageNet dataset and co-directs the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, joined Radical as a Scientific Partner in 2023. Geoffrey Hinton, the Turing Award winner and 2024 Nobel laureate in physics, has been a backer of and contributor to the firm and was reported among the limited partners in its 2023 fund. Both Hinton and Li have also been individual investors in Radical portfolio companies such as Cohere.
The firm has additionally collaborated with Yoshua Bengio, the Turing Award winner and Mila founder, who co-led with Radical a pre-seed financing of the medical-diagnostics startup Ubenwa and has participated in Radical events; he is best described as a frequent collaborator rather than a titled partner of the firm. Through its Radical AI Founders programming, the firm has convened figures including Hinton and Li for public discussions, reinforcing its position at the centre of the research-to-startup pipeline.
Jordan Jacobs is co-founder and managing partner and is the firm's most public figure; he previously co-founded Layer 6 AI and the Vector Institute and serves on boards including the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). Tomi Poutanen is co-founder and a partner and shares the Layer 6 and Vector Institute lineage. Salim Teja is a partner who leads the firm's Velocity team and brings more than two decades of experience across entrepreneurship, venture investing, and ecosystem building, including a prior role at MaRS. Aaron Brindle is a partner focused on public affairs. Rob Toews, a partner who leads the firm's Bay Area office and writes a widely read AI column, has led several Radical investments including Hebbia, Reka, and Twelve Labs. The senior team also includes vice chair John Megrue, former McKinsey global managing partner Dominic Barton, and partners David Katz, Parasvil Patel, Aaron Rosenberg, and Sanjana Basu, among others.
As a dedicated AI investor with deep ties to the field's leading researchers, a multi-billion-dollar asset base, and a portfolio that spans foundation models, chips, autonomy, and applied software, Radical Ventures is generally regarded as one of the leading AI-specialist venture firms, and the most prominent one based in Canada.