Toronto-based Radical Ventures said on 15 September 2026 that it had completed the first close of its Breakouts Fund, pulling in more than US$1 billion in commitments and becoming, by its own account, the largest venture capital fund ever raised in Canada. The announcement came at the inaugural Canada Investment Summit in Toronto, according to the firm’s own release, which was distributed through Newswire and mirrored on PR Newswire and the pension fund’s own site, PSP Investments.
The list of backers reads like a roll call of Canada’s largest pools of retirement savings: the Public Sector Pension Investment Board, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, HOOPP, TD Bank Group, BMO Financial Group, CI Global Asset Management and OPTrust are all named as anchor investors, alongside unnamed international investors, per the release carried on Newswire.
Why the fund says it exists
Jordan Jacobs, Radical’s co-founder and managing partner, framed the fund as a response to a persistent gap in Canadian finance. In the release, Jacobs said Canada has never lacked strong AI companies, only the capital needed to keep them growing at home, and argued that for decades the country’s best firms had to turn to American money during their most important growth years, taking much of the value they created out of the country with them, according to the PSP Investments statement.
Speaking to BNN Bloomberg two days after the launch, Jacobs said the fund will eventually grow into a multibillion-dollar vehicle aimed at backing roughly twelve companies on trajectories toward trillion-dollar valuations, several of which he expects will be Canadian. He pointed to Cohere, Waabi, Xanadu and Aspect Biosystems as examples of Canadian firms that have stayed domestic despite repeated opportunities to be acquired abroad. He also argued that Canada should become a more confident early customer of its own technology firms rather than waiting for American buyers to validate them first, and said political leaders across party lines were showing more alignment on building an attractive investment climate, according to the same interview.
What pension money is actually buying
The fund’s own mandate complicates the retention narrative built around its launch. Jacobs told BNN Bloomberg that Radical can invest anywhere in the Western world, not solely in Canada, meaning the strategy is built around chasing global scale rather than guaranteeing that backed companies stay headquartered domestically. Bloomberg’s own report on the launch treats the fund chiefly as a capital-markets milestone, noting the size of the raise and the identity of the institutional backers without dwelling on whether the structure changes where the underlying companies ultimately sit.
How the outlets framed it
Bloomberg’s coverage presented the Breakouts Fund largely as a financing story, emphasising its scale as the largest venture fund in Canadian history and listing its bank and pension backers with little discussion of why such a fund had not existed sooner. Radical’s own release and the mirrored version on PSP Investments’ site framed the fund as a patriotic correction, quoting Jordan Jacobs describing decades of Canadian value migrating south for lack of growth-stage capital. The gap between those framings matters because one treats the announcement as a routine capital markets event while the other asks readers to accept, largely on the strength of the fund’s own promotional language, that raising the money solves a problem the fund’s own global mandate does not actually require it to solve.
Whether the Breakouts Fund keeps more AI companies headquartered in Canada, rather than simply giving Canadian pension holders a stake in whichever country those companies end up calling home, will not be testable for several years, since trillion-dollar outcomes of the kind Jacobs described typically take a long time to materialise, if they arrive at all.
