Radical Ventures

In 2017, Jordan Jacobs and Tomi Poutanen worked with AI academics including Geoffrey Hinton, Richard Zemel, Raquel Urtasun, and Sanja Fidler, as well as Ed Clark, to create Toronto’s Vector Institute, which launched in March 2017 with 8 founding faculty. The two believed that for this research ecosystem to reach its full potential, it also needed capital and expertise that could turn research into commercial applications, and they founded Radical Ventures shortly after Vector’s launch. Poutanen is also Jacobs’s co-founder at Layer 6.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

In 2019, Radical launched its first institutional fund, and the Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments) and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) have been its investors since then, with PSP as an anchor investor.⁠[2][2]

In 2020, Radical invested in Cohere, an enterprise AI company founded in 2019 by two former Google Brain researchers and a founding engineer of Cortex, whose CEO Aidan Gomez co-authored the paper that introduced the Transformer architecture. Cohere emerged from stealth in May 2021, and in September of that year Radical continued its support by participating in Cohere’s $40 million Series A led by Index Ventures.⁠[3][3][4][4][4][4]

On September 20, 2021, Radical announced an expansion of its leadership team: Rob Toews, who had led AI investing at Highland Capital Partners, joined the investment team as a partner based in San Francisco, and serial entrepreneur David Katz became operating partner. The companies emerging from Canada’s research ecosystem that Radical then cited as backed by it included Waabi, Untether AI, and Cohere, and it is also a leading investor in Waabi, the self-driving company founded by Raquel Urtasun.⁠[1][1][1][1]

In February 2023, Stanford University professor Fei-Fei Li joined Radical as a Scientific Partner while continuing her full-time work at Stanford. In April of the same year, Aaron Rosenberg, former head of strategy and operations at DeepMindGoogle DeepMindGoogle DeepMind is Google’s artificial intelligence research organization, formed in April 2023 by merging DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, with the Brain team from Google Research, and led by CEO Demis Hassabis. It developed AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the Gemini family of models, and Hassabis and John Jumper received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction work.Open the full entry, joined as a partner, and Radical thereby launched its operations in London.⁠[5][5][6][6]

On August 19, 2024, Radical announced its first venture growth fund (Venture Growth Fund 1), investing in growth-stage technology companies with AI-first products or AI-enhanced businesses, complementing its existing early-stage fund.⁠[7][7][7]

In September 2024, Radical announced its investment in World Labs, a spatial intelligence company co-founded by Fei-Fei Li with Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall, which builds “Large World Models” to perceive, generate, and interact with the 3D world. Radical said that starting a year before World Labs was incorporated, Jacobs and Li met at least weekly to incubate the concept.⁠[8][8][9]

On August 5, 2026, Radical announced that it was co-leading, with Khosla VenturesKhosla VenturesKhosla Ventures (KV) is an American venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It made heavy early bets on clean technology, became OpenAI’s first venture capital investor in 2019, and its portfolio also includes companies such as DoorDash, Block (formerly Square), Impossible Foods, and Rocket Lab.Open the full entry, the initial funding round of Discovery Loop, a public benefit company founded by Jeff Dean, Sanjay GhemawatSanjay GhemawatSanjay Ghemawat is a computer scientist and software engineer who joined Google in 1999 and, with his longtime partner Jeff Dean, designed distributed infrastructure such as MapReduce and Bigtable that underpins Google’s search and data processing, later becoming a Google Senior Fellow. In August 2026, he left Google with Jeff Dean, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals to co-found the AI company Discovery Loop.Open the full entry, Quoc LeQuoc LeQuoc Le (Vietnamese name Le Viet Quoc) is an artificial intelligence researcher and early member of Google Brain who led the 2012 experiment in which a neural network running on 16,000 processor cores taught itself to recognize cats from YouTube videos, and who helped develop deep learning methods including sequence-to-sequence learning (seq2seq), paragraph vectors, and neural architecture search (AutoML). In August 2026, he left Google with Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, and Oriol Vinyals to co-found the AI company Discovery Loop.Open the full entry, and Oriol VinyalsOriol VinyalsOriol Vinyals is an artificial intelligence researcher who joined Google around 2013 and worked at Google Brain and then DeepMind. He helped develop methods including sequence-to-sequence learning (seq2seq), knowledge distillation, and image caption generation, co-led the AlphaStar project that defeated professional StarCraft II players, and served with Jeff Dean as an overall technical lead of the Gemini models. In August 2026, he left Google with Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, and Quoc Le to co-found the AI company Discovery Loop.Open the full entry, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Doerr Capital. The founding team had pitched to Radical a few weeks earlier. Managing partner Jordan Jacobs, who will join Discovery Loop’s board, said that building something to solve all those problems is a powerful idea.⁠[10][11][12][13][14]

On September 15, 2026, at the inaugural Canada Investment Summit in Toronto, Radical announced the first close of the Radical Breakouts Fund, which secured over $1 billion in commitments from investors including PSP Investments, CPP Investments, HOOPP, TD Bank Group, BMO Financial Group, CI Global Asset Management, and OPTrust. Radical said it was the largest venture capital fund in Canadian history; it is Radical’s new late-stage strategy, with a planned fund size of several billion dollars, intended to continue backing AI companies through later rounds of hyper-growth. The summit outcomes published by the Office of the Prime Minister of Canada that day listed Radical investing and mobilizing 4 billion (currency not specified) to launch the fund. As of September 21, 2026, the fund had invested in three companies: Discovery Loop, Etched, and Crusoe.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][15][16][15]

In early October 2026, AMD announced its $8.2 billion acquisition of Radical portfolio company World Labs, with Fei-Fei Li to join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to CEO Lisa Su. Radical said it had partnered with World Labs since before its founding, with its Velocity team helping with recruiting, securing compute, and public affairs.⁠[9][9][9][9]

Radical invests in founders in artificial intelligence across all stages, from day-zero incubation and seed through growth and pre-IPO; it says it helped launch Cohere, Waabi, and World Labs. Its Velocity team supports portfolio companies with talent recruiting, go-to-market, compute and technology, brand and public affairs, and finance and governance, and it runs a free virtual “AI Founders Masterclass” for AI entrepreneurs. As of September 2026, Radical had offices in Toronto, San Francisco, London, and New York; its website is operated by Radical Ventures Investments Inc., which provides investment management and administrative services to its investment funds.⁠[2][15][17][17][17][17][17][17][2][18]

As of October 2026, Radical’s team page listed Jordan Jacobs as co-founder and managing partner, Tomi Poutanen as co-founder and partner, Fei-Fei Li as Scientific Partner, and Ed Clark and Dominic Barton as partners. Portfolio companies shown on its homepage included Discovery Loop, Cohere, Decart, World Labs, Etched, Generalist, Aspect Biosystems, Xanadu, Waabi, Muon Space, Crusoe, and Latent Labs.⁠[19][19][19][19][20][20][20][20][20][20]

Radical Ventures: Official website: https://radical.vc/ (opens in a new window).⁠[18]

X: Public account: https://x.com/radicalvcfund (opens in a new window)⁠[20]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/radicalventures (opens in a new window)⁠[20]