Radical Ventures Raise $800 Million for AI Start-Ups

Toronto-based Radical Ventures, the venture capital (VC) firm that helped to launch pioneering artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Cohere, has raised nearly $800 million to create the largest fund of its kind for AI.

According to a report in Financial Times, this is the Radical Ventures’ third institutional fund and will focus exclusively on growth-stage start-ups, according to people familiar with the plans. It raised $550 million last year to invest in early stage companies and $350 million in 2019, the report said.

Radical’s investors include former Google chief Eric Schmidt’s family office, Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, a computer scientist who has been dubbed the “godmother of AI,” and former Google Brain executive Geoffrey Hinton, as well as a number of Canadian pension funds, such as CPP Investments.

CPP Investments said in public filings this week that it had committed $75 million to the new fund, bringing its total commitments to Radical to $204 million.

The capital raise comes as some investors have started to question the likely returns from the billions of dollars that have flowed into the AI start-ups in the wake of ChatGPT’s launch nearly two years ago.

Quoting Jordan Jacobs, co-founder and managing director of Radical Ventures, the report said that there was certainly a hype cycle in some parts of venture and AI.

“But I think there is going to continue to be a lot of money. There are some truly giant future companies that are now transitioning from early stage to growth and feel we have the expertise and relationships to invest,” the report said and added that Jacobs declined to comment on the latest fundraising.

Supporting Several AI Firms

Radical Ventures was launched in 2017, making it one of the earliest focused on investing exclusively in AI.

The firm has since backed a string of fledgling AI companies that have grown rapidly as the technology has boomed. It was the first investor in AI start-up Cohere, which has since grown to a valuation of $5.5 billion. Other portfolio companies include Covariant, a robotics foundation model, and drug discovery company Genesis Therapeutics.

Venture capitalists have piled into AI companies in the past two years, even as broader start-up fundraising has been rocked by high interest rates, competition scrutiny on acquisitions and a largely frozen market for initial public offerings (IPOs).

AI investments drove a 47% increase in the US venture funding to $55.6 billion in the three months to June, according to PitchBook, the highest quarterly total in two years, the report said.

Radical was launched by Jacobs and Tomi Poutanen, who studied machine learning alongside Hinton at the University of Toronto. They previously ran a start-up, Milq, and in 2016 created Layer 6, an AI company that was acquired by Canada’s TD Bank.

The duo originally started Radical to back deep learning companies as angel investors. They then sold their company to invest in the technology full-time after the publication of “Attention Is All You Need”, a landmark AI research paper authored by a group of Google scientists, including Cohere co-founder and chief executive Aidan Gomez.

“We believed after that paper that AI would cause a replacement cycle of software that would have an economic impact akin to an industrial revolution, and that it would also unlock science, which would be like a second industrial revolution,” Jacobs said and added that Zero western investors were focused on it.