TL;DR

Intrepid Growth Partners, an AI-only growth investor based in both London and Toronto, has reached final close on its first fund at roughly £390 million ($525 million). More than 80 limited partners have committed, including the British Business Bank, Temasek and two Canadian state lenders. The fund targets later-stage companies with revenue rather than early bets, a stage at which UK technology firms have long reported a domestic funding gap.

Who is behind it

The firm was set up in 2023 by three founders. Mark Machin previously ran Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Mark Shulgan led growth equity at the pension fund OMERS, and Ajay Agrawal is a University of Toronto professor known for his economics of AI research.

Its backers mix sovereign and development capital. Alongside the British Business Bank and Temasek are the Abu Dhabi Investment Council, Export Development Canada and the Business Development Bank of Canada, plus US institutions and family offices. Its adviser network includes Richard Sutton, the reinforcement learning pioneer who shared the 2024 Turing Award, Sir Mike Wigston, who previously headed the RAF, and Shopify president Harley Finkelstein.

The investment thesis

Intrepid says it backs businesses using AI to change established sectors, and it concentrates on the talent pool linking Canada and the UK, with the US and Europe as secondary markets. Agrawal’s rationale echoes Prediction Machines, the 2018 book he co-wrote: as AI makes prediction cheap, the value moves to what prediction cannot replace, such as proprietary data, human judgement, distribution and redesigned workflows.

Jacomo Corbo, chief executive of London-based PhysicsX, contributed to the announcement, describing the physical economy as AI’s next frontier.

AI minister Kanishka Narayan welcomed the commitment. Christine Hockley, who co-leads fund investment at the British Business Bank, argued that realising the UK’s AI potential depends on “deeper pools of scale up funding” and specialist investors.

Looking forward

The fund’s size is modest next to recent European rounds such as Mistral’s €3bn raise, but growth-stage money is where UK AI companies have tended to look overseas or sell early. The British Business Bank’s participation shows the state using fund commitments to pull specialist investors towards Britain, rather than writing cheques to companies itself. It arrives while markets are uneasy about AI spending after the recent run of safety warnings, so the pace at which Intrepid deploys capital will be a useful signal of investor confidence in applied AI, as distinct from frontier labs.