Radical Ventures

Radical Ventures is a Toronto-headquartered AI-first venture capital firm with offices in San Francisco and London and over $2.5 billion in assets under management. Founded in 2017 by Jordan Jacobs, Tomi Poutanen, and Maks Volkovs, all three of whom previously co-founded Layer 6 AI (acquired by TD Bank in 2018), Radical has built a thesis explicitly around backing entrepreneurs who apply deep AI to transform large industries, with healthcare, life sciences, transportation, financial services, and climate as core focus areas. The firm is unusually close to the academic and research foundations of modern AI, with deep ties to the Vector Institute in Toronto, the Mila institute in Montreal, and the broader Canadian AI research community that produced Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Yann LeCun.

Jordan Jacobs, the firm’s managing partner and public face, has been explicit that healthcare and biology are central to the Radical thesis. In interviews and at conferences he has framed the firm’s mission with the phrase ‘AI will help cure cancers,’ and the Radical portfolio reflects that conviction with active investments in AI-driven drug discovery, computational biology, regenerative medicine, and clinical AI. Notable healthcare and life sciences investments include Aspect Biosystems, the regenerative medicine platform pioneering bioprinted tissues for therapeutic applications, and several stealth and growth companies in computational drug discovery and clinical AI. The firm has also been a major early investor in Cohere, the foundation model company, and Waabi, the autonomous freight company founded by Raquel Urtasun, plus Hebbia and World Labs in the broader AI infrastructure space.

The partnership has expanded over time with senior partners and principals across Toronto, San Francisco, and London. The team is unusually technical for a venture firm; many partners and principals hold PhDs in machine learning, computer science, or related quantitative disciplines, and the firm runs a deep pattern of co-investment with peer AI specialists in the Bay Area and the broader research community.

Check sizes run from $5 million at Series A up to $50 million plus at Series B and C, with the firm comfortable leading at Series A and B and participating with substantial follow-on at later stages. Radical also writes occasional seed checks for technical founders coming directly out of academic research, particularly when the team has strong ties to Vector, Mila, or comparable AI research institutions. Geographic scope is global with strong North American and UK practices. The firm is comfortable leading transatlantic rounds.

Founders who should approach Radical are technical AI and machine learning founders building healthcare, life sciences, and clinical AI applications with a defensible model architecture, data moat, or scientific insight. The firm is particularly well suited for founders coming out of academic AI research, including PhDs and postdocs in machine learning, computational biology, and adjacent fields. Founders building healthcare services, biopharma assets without a strong AI thesis, or pure digital health software without a deep technical wedge should pitch other firms. Radical is decisively a deep-tech AI firm; its bar is technical, not commercial.

Entry path runs through academic AI research networks, particularly Vector, Mila, Stanford, Berkeley, and MIT, plus warm introductions from portfolio CEOs and peer AI specialist investors including Conviction, CRV, and Sequoia’s AI bench. Jacobs and the senior partners are publicly active at NeurIPS, ICML, and the major AI research conferences, plus selectively at JPMorgan Healthcare and BIO when the focus is computational drug discovery. Cold inbound through the website is read but converts at low rates without a strong technical signal or academic referral. Diligence is rigorous on the technical side, typically four to six weeks from first meeting to term sheet, with substantial review by Radical’s network of academic and operating advisors.

In a pitch, lead with the technical wedge, the data, and the scientific or clinical insight. Radical partners want to see why your model architecture, your data acquisition strategy, or your computational approach yields a step function in the relevant domain. Bring rigor, a clear plan to translate computational advantage into a product, asset, or platform, and a credible answer to why incumbents and well-funded competitors cannot easily replicate your work. The firm’s added value is best realized when founders use the broader Radical network: academic advisors from the Canadian AI research community, peer technical founders in the portfolio, and the firm’s relationships with Bay Area and London AI investors who can anchor follow-on rounds. Founders building genuinely deep technical AI for healthcare and life sciences will find Radical one of the most rigorous and useful tier-one partners in the category.