Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan: Investor Profile

Canada's C$303.2 billion pension giant invests in late-stage startups through its Teachers' Venture Growth arm, which has backed Indian companies including Perfios and Darwinbox.

The Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (OTPP) is one of the world's largest pension funds, with net assets of C$303.2 billion as at June 30, 2026, managing retirement security for approximately 346,000 working members and pensioners. Founded in 1990 and headquartered in Toronto, it is jointly sponsored by the Government of Ontario and the Ontario Teachers' Federation, and is one of the 'Maple 8' — Canada's largest pension funds.

Investment thesis: patient capital for late-stage tech

OTPP's startup activity runs through Teachers' Venture Growth (TVG), the plan's late-stage venture and growth-equity arm. Founded in 2019 and led by Olivia Steedman, Executive Managing Director and Global Head of TVG, the platform targets cutting-edge technology companies worldwide at Series B stage and beyond. TVG partners with founders aiming to expand product offerings, scale geographically, and become market leaders, with a direct presence across Europe, North America and Asia (Hong Kong).

The venture growth portfolio delivered a 30.2% return in 2025 against an 18.5% benchmark, and grew to C$25.9 billion in net investments by June 2026 — about 9% of the total fund. TVG's first-ever investment was in SpaceX in 2019; following its Nasdaq listing in June 2026, SpaceX was a significant contributor to OTPP's 9.5% total-fund return in the first half of 2026. Other notable growth-stage holdings include Databricks, Anthropic, Grafana Labs, Quantexa, StackAdapt and SmartHR.

India activity

OTPP has built a dedicated India venture practice. Darius Vakil serves as Director of TVG in India, and India investments confirmed by the firm include:

Perfios — TVG invested US$80 million in the Bengaluru-based fintech SaaS company, which provides data-aggregation and analytics to financial institutions, supporting its digital-transformation ambitions in India and beyond.

Darwinbox — TVG invested US$40 million in the Hyderabad-headquartered AI-powered human capital management (HCM) platform, which serves over 1,000 enterprises and 4 million employees across 130 countries, to accelerate its North American expansion and agentic-AI innovation.

Sectors, stages and key people

Sectors: enterprise software, fintech, artificial intelligence, consumer tech and frontier technology such as space. Stages: late-stage venture and growth equity — Series B onward, primary and secondary transactions. Leadership: Jo Taylor, President and CEO of Ontario Teachers'; Olivia Steedman, Global Head of TVG; Kelvin Yu, Senior Managing Director and Head of TVG in Asia.

Programs and perks: TVG operates as an institutional co-investor rather than an accelerator — it publishes no founder programs, credits or perks. Its value-add is large cheque sizes, long-horizon patient capital and a global network for geographic expansion.

Why it matters for founders

Teachers' Venture Growth is one of the few pools of patient institutional capital actively writing growth-stage cheques into Indian tech companies, as shown by the Perfios and Darwinbox deals. If you are a late-stage founder with real scale, it is worth being on TVG's radar — but note its model is co-investment alongside GPs and late-stage rounds, not seed or early-stage backing.