Last week it was announced that the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board would invest $400 Million in a “fund of funds” concept. That is, it looks like they are proposing to deploy $400 Million to existing private equity and venture capital firms so that they may, in turn, deploy that money as part of their own investing activities. The Montreal Gazette has a good write up about the announcement.
The fund of funds model is similar to the model employed by the Ontario Government and its co investors in the Ontario Venture Capital Fund which I blogged about last April (both the new CPP funds and the OVCF funds are both managed by Northleaf Capital Partners). The funding of the OVCF closed in June of 2008 and, as I understand it, it has yet to actually invest much money. Unfortunately, very little of that money has been put to work so far.
Let’s hope that the CPP’s fund of funds is able to deploy funds a bit faster. Without much needed capital, Canada’s knowledge based startups can’t get off the ground. Mark McQueen recently lamented on the Wellington Financial Blog that the wicket is open for tech IPOs but there isn’t enough “product” – i.e. quality tech companies of the right size and trajectory. Fund announcements like this may be too late to help launch companies that could take advantage of the IPO climate we face at the moment, but without a steady flow of funds to support generation after generation of knowledge based companies we will have a very hard time maintaining any kind of robust public (or private) market for tech companies in Canada.
