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Mark trained in Physiological Sciences including specialization in neurosciences at Oxford, researched developmental biology, and studied Clinical Medicine at Cambridge before pursuing a career in finance. For more than two decades he worked at Goldman Sachs in Europe and Asia where he was a Partner and among other roles was Vice Chair and the Head of Investment Banking for Asia Pacific. He then joined CPPIB first as Head of International and then served as President and CEO for five years. Under his leadership, CPPIB grew its exposure to technology investing by launching a Venture and Growth Equity strategy, opening an office in San Francisco, and creating partnerships with leading venture firms and incubators, like the Creative Destruction Lab.

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While at CPPIB, Mark chaired its investment committees and oversaw more than $500B of investment in many companies and investment funds. In addition, Mark led the creation of several internal initiatives that leveraged ML/AI to enhance coordination among CPPIB's nearly 2,000 employees across nine global offices and support its investment processes. Under his leadership, CPPIB was one of the best-performing global pension funds.

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Before founding Intrepid Growth Partners, Mark co-founded and was the founding CEO of Opto Investments, a software platform that raised a $145M series A and is using software to create a new market for investment advisors to access alternative investments. Mark served on the board of Sequoia Heritage and currently serves on GIC's International Advisory Board, Serendipity Capital, and is the Vice Chair of Opto Investments.

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Mark earned a Bachelor of Arts in Physiological Sciences from Oxford University and a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery from Cambridge University.

My interest in technology began in the early 1980s when my brother and I received a TRS-80 for Christmas—an early and formative lesson in the power of automation to improve productivity. That instinct carried through to my years as an investment banker, where I built tools to automate routine workflows whenever I found time.

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Since then, I’ve launched and led growth equity platforms at two of Canada’s largest institutional investors, CPPIB and OMERS, investing over $5 billion across more than 30 software and healthcare companies in North America, Western Europe, and Asia. Earlier in my career, I was a Vice President at Fortress Investment Group.

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I’ve served on the boards of companies including Dialpad, Coveo, TouchBistro, PandaDoc, Celigo, Purpose Financial, and OneEleven. I graduated as the Gold Medalist of my class from Western University and currently mentor in the AI stream at the Creative Destruction Lab in Toronto.

Ajay Agrawal is the Geoffrey Taber Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation and Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

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Ajay is Founder of the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL), a not-for-profit program for early-stage, science-based companies. Its mission is to enhance the commercialization of science for the betterment of humankind. CDL operates at 13 universities globally and companies that have graduated from the program have generated over $30 billion in equity value.

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He is also a Co-founder and Board Director of Sanctuary AI, a Vancouver-based robotics company on a mission to create the world’s first human-like intelligence in general-purpose robots.

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Ajay is a co-author of two best-selling books on the economics of AI – "Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence" and “Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence.” He is also co-author of several scholarly and popular press articles on the economics of machine intelligence.

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He holds a PhD in Strategy & Business Economics from the University of British Columbia and honorary PhD from the University of Calgary.

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Ajay was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2022 for his contributions as a scholar, mentor, and entrepreneur, and was featured in the Globe and Mail’s “Power 50” list of the most influential Canadians.

Stephen helps lead our sourcing and investing efforts in the UK and Europe. Prior to Intrepid, Stephen was an investor with SoftBank Vision Fund and Atomico in London, where he worked with companies including Perk, Grab, Pipedrive, Bird (fka MessageBird), and Rovio.

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He began his career in Goldman Sachs' Investment Banking Division and holds an MEng in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College London.

Grant helps lead our sourcing and investing efforts in North America. Prior to Intrepid, Grant was a founding member of OMERS Growth Equity where he focused on software and technology. While there, he supported lead investments in Dialpad, Clio, Skillshare, and ExecOnline. He began his career as a Consultant at Monitor Deloitte where he supported engagements around corporate strategy and operations.

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Grant is a first-generation college graduate, first studying at Ivey Business School where he was a Section President and Ivey Scholar (top 10%). He subsequently attended Stanford Graduate School of Business where he managed a tech-focused public equity portfolio as CIO of the Finance & Investment Club and graduated as an Arjay Miller Scholar (top 10%).

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Grant is an avid reader, a long-time gamer, and a student of investing. He grew up in the suburbs of Toronto and has nearly three decades of experience as a tortured Leafs fan.

Jess supports our sourcing and investing efforts in North America. Prior to Intrepid, Jess was a Senior Associate at General Atlantic in New York, where she executed growth and buyout investments and supported portfolio companies across the Healthcare Services industry. At GA, Jess supported a majority investment in PT Solutions (national physical therapy provider), a majority investment in Oak Street Health (value-based primary care provider; sold to CVS for $10.6 billion), and a new company incubation (Author Health; behavioral health provider for geriatric patients). Prior to GA, Jess was an Investment Banking Analyst at J.P. Morgan in New York, where she worked in the Healthcare group.

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Jess earned a Bachelor of Commerce from the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University where she graduated on the D.I. McLeod’s Dean’s List with Distinction (top 10% of program) and was Co-Chair of the Queen’s Private Capital Group.

Jess is a senior associate on the investment team in Europe. Prior to Intrepid, Jess worked as an investor at ex/ante, investing across cybersecurity, AI, web3, and data infrastructure. She previously worked with CrossBoundary in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan as an investment advisor, where she worked on deals spanning tech, telco, and manufacturing. Jess also worked at Bain London, mostly within the PE due diligence ringfence, and with the UK Foreign Office, where she worked with the counter-ISIS taskforce in 2015.

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Jess received her Masters’ in Public Policy and Business Administration with Distinction from Harvard, where she was a David Rubenstein Fellow, and BA in Classics from Oxford University.

Harley is an entrepreneur, lawyer, and President of Shopify.

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Born in Montreal, Canada, Harley founded his first company at age 17 while studying at McGill University. He went on to receive a JD / MBA from the University of Ottawa and began his career in law before joining Shopify as Chief Platform Officer in 2010. Since his joining, Shopify has grown from a Seed-stage startup to the preeminent global ecommerce platform, with over 8,000 employees and over $50 billion in market capitalization.

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He currently serves on the Boards of The Montreal Children’s Hospital Foundation and the National Retail Federation, and has previously served on the Boards of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and The C100.

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Harley has been named Angel Investor of the Year by the Canadian Startup Awards, Canada’s Top 40 Under 40, and is a member of the Order of Ottawa.

Niamh is an Applied AI Scientist who uses a systems engineering approach to safely transform groundbreaking research into commercial AI-first products that scale. Her operator-investor experience spans the tech stack, product life-cycle, business functions and company stages across the US, EU, MENA and Asia.

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Niamh’s expertise is building closed-loop AI platforms that leverage active learning to close the Sim2Real gap and accelerate scientific discovery. These include, multiscale simulation of dynamical systems for SynBio, mechanistic mapping of reaction pathways for Pharma and ab-initio optimisation of catalysts for Industrial Chemistry. Prior she leveraged biomimicry for open-ended search (evolutionary compute), robotic swarms (collective adaptive intel) and photosynthetic solar cells.

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Based in Silicon Valley, Niamh is currently an early access partner enabling the real-time inference of multimodal foundation models from Meta, OpenAI, Google, Mistral and a variety of Startups. She is also an early stage investor in DeepTech pioneers such as Recursion, Planet, Applied Intuition, Groq, Phaidra, Stairwell and GordianBio.

Sendhil is Professor of Economics and Peter de Florez Professor of EECS (Electrical Engineering & Computer Science) at MIT. His current research uses machine learning to understand complex problems in human behavior, social policy, and especially medicine, where computational techniques have the potential to uncover biomedical insights from large-scale health data. Sendhil is cofounder of Nightingale, the computational medicine initiative, Pique, an app that changes how people read books and learn, and Dandelion, a company that catalyzes AI in healthcare.

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In past work he has combined insights from economics and behavioral science with causal inference tools—lab, field, and natural experiments—to study social problems such as discrimination and poverty. Papers include: the impact of poverty on mental bandwidth; how algorithms can improve on judicial decision-making; whether CEO pay is excessive; using fictitious resumes to measure discrimination; showing that higher cigarette taxes make smokers happier; and modeling how competition affects media bias.

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Sendhil enjoys writing. He recently co-authored Scarcity: Why Having too Little Means so Much and writes regularly for the New York Times. Additionally, his research has appeared in a variety of publications including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, Social Cognition, British Medical Journal, and Management Science.

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Sendhil helped co-found a non-profit to apply behavioral science (ideas42), co-founded a center to promote the use of randomized control trials in development (the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab), serves on the board of the MacArthur Foundation, has worked in government in various roles, is affiliated with the NBER and BREAD, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Prior to joining MIT, Sendhil was the Roman Family University Professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at University of Chicago Booth and the Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, where he taught courses about machine learning and big data.

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Sendhil is a recipient of the MacArthur “Genius Grant,” has been designated a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum, was labeled a “Top 100 Thinker” by Foreign Policy Magazine, and was named to the “Smart List: 50 people who will change the world” by Wired Magazine (UK). His hobbies include basketball, board games, googling, and fixing up classic espresso machines.

Richard Sutton pioneered one of the most powerful techniques of the modern AI revolution: Reinforcement Learning.

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In 2024, he was awarded the ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing”, alongside Andrew Barto, for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning. Their work introduced key ideas such as temporal difference learning and has been foundational to applications from autonomous vehicles to chatbots like ChatGPT.

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He is coauthor of the primary textbook on Reinforcement Learning used by almost all top computer science departments around the world: Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction. His scientific publications have been cited more than 140,000 times.

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Richard is a professor in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, chief scientific advisor of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), research scientist at Keen Technologies, and fellow of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Canada, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and CIFAR.

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At the University of Alberta, Richard founded the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Lab, which consists of ten principal investigators and over 100 researchers. Prior to joining the University of Alberta in 2003, he worked in industry at AT&T Labs and GTE Labs, and in academia at the University of Massachusetts.

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Richard received a PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts and a BA in psychology from Stanford University. He is also a libertarian, a chess player, and a cancer survivor.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston was Chief of the Air Staff from 2019-2023, the 4-star commander and head of the Royal Air Force. As principal air and space advisor to the Prime Minister, Secretary of State for Defence, and the Chief of Defence Staff, he was one of the youngest ever to hold the role.

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Sir Mike spent over 37 years in the Royal Air Force. He began his career as a fast jet pilot, and served around the world, including numerous operational tours in the Middle East and Afghanistan. He has worked alongside international partners at the highest levels of governments, armed forces and industry across Europe, the Middle East, Japan, Australia, Canada, and the US.

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As Chief, he empowered innovation at every level, and advocated for the adoption of new technologies like space systems, uncrewed aircraft, swarming drones, and AI. He conceived and established UK Space Command in 2021 and was a leading member of the seven-nation Combined Space Operations initiative. He played a leading role establishing the strategic partnership with Japan and Italy to build the UK’s next generation combat aircraft, a multi-billion, multi-decade program.

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Along with serving as a Senior Advisor to Intrepid, Sir Mike supported Bridgepoint Group’s 2024 investment in MyDefence, a Danish drone defence company, joining MyDefence’s Board of Directors. He is also a Strategic Advisor to Faculty AI, a UK AI software and consultancy firm; a Senior Advisor at BCG; and a Visiting Professor at King’s College London.

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Sir Mike brings experience of leading a top-tier European Air Force in a time of geopolitical uncertainty, navigating complex global partnerships at the highest levels of international governments, armed forces, and corporations. He offers a unique perspective in an era of rapid technological change.

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Sir Mike’s education includes Engineering Science at Oriel College, Oxford; and an MA in Defence Studies from King’s College London.

George Hoyem is a distinguished venture capital executive and technology leader with over 25 years of experience spanning venture capital, entrepreneurship, and the national security intelligence sector. As Executive Vice President of Investments at In-Q-Tel (IQT)—the strategic venture capital arm of the CIA and U.S. Intelligence Community—George led a team that invested in more than 800 dual-use and defense-first startups. His focus areas included advanced analytics, AI, cloud, cybersecurity, and IT infrastructure, ensuring that critical emerging technologies reached national security agencies.

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Throughout his tenure at IQT, George personally led over 40 investments and served on the boards of numerous innovative companies, such as Groq, Cylance, D-Wave, GitLab, Matterport, Phantom, Primer, and Swarm Technologies. His leadership helped shape the federal market strategies of these companies and bridged the gap between cutting-edge startups and the demanding needs of national security.

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George’s influence extends beyond IQT. He served a four-year term on the Board of Directors of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), where he championed policies supporting entrepreneurship and the growth of VC-backed companies, helping to shape the future of the U.S. innovation ecosystem.

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Prior to IQT, George held senior roles at leading venture firms including Blueprint Ventures, Redleaf, and El Dorado Ventures, specializing in internet and software infrastructure investments. Earlier in his career, he managed multiple $40M+ P&L businesses as a General Manager and led the Internet Commerce Division at Verifone, contributing to its $1.3B acquisition by Hewlett Packard.

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George Hoyem is recognized as a trusted and visionary leader, closely connected with the top echelons of venture capital, U.S. intelligence, and national security communities, and remains at the forefront of technology innovation and investment.

John is a seasoned AI and Data Science leader with experience as an Operator, Investor and Research Scientist.

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John has broad interests across commercial applications of AI, next-generation AI and compute paradigms, and Dual-Use / Defence Tech.

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John serves as Managing Director & Chief Data & AI Officer at Cerberus Technology Solutions, a subsidiary of Cerberus Capital Management, where he provides data & AI expertise across the investment lifecycle from deal sourcing and leading technical due diligence through to operational value creation. John has supported multiple fund strategies including Supply Chain Fund (National Security and Dual-Use Deeptech), Private Equity and Global Financial Opportunities.

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John was formerly Chief Data Scientist at Barclays UK Information Business and founded & led the EMEA Data Science group at JPMorgan Chase. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Responsible AI Institute, a non-profit focused on driving safe and trustworthy AI.

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John supports the startup ecosystem as a Mentor with Conception-X and Intel Ignite; Lecturer at University College London; and Angel Investor.

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John holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, M.Sci from University College London (UCL) and serves as Honorary Lecturer at UCL.

Tap is a seasoned leader with 25+ years of experience leading strategy, technology, business and corporate development at worldwide technology companies ranging from start ups to Fortune 100. He is passionate about developing and leading cross-functional teams to achieve bold goals on a global scale.

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Most recently, Tap was VP of Strategic Initiatives at Amazon Web Services. In this role, he designed and implemented key initiatives to drive AWS growth. Tap led strategic planning, working across AWS senior leadership to evolve AWS’ long-term vision and operational plan. Prior to leading Strategic Initiatives, Tap ran the Worldwide Specialist Organization (WWSO) that built and executed go-to-market strategies for AWS’ multibillion dollar service businesses, including Compute, Storage, Database and Analytics, and AIML. Under his leadership, the team tripled in size and AWS revenue grew significantly from $41B ARR in 2020 to $85B ARR in 2023. Prior to WWSO, Tap led AWS Game Tech, a vertical strategy that spanned AWS Services, Sales, Solutions Architecture, Business Development, and Marketing. Tap led this team for 3 years and under his leadership, Game Tech tripled games industry revenue.

Talia is a clinician leader and executive advisor at the intersection of business and healthcare, with responsibility for the strategic and day-to-day success of major corporate engagements. She is Physician Lead of Advisory Services at Cleveland Clinic based in Canada, holding P&L responsibility and advising cross-industry executives. She is a member of the Senior Leadership Team which includes developing annual strategic and financial planning, succession planning, setting of corporate policy, talent management, risk management as well as monitoring of corporate performance against business plans and KPIs.

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Talia is also a Primary Care physician with subspecialty work in Addiction Medicine and Chronic Pain at the front lines of the opioid crisis. Her clinical interest areas include AI & health, women’s health, mental health, healthcare systems and management, and women & leadership development.

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Talia’s unique management background combines the rigour of medicine with corporate training excellence of management consulting. She brings deep experience from McKinsey & Company across a broad spectrum of international corporate mandates including due diligence, corporate finance, operations, human resources & talent, enterprise strategy, organizational agility and digital transformation. Her work experience further includes ESG/sustainability, People Risk, executive resilience, corporate & community partnerships, DEI and governance models in organizations including Harvard Business School, University of Toronto, and SickKids Hospital.

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She is a trusted advisor and board member across diverse sectors including healthcare, sustainability and private equity. Talia has a strong track record of C-Suite level advisory and is a recognized business thought leader with publications in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, Globe and Mail, and the National Post.

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Talia holds a Masters of Public Health from Harvard University, a MD & CCFP from McMaster University, and BSc from Western University.

Adrian is a Director of Research in machine learning at the University of Cambridge and Head of Safe and Ethical AI at the Alan Turing Institute.

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Adrian has broad interests across machine learning and artificial intelligence, their applications, and helping to ensure beneficial outcomes for society. He holds a Turing AI Fellowship for Trustworthy Machine Learning.

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Adrian is a Director of Research and Programme Director for Trust and Society at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI); an advisor to the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP), and the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER); and a fellow at Sidney Sussex College. In addition, he is a member of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Future Council on the Future of AI, and is co-director of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) programme on Human-centric Machine Learning. Adrian previously served as Programme Director for AI at the Turing Institute, on the advisory board of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) and in the UNESCO ad hoc expert group on the ethics of AI.