The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP)’s venture growth investment portfolio posted strong results last year, delivering a 30.2-percent rate of return and beating its one-year benchmark of 18.5 percent by a wide margin.
Through TVG, the OTPP invests directly in tech companies at the Series B stage and beyond, as well as select venture capital and growth equity funds.
The organization’s latest report, published Tuesday morning, indicates the fair value of net investments by Teachers’ Venture Growth (TVG) soared to $15.3 billion CAD last year, up from $10.4 billion in 2024. The OTPP says this performance was driven by a resilient portfolio and strong valuation gains across “several high-performing assets,” including its existing equity positions in Elon Musk’s Texas-based aerospace company SpaceX, and San Francisco data intelligence platform Databricks, which it first backed in 2019 and 2023, respectively. Both are strong candidates to go public this year.
Venture growth was not the only bright spot for OTPP in 2025: public equities also delivered 15 percent gains for the pension fund, above its one-year benchmark of 13.9 percent.
The OTPP’s private equity portfolio posted a 5.3-percent loss, far below its targeted 18 percent return for the year, dragging on the pension fund’s overall performance, alongside continued headwinds in real estate. Both contributed to OTPP falling just shy of its target seven percent annual return for 2025.
Through TVG, the OTPP invests directly in tech companies at the Series B stage and beyond, as well as select venture capital and growth equity funds in North America, Europe, and Asia. The pension fund increased its allocation to venture growth last year, closing 2025 with TVG accounting for six percent of its total portfolio, an increase from four percent in 2024.
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In 2025, TVG backed Toronto-based programmatic advertising platform StackAdapt, San Francisco’s Anthropic—the large language model developer behind Claude—and human resources tech company Gusto, and New York observability software firm Grafana Labs. During this time, TVG also invested in Indian HR tech firm Darwinbox and London, UK-based decision intelligence platform Quantexa and AI energy company Kraken.
The OTPP says it sees significant investment opportunities in AI and tech, and is seeking “balanced exposure” to both via public markets, venture growth, and data centres.
In the report, the OTPP also shared the steps it has taken since investing $95 million USD in failed crypto exchange FTX. OTPP was forced to write down its investment entirely after becoming aware that the Bahamas-based firm misused funds and filed for bankruptcy. The pension fund came under fire for this investment, and was hit by a proposed class action lawsuit that was discontinued last year.
While the impact of the FTX loss was immaterial—0.05 percent of the pension fund’s total net assets—OTPP said it undertook a thorough review of its investment process in 2023 that it said “validated the robustness of our due diligence framework and confirmed that we had effectively identified risks.”
But the OTPP said it also identified some room for improvement, indicating that the pension fund plans to enhance governance requirements in investments with emerging founder-CEOs, improve planning for worst-case scenarios, and strengthen its cross-enterprise collaboration.
Feature image courtesy Arild on Flickr. Shared under Creative Commons license BY-SA 2.0.