Koru
Industry Focus
Geographic Focus
Koru is a captive venture studio wholly-owned by Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (OTPP), founded in 2019 in partnership with BCG Digital Ventures. Koru exists exclusively to drive value creation and grow the overall enterprise value of OTPP's portfolio companies by partnering with them to identify, validate, build and oversee new disruptive business opportunities that leverage unfair advantages. The studio works across OTPP's infrastructure, natural resources, private equity, and real estate portfolio companies. Since 2019, Koru has built and launched 9-12 new ventures across diverse industries and geographies including childcare, field safety, customer service innovation, financial services, e-commerce logistics, elder care, and climate tech/energy transition. Koru's diverse multidisciplinary team of approximately 35-72 people includes entrepreneurs, product managers, engineers, marketers, designers, and startup operators with capabilities ranging from engineering and product growth to marketing. The studio specializes in the zero-to-one stage of building startups, creating scalable new digital businesses through a methodology that includes hosting hack-a-futures to surface new ideas, validating concepts, and building businesses from paper to product in less than 12 months. Koru helps portfolio companies tackle difficult-to-solve problems, essentially enabling them to disrupt themselves in a supportive environment while leveraging existing assets in new ways to accelerate value creation. Ultimately, this work is in service of providing pensions for Ontario's 327,000 active and retired teachers.
2019
9 Companies
1
3X Higher