The head of venture capital and growth-equity investments at Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, Saar Pikar, is leaving the pension fund to be president of Toronto-based investment firm Kensington Capital Partners Ltd.
Mr. Pikar starts on July 28 at Kensington, a private equity and venture capital firm with $2.1-billion under management, and will report to chief executive officer Tom Kennedy.
This is the third time the head of the OMERS ventures team has changed in three years, continuing a period of rapid turnover at the top of the unit after the prior departures of Damien Steel in 2023 and Michael Yang two years later.
OMERS expects to announce its plans for the division’s new leadership in the coming weeks.
Mr. Pikar brought “clarity and strong relationship-building to his work across asset management, growth equity and, most recently, Ventures & Growth,” OMERS head of private capital Michael Block said in an e-mailed statement.
Kensington is also hiring Bo Cenanovic as a senior managing director and head of private equity, with a mandate to expand the company’s mid-market buyout business. He spent more than a decade at Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and was most recently a managing director at PSG Equity.
Mr. Pikar joined OMERS in 2019 as an adviser to its growth equity team and took on an expanded role as the pension fund’s head of ventures and growth in the summer of 2025. On his watch, that team has refocused its investments in Canada, after retreating from an expansion into the United States and Britain, where the fund struggled to gain an edge in competitive markets such as Silicon Valley.
OMERS has about 1 per of its total portfolio, or $1.5-billion, allocated to venture investments.
“I’m proud of the progress the Ventures team has made, including its work in the past year across the existing portfolio and recent investments in companies such as Dominion Dynamics and Cohere,” Mr. Pikar said in a statement.
In his new job, Mr. Pikar said he is “excited to lead a renewed Kensington investment team.” He will help set the company’s strategic plan, lead its investment teams and have direct oversight of venture and growth investments, as well as Kensington’s defence and security investing platform, ONE9, which it acquired last year.
OMERS Ventures launched in 2011 and was an early backer of Canadian startups and founders. It has made investments in 46 companies, including success stories such as Shopify Inc. SHOP-T, Hopper Inc., Wattpad and more recently Xanadu Quantum Technologies Ltd. XNDU-Q
But investing in early-stage companies also comes with higher risk in pursuit of outsized returns. OMERS took a nine-figure loss in the recent sale of point-of-sale software vendor TouchBistro Inc., walking away with only $2-million from an initial $140-million investment.
But OMERS said it is still committed to venture and growth investing, primarily in Canada. The pension fund is looking to add at least $10-billion in new domestic investments to its portfolio over the next five years, across asset classes such as infrastructure and real estate, which would boost its overall exposure to Canada.
Venture and growth investments are one priority area for deploying that money, in sectors such as AI platforms for industry workflows as well as defence technologies.
The OMERS Ventures team “continues to actively source and diligence investment opportunities with a focus on backing strong Canadian companies and creating long-term value for our members,” Mr. Block said.
With a report from Sean Silcoff in Ottawa