Mr Toon said: “We have about £4.6 trillion of capital managed in London as a result of pension funds and insurance. A tiny, tiny percentage of that goes into private companies today.
“I think there’s a huge opportunity here. Our pension funds tend to focus on cost, rather than on growth [and] performance. And that creates its own issues in terms of ‘what’s the future value of your pension going forward?’ And how do we expose some appropriate portion to the high-growth opportunities that some of these scale-up opportunities represent.
“I think there’s a massive opportunity to do that, but there’s a lot of structural things still, I think that needs to be fixed.”
Mr Toon pointed out that the majority of the money invested in Graphcore, from shareholders such as Microsoft, the venture capital fund Sequoia and the giant Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, came from overseas.
He said: “That’s the piece that we’re going to need to fix going forward.”
British pension funds have faced repeated criticism for their risk-averse approach to investing from the lines of Sir John Bell, a leading scientist who led Britain’s Covid response. Opponents argue that as well as failing to maximise savers’ returns, the industry’s failure to back promising companies also means that talent and profits go abroad instead.