Ajay Agrawal

Early life

Ajay Agrawal was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. Most of his early life was focused on achieving a higher education. In the mid 1990s to 2000s, he earned a BSc and a PhD in Strategy & Business Economics from the University of British Columbia. He later obtained an MBA from London Business School.

Career

Agrawal began his career in teaching 25 years ago. He started as a lecturer at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business in 1998. In 2001, he became an Assistant Professor at Smith School of Business at Queen’s University. In 2003, he moved on to Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor. He eventually fulfilled the position of a full-time professor, becoming the Geoffrey Taber Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation. At Rotman, he teaches courses on innovation, strategy, and entrepreneurship to MBA, executive, and undergrad students. He also directs research on how AI impacts markets and business models.

In 2010, he co-founded The Next 36, now part of NEXT Canada, a program that supports young entrepreneurs across the nation. He also helped launch NextAI, a specialized firm focused on AI ventures. Both programs combine mentorship, training, and access to investors to help founders build strong companies.

In 2012, he founded the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) at Rotman. Through this non-profit seed-stage program, science-based startups experience goal-focused mentoring with entrepreneurs and investors. With Agrawal’s leadership, CDL has grown to more than a dozen locations globally. The program helps ventures in fields including AI, quantum computing, climate tech, and health grow and secure funding. The companies that have come through CDL have generated billions in equity value.

Agrawal also co-chairs conferences for academics, business leaders and policymakers. In these conferences, he talks about the economics of machine intelligence and how AI will impact industries and labour markets. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in America as well as a Faculty Affiliate at the Vector Institute for AI in Toronto. He is a part of various advisory boards that focus on research and innovation policy.

He co-founded Kindred, a robotics and AI firm, and Sanctuary AI, which aims to create general-purpose, human-like robotic intelligence. He is also a co-founder and partner of Intrepid Growth Partners, a growth equity fund focused on AI-centered companies.

Agrawal is the author and co-author of two books on AI economics, Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence and Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence. Additionally, he has written several academic and popular articles on innovation and machine intelligence.

Net Worth

There is no official public record of his net worth. Online estimates put it in the low multiple millions, but these numbers are speculative and not verified by any financial disclosures.