Beyond Capital: How Long-Term Investors are Creating Value | Global Dialogues Toronto 2026

Eldridge Investment Group & Asenco Strategic Direction

• Eldridge operates as an investment holding company with three core pillars: an insurance business (Security Benefit), an asset management platform (Eldridge Capital Management), and direct strategic investments.
• The firm is launching a minerals investment platform and advisory business to support Asenco in extracting critical minerals and rebuilding supply chains.
• Eldridge took control of Asenco last week, having invested and partnered with the company over the previous four years.
• Tony Elman noted that the term "critical minerals" was coined by Donald Trump to redirect global energy toward the industry, which had been neglected as environmental burdens were exported to China for two decades.
• Canada is identified as having massive untapped mineral potential, characterized by a high urbanization rate that leaves vast undeveloped land available for resource extraction.

Artificial Intelligence Integration & AI Investments

• Eldridge acquired "Pseudo Labs," a Slovakian AI firm with ~70 employees (mostly engineers and client-facing staff) based in Košice with offices in Prague and Bratislava.
• The firm secured an enterprise license for Anthropic's Claude model in early 2024, deeming the risk of inaction greater than the risk of action.
• Approximately 85% of Eldridge's 450 employees are daily active users of AI tools, with year-to-date deployment costs remaining under $1 million.
• The strategic goal is to build a proprietary "context layer" to decouple internal intelligence from specific frontier models (like Claude), allowing the firm to route this intelligence to any model, including open-source options, to drive down costs.
• Phil Elman anticipates that frontier models will eventually become commoditized, necessitating a shift toward owning the context layer and potentially running open-source models on owned compute.

Capital Structure, Insurance, and Private Credit Cycle

• Security Benefit maintains a low leverage ratio of approximately 6:1 liabilities-to-equity, enabling flexible investment mandates focused on generating a low-teens Return on Equity (ROE).
• Due to the sticky nature of annuity liabilities (90% become annuitized post-surrender charge), the firm prioritizes long-duration, investment-grade assets, having shifted significantly toward CLO tranches in 2019–2021 to mitigate duration risk.
• Alan Miller of BMO observes a record level of capital formation across asset classes, creating a robust environment for corporate growth despite short-term interest rate volatility.
• Private credit is described as potentially overheated, with concerns regarding "sponsor-backed" loans to software companies with high leverage (8x–12x) and mismatched asset/liability durations.
• Miller suggests the current flattening of private credit market power is a healthy correction that brings the sector back into equilibrium with public markets.
• Elman warns that aggressive capital deployment creates mistakes, citing the erosion of fundamental lender-borrower principles in the leveraged loan market and the risk of "lender-on-lender violence" due to non-parallel security positions.

Real Estate & Data Center Infrastructure Strategy

• Heinz Real Estate maintains a 22-year presence in Canada with 170 staff across Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver, anchored by the 3 million sq. ft. CWC Square office development in Toronto.
• The firm identifies "power, land, and entitlements" as the primary scarcity constraints and investment opportunities for the data center sector, specifically avoiding speculative data center development or direct acquisition.
• Analysts believe the current market for existing data centers is mispriced and overvalued, carrying significant risk of excess capacity if not backed by structured off-take agreements with end-users.
• The firm operates on a "new normal" macroeconomic view with elevated base rates, expecting income growth rather than capital rate compression to drive returns in the real estate sector.
• Local, on-the-ground teams are deemed essential for managing assets in 400 cities globally to drive income performance and navigate complex local supply chains.

Canadian Investment Thesis & Aerospace Ventures

• Panelists identify Canada as structurally well-positioned for the future due to low-cost sustainable power, deep natural resources, proximity to the US economy, and a stable regulatory environment.
• Investment opportunities in Canada are concentrated in critical minerals, energy, and industrial infrastructure, with a specific call to action for financing growth-stage entrepreneurial businesses rather than just large-scale public-private infrastructure.
• Trade friction is viewed as a short-term risk but a potential long-term catalyst for supply chain shortening and manufacturing relocation closer to demand (North America).
• Eldridge's aerospace subsidiary, ESAR Aerospace, successfully launched its second rocket from Norway in September, achieving full payload orbit.
• A new launch facility partnered with Maritime Launch Services is scheduled to come online in Nova Scotia by 2028, targeting the growing demand for non-US tethered launch capacity.
• The Nova Scotia launch site is highlighted as a strategic alternative to SpaceX dominance, addressing the geopolitical risk of US government access to data from all payloads launched on SpaceX vehicles.