London VC Firgun Ventures has unveiled the primary $70m (£53.4m) shut of its quantum-focused funding fund.
Concentrating on early growth-stage companies growing quantum applied sciences, the fund will again Sequence A and B rounds within the sector.
The fund, for which Firgun goals to lift $250m, has secured important backing from the Qatar Funding Authority in addition to a handful of household places of work and Ilyas Khan, the founding father of Cambridge Quantum Computing, which was later fashioned into one of many world’s largest firms within the house Quantinuum.
“Quantum isn’t a buzzword. It’s an industrial revolution. It’ll reshape how we compute, talk, and diagnose or remedy illness. We’re right here to fund its future main firms,” mentioned Dr Kris Naudts, co-founder of Firgun Ventures.
“Our investor ethos begins with ‘first, do no hurt,’ borrowed from the medical world, however used right here to imply that we’re focussed on serving to founders and administration groups preserve innovation and drive sustainable and organised development. Quantum know-how is right here to vary the world, and we strongly imagine in its skill to take action for the higher.”
With the quantum sector advancing past analysis into revenue-generating industrial ventures, Firgun has seen a possibility to again it because it grows more and more intertwined with sectors from medical know-how to banking and finance.
“We again quantum founders who’ve already crossed from lab to market, and so they want buyers who perceive each worlds so as to efficiently scale,” added Firgun co-founder Zeynep Koruturk.
“After greater than a decade working with know-how entrepreneurs at Goldman Sachs, I’ve seen how transformative innovation takes maintain when it’s backed by the proper of capital. Quantum is not any totally different – it wants buyers who mix conviction with values. That’s precisely what Firgun was constructed to ship.”
