One of the leading lights in U.K. deep tech investing, IQ Capital, vaulted its assets under management past $1 billion with the final close of its fourth venture fund at $200 million.
The fund drew support from British Patient Capital, the largest LP investing in U.K. venture capital, in addition to global institutions including funds-of-funds, family offices and tech entrepreneurs, several of whom were previously backed by IQ Capital.
IQ Capital was co-founded in 2007 in Cambridge by General Partners Kerry Baldwin, Max Bautin and Ed Stacey, who have worked together for over 20 years. The firm, now co-headquartered in London and Cambridge, has invested in more than 100 deep tech startups, attracting $1.4 billion in follow-on capital to its portfolio and creating over 4,000 deep tech jobs along the way. IQ Capital has more than 20 exits to its credit, including Phonetic Arts, which developed a natural speech synthesis software engine and was acquired by Google in 2010; Grape Shot, which developed a contextual intelligence platform for digital advertising and was acquired by Oracle in 2018; and Bloomsbury AI, which was acquired by Facebook in 2018 in a bid to boost the social media giant’s natural language processing capabilities.
“The world has seen many examples of the transformative impact that deep tech can create to achieve vital improvements in all spheres of life and help address some of the biggest challenges facing humanity,” said Bautin. “Breakthroughs in ‘novel AI’ models, new energy and climate, robotics and space-tech, quantum computing, synthetic biology — all demonstrate what a significant opportunity deep tech now presents.”
Fund IV has already made investments including: DreamFold, which uses Generative AI algorithms to predict the properties of therapeutic proteins; Risilience, a climate-risk platform helping multinational corporates to meet their net-zero objectives; and Secretarium, a confidential computing, pioneer that used advanced cryptography to develop the world’s first “trustless” cloud computing infrastructure.
In addition to continuing to invest in seed and Series A rounds of U.K. and European startups to market IP-rich breakthrough technologies and help founders scale globally, IQ Capital has also launched its second $200 million growth fund to provide later-stage funding to companies that are showing exceptional results, particularly in its venture portfolios. This will enable the firm to deploy capital at multiple stages, investing an additional $30 million in individual companies as they broaden their international reach.
