IQ Capital Raises $400 Million for Deep Tech AI Firms

Venture firm IQ Capital has raised $400 million for artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics startups.

As City AM reported Monday (June 5), the London-based company says it will use the money to fund a range of “deep tech” companies, an umbrella term for advanced technologies, including AI, blockchain and quantum computing.

IQ Capital Co-founder and Managing Partner Kerry Baldwin said in a statement that deep tech firms “will play a pivotal role” as Great Britain and Europe “continue to lead the way in developing technology that will have a lasting global impact.”

Max Bautin, also a co-founder and managing partner at IQ Capital, added that deep tech firms could now have a “transformative impact” in the years to come.

“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,” he said.

Last year, the European Union published the European Innovation Agenda, a plan to increase the number of deep tech startups in Europe by attracting 45 billion euros from private investors.

While AI-related projects are capturing the attention of VC firms, the technology has also been a “source of significant technical disruption” in the VC space, letting firms automate and improve funding decision-making by merging AI and machine learning efficiency with human insight, Mattias Ljungman, founder at U.K.-based Moonfire Ventures, told PYMNTS last week.

“It makes us a bit more effective at identifying good opportunities,” added Mike Arpaia, a partner at Moonfire. “It’s also just a fun and an interesting way to participate in an emerging technology which is going to be very transformative.”

To that end, Moonfire can filter through between 50,000 and 60,000 funding applications per week, winnowing it down to about 100 opportunities that fit its investment thesis.

Once that list is generated, the firm performs a more comprehensive analysis of the shortlisted companies, using AI and natural language processing models to identify the most compelling founders, create investment memos and summarize information from different data providers, among others.

Meanwhile, a recent report by cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase notes the potential for the VC space to invest in AI-centric crypto projects.

“We think the intersection of AI and crypto represents an important opportunity for entrepreneurs looking to build in Web3,” wrote David Duong, Coinbase’s head of institutional research.

The report notes the crypto projects involving AI models are still somewhat rare, accounting for only 0.07% of the total crypto market cap.