Even though IQ Capital has defined deep tech investing in the UK since its foundation in Cambridge in 2007, they are not stopping there. The leading London-based deep tech venture capital firm announced the final close of its fourth Venture Fund at €187 million (Fund IV), taking its assets under management to more than €934 million.
The firm will continue to invest in Seed and Series A into UK and European startups to commercialise IP-rich breakthrough technologies and back founders with the ambition to scale globally.
Fund IV will build on the success of IQ Capital’s existing funds, which have achieved exits to Oracle, Google, Apple and Facebook, along with several high-profile IPOs and delivered industry-beating returns to the investors. IQ Capital’s PhD-rich team has invested in over 100 deep tech startups, attracting a further €1.3 billion follow-on capital to its portfolio and creating over 4,000 deep tech jobs.
Investors in Fund IV include global institutions, funds-of-funds, family offices, corporates and tech entrepreneurs of whom several were previously backed by IQ Capital, as well as British Patient Capital, the largest LP investing in UK venture capital.
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 providing the technology for multinational corporates to meet their net-zero objectives, which has gone on to raise a further €24 million, and Secretarium, which has pioneered confidential computing, developing the world’s first ‘trustless’ cloud computing infrastructure, based on advanced cryptography using only standard hardware components.
Kerry Baldwin, co-founder, Managing Partner of IQ Capital and previous Chair of the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (BVCA), said: “Deep tech will play a pivotal role as both the UK and Europe continue to lead the way in developing technology that will have a lasting global impact. IQ Capital backs IP-rich technologies with the potential to dominate massive global markets, at a time when deep tech investment is at the forefront of investor’s minds, topping $17bn in 2022.”
The firm has also launched its second €187 million Growth Fund to provide later-stage funding to outperforming companies, primarily in its venture portfolios. This enables IQ Capital to deploy capital at multiple stages, investing an additional €28 million in individual companies as they internationalise.
Max Bautin, co-founder, Managing Partner of IQ Capital and board member of Invest Europe commented: “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. Breakthroughs in “novel AI” models, new energy & climate, robotics and space-tech, quantum computing, synthetic biology – all demonstrate what a significant opportunity deep tech now presents.”
IQ Capital’s general partners, Kerry Baldwin, Max Bautin and Ed Stacey, have worked together for more than 20 years, with their commercial and scientific networks attracting founders from across Europe. IQ Capital’s investments include: Thought Machine, a core-banking software unicorn that they backed from Seed; Nyobolt, ultra-fast charging battery tech; and Speechmatics, the leading speech recognition technology scale-up.
