IQ Capital

BREAKING: The UK has just minted ANOTHER Deep Tech unicorn - this time it's battery company Nyobolt! 🇬🇧 The company, founded by Sai Shivareddy and Clare Grey, is a Cambridge university spin out that enables ultrafast charging in seconds. It also delivers 10x the lifespan of conventional lithium-ion batteries. It's now powering AI data centres and warehouse robots around the world, and has seen revenue grow by 5x in the last year! Today it has announced a $60m Series C round at a $1 billion valuation, led by Symbotic, with participation from IQ Capital (Max Bautin), and Latitude | Phoenix Court (Saul Klein). LETS GO It's great to see UK Deep Tech flying. Interested in European Tech? Sign up to my newsletter to stay up to date: https://lnkd.in/d54jdWXP

Nyobolt has just announced its latest funding round at a $1B valuation. We backed Sai Shivareddy, Clare Grey and the team in 2021 when the technology was a breakthrough in battery science spinning out of the Grey Group at the University of Cambridge. Since then, Nyobolt has become the instant power backbone for physical industries, with rapid commercial growth and deployment across advanced robotics and emerging AI infrastructure, including data centres. We’re proud to back the team for a third time as they continue to push the boundaries of high-performance energy systems. More news to follow! 

We’re excited to announce that we are leading Omegga's €10m seed round. Chick culling is an entrenched problem in the poultry industry, leading to the culling of around 7 billion male chicks every year. Katharina Maria Hesseler, CEO and co-founder of Omegga, is changing that with their spectral intelligence platform. Following the company’s recent €10m funding round, here are a few highlights from her conversation with IQ Capital Partner Mason Sinclair. What are you building and why now? We are building a deep tech platform that combines spectroscopy with AI to turn complex biological data into real-time insights. Our first application is in-ovo sexing, allowing hatcheries to determine the sex of a chicken embryo at the earliest stage and avoid culling male chicks entirely. What did you see that others missed? Most approaches focused on biology alone. We started with the customer, understanding how hatcheries actually operate and what it takes for a solution to work at scale. With advances in machine learning, we can now unlock spectral data in a way that was not possible before. What needs to go right for this to work at scale? Technology, industrialisation and go-to-market all need to come together. That means building a robust system across different environments that integrates seamlessly into existing hatcheries and delivers clear ROI for customers. Read the full conversation at the link below.

We’re pleased to be co-hosting this with Commplicated, Earlybird Venture Capital and World Fund at Deep Tech Momentum in May. There’s no shortage of ambitious female founders building in deep tech, but access to capital and networks still hasn’t caught up. This is about changing that in practice: getting the right founders, investors, and LPs in the same room. Max Bautin, Jordan Billiald and Elaine Hegarty will be in Berlin and are looking forward to the conversations. If you should be there, register your interest.

Very few companies have the ambition to become Europe’s next energy major - even fewer are on the road to delivering it in the real world. Harvey Hodd, founder and CEO of Rivan Industries, is doing exactly that. Following today’s Series A announcement, here are a few highlights from his conversation with IQ Capital partner Jonno Evans: What are you building and why now? We’re building the infrastructure to produce synthetic fuels domestically in Europe, using renewable energy and carbon captured from the air. The timing matters because energy security has never been more important. Europe is still heavily reliant on imported fossil fuels and the shocks of the past few years have shown how exposed that makes the system. What did you see that others missed? A lot of people looked at synthetic fuels and concluded they were too expensive, too energy-intensive and too hard to scale. But the truth is that they do work if you design around abundant cheap energy and combine proven systems - solar, electrolysis, direct air capture and fuel synthesis. What needs to go right for this to work at scale? Execution. Scaling manufacturing, deploying larger plants and delivering against offtake agreements. Our £25m Series A means we can now deploy at industrial scale. Read the full conversation at the link below.

Turning the tide on one of the world’s most lethal cancers. Glioblastoma is the most aggressive and common form of brain cancer in adults, and one of the hardest to treat, with tumours that rapidly grow, infiltrate healthy brain tissue and almost always recur. Currently, only 25% of glioblastoma patients survive beyond one year. Trogenix has just published breakthrough pre-clinical results in Nature showing 83% complete tumour elimination in an aggressive glioblastoma model, with no toxicity and no relapse. This is a powerful proof point for Trogenix’s dual-payload gene therapy platform, combining direct tumour killing with immune activation to create lasting protection. With first patient dosing expected this year, the company is now moving into the clinic with a potential new approach to treating glioblastoma. It’s a privilege to support the Trogenix team as they push the boundaries of what’s possible in oncology and healthcare. Read the full release below.

Building quantum power comes with real responsibility. Quantum computing is going to be one of the most important technologies of the next era, with the potential to transform everything from drug discovery and materials science to energy systems and cryptography. Who shapes it is critical. As Nu Quantum founder and CEO, Dr Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, told BBC News: “Quantum computing talent should be used for good. We’re talking about an extremely powerful technology, and with that comes huge responsibility about the use cases that are going to be prioritised and the ethics around that.” From its roots as a Cambridge spinout to building the infrastructure that will connect quantum computers at scale, Nu Quantum is tackling one of the field’s hardest challenges. We have been long-term supporters of Nu Quantum and the brilliant work the team is doing in Cambridge. Encouraging to see this debate around the future of quantum playing out on a national stage. Read more below.

Trogenix is rethinking how we treat cancer by going straight to the source. Featured on The Rest is Science podcast this week, its approach uses a Trojan horse strategy to enter tumour cells and trigger a self-destruct mechanism from within, while activating the immune system to recognise and fight the disease. As the podcast’s hosts, Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens (Vsauce), put it: “We're going to sneak past the guards… get into the tumour and then hit the self-destruct button.” Built on its Odysseus® platform, Trogenix is advancing precision therapies with the potential to deliver long-term protection against recurrence. We backed the team at Seed and Series A and are proud to support them as they move towards clinical trials in some of the hardest-to-treat cancers, including targeting brain tumours. Listen to the episode below.

Isembard has raised $50m in Series A funding led by Union Square Ventures. We will open 25 factories this year in the United Kingdom and United States, expand our engineering teams and launch into Germany, France and Ukraine. Tamarack Global and IQ Capital joined the round alongside existing investors Notion Capital and CIV. Angels include Alex Bouaziz (Deel), Andrei Danescu (Dexory) and Matt Briers (Wise). Manufacturing is the rate limiter on our collective security, prosperity and sense of purpose as nations. Isembard is the manufacturer for aerospace, defence and robotics customers. We operate both owned and grow franchisee factories powered by our proprietary software and AI platform, MasonOS. Our mission is to forge industrial acceleration. If you are doom scrolling but would rather solve the hardest problems of our time, get in touch. Roles we are hiring for are in the comments below. Saying that, we prefer to craft roles around the individual rather than craft individuals to roles. And if you're interested, the oil painting in the image is The Iron Rolling Mill (also known as Modern Cyclopes) by Adolph Menzel, which depicts engineers inside a 19th-century German rolling mill.

Tropic has raised $105m in Series C funding, and IQ Capital is proud to be part of it. Panama Disease (TR4) is spreading across more than 20 countries and poses an existential threat to the $25bn global banana industry. But engineering disease resistance into tropical staple crops isn't possible with conventional breeding, and gene editing in these crops has been painstakingly slow — the genetics are complex and the cycles are long. Tropic's platform changes that. They've already brought the first new banana varieties to market in over 75 years, with demand outstripping supply, and their TR4-resistant varieties are on track for commercial deployment from 2027. The round was co-led by Forbion and Corteva Agriscience, with participation from Just Climate, ABN AMRO Bank N.V., Invest International, and continued support from Temasek, Five Seasons Ventures, and the existing syndicate. We're proud to be backing Gilad Gershon and the Tropic team as they scale globally. https://lnkd.in/eiNK3sCC