IQ Capital raised total investment capital of more than $300 million to fund deep-tech ventures. It divided the money into a $125 million Growth Opportunities Fund and a $175 million venture fund, IQ Capital Fund III.
Deep Tech Investments
IQ Capital focuses its investments in deep-tech, a phrase referring to research and development of artificial intelligence (AI), biotech, blockchain technology, the Internet of things and other futuristic technologies requiring significant recent advances in engineering and science. Startups it has invested in include Funderbeam, Paragraf and Senseye. The fund continues a European trend in developing deep tech opportunities.
“The partners, Ed Stacey, Kerry Baldwin, and I, have been investing in deep-tech for over 20 years and during this time we’ve seen investment in the sector grow from tens of millions p.a. to $1.75 billion deployed across Europe in 2018 alone,” said IQ Capital co-founder and partner Max Bautin. “Half of this capital was invested into UK start-ups, reinforcing the UK as a leader in Europe, with well-established technology ecosystems formed in Cambridge, Bristol, Oxford, and London.”
Growth Opportunities Fund
The new of the two funds, the Growth Opportunities Fund, further finances the best-performing companies in IQ Capital’s current investment portfolio with later-stage funding. The first recipient of the funding, Privitar, a data privacy engineering firm supported from seed stage by IQ Capital, will receive a contribution to its $40 million Series B funding round.
IQ Capital Fund III
More than 90 percent of IQ Capital’s Fund II investors also invested in Fund III, a seed and Series A fund. During 2018, the venture funding firm invested in 12 companies. Fund III monies will go to Causalens, Concirrus, and Iotic, among others. The prior fund, Fund II, provided monies to scaling business including Fluidic Analytics, Paragraf, Speechmatics, and Thought Machine. Fund II has a current portfolio enterprise value of more than $1.2 billion.
The Fund’s Investors
The funds raised for dispersion by IQ Capital come from various global investors, such as National Grid Partners and British Patient Capital. NGP stated its contribution was due in part to IQC’s knowledge of “ML, AI, data-focused propositions, and engineering and materials.”
The venture capital firm has not yet announced the full list of recipients of its Growth Opportunities Fund or its IQ Capital Fund III.
