We’re very pleased to welcome @AzuleneLabs to our portfolio as it announces we have led its $3.4 million pre-seed round. Azulene Labs is creating the future of drug and materials development. While mechanical and civil engineers design new products with high-precision software, chemistry has traditionally been far less precise. For example, even after 60 years of computer modeling, predictions of how tightly a drug sticks to its target protein are still routinely wrong by a factor of a hundred or more. Azulene Labs is rebuilding the simulation stack to make chemistry and biochemistry modeling truly predictive for the first time. It is building high-accuracy physics-based foundation models that provide around 100 times the efficiency of competitors while being at least 200 times more cost-effective. Co-founder @NicolasSawaya explains: “An airplane is specified down to manufacturing tolerances before anyone builds a prototype. A skyscraper is load-tested in simulation before a single beam goes up. These ‘macroscopic’ models are so accurate that you can put enormous trust in them. Chemistry has had nothing like this. Until now.” “Chemistry should work the way aerospace engineering already works, where you design the thing in a computer, you believe the answer, and the physical object behaves as predicted the first time you build it.” Azulene Labs uses quantum-mechanical training data that produces far more high-quality data and higher-accuracy AI models for the same amount of capital as other approaches. While there have been significant advances in AI-based chemistry modeling in recent years, existing models routinely produce structures that are deeply inaccurate, or worse, physically impossible. Azulene Labs’ models are constrained to the laws of physics in ways that the current cutting-edge AI models are not. The technology can make a significant impact on product development across pharma, agriculture, energy storage, plastics, and industrial chemicals. “Imagine cancer medicines aimed at proteins the industry wrote off as undruggable decades ago; new antibiotics for infections that have stopped responding to everything we have; replacements for the solvents the chemical industry runs on by the megaton, many of which are toxic enough that regulators are phasing them out with no good substitute yet found, or plastics that perform like the ones we use today but break down completely afterward instead of persisting for centuries,” Sawaya says. The new funds will be spent on expanding the team and further product development. The company is currently working with end-users in the biotech and industrial chemistry markets. @noordende, our founder and General Partner, says: “What we see in this company is exceptional founder-market fit at a time when the pharma market is hungry for exactly what this incredible team is building. Nicolas is the perfect person to lead Azulene Labs to become the Anthropic of chemistry.”

Introducing the latest addition to our portfolio! We’ve led a $1.4 million pre-seed round for Arq Quantum Technologies. Arq is accelerating the development of the quantum internet with a quantum repeater that achieves connectivity reliably across long distances, faster and at lower cost than alternative approaches. Co-founders Samuele Grandi and Emanuele Distante are both experienced quantum scientists, and this latest advancement builds on their previous breakthroughs such as the first multiplexed and telecom-compatible quantum repeater, the first transmission of light-matter entanglement over tens of kilometers of optical fibre over a metropolitan network, and a quantum gate between remote atoms in optical cavities. They’re targeting the launch of a commercial product for networking quantum computers over long distances, aiming at telecom, finance, pharma, and healthcare customers. This round will fund a state-of-the-art lab to develop Arq's next generation of quantum memory devices, with a focus on reproducibility and reliability. Want to know more? Here’s Samuele to tell you all about Arq…

When we hosted Ground State Assembly in Amsterdam recently, @BNR knew it was a great opportunity to tell their listeners about the huge opportunity quantum technology presents. And so @joevanburik and @ikbenechtben took time to interview our founder and general partner @noordende , our partner @ChadRigetti, and our special advisor Charles Marcus (pictured here mid-interview). The interviews add up to a great primer on where quantum technology stands today, and the opportunities for founders and investors alike. Give them a listen: Ton’s interview (in Dutch): bnr.nl/podcast/degrotetechsh… Chad and Charles’ interviews (in English after a short Dutch intro): bnr.nl/podcast/degrotetechsh… [Photo: Rebekka Mell]

Ground State Assembly is a wrap! And wow, what an incredible day it was. We brought together the global investment community and some of the world’s best technologists, which of course included our own portfolio companies. Thanks to everyone who took part, including Joachim Schäfer of @IBM, Georges-Olivier Reymond from @pasqal_quantum, @yoramdw of @dealroomco , Nadia Carlsten, Charles Marcus, and our portfolio companies including @QuantWareHQ, QT Sense, Diffraqtion, EuQlid, SiC Systems, Rhonexum, QphoX, @orangeqs, and Sygaldry Technologies.  Conversations onstage included ‘Making Sense of Quantum: From Breakthrough Science to Venture-Ready Tech’, ‘Creating Value Across the Whole Quantum Computing Stack’, ‘Quantum's Road to the Public Market’, and ‘Sensing Opportunity: The Emerging Market for Quantum Sensing, From Manufacturing to Defense’. But the conversations in the room between attendees is what made it really special, and we created a lot of value for investors and founders alike. The feedback has been incredible, and we’ll be 10x-ing this thing next year. Just wait and see. Look out for podcasts from @BNR featuring on-location interviews with @noordende, @ChadRigetti, and Charles Marcus going live in the coming days on De Grote Tech Show’s podcast feed.

At Ground State Ventures, we know that finding the best early-stage quantum startups means understanding ecosystems around the world in detail. Example: this month our founder and general partner, @noordende , spent a week in Japan to explore its strong quantum technology scene. While he was there, he also took part in a panel on quantum’s next chapter at Q2B Tokyo. Thanks to Jun Takagi for the pictures…

Congratulations to Dr. Kris Kaczmarek, who has been promoted to become a partner here at Ground State Ventures!

Congratulations to our portfolio company Diffraqtion, which has advanced to the second phase of its project with @DARPA. Diffraqtion is developing next-generation Earth and space intelligence, powered by quantum cameras. Now the team has completed its first-year milestone to demonstrate sub-diffraction imaging capabilities for Space Domain Awareness and Space Exploration, in partnership with @uarizona. What’s next? They’ll be further advancing their technology to achieve the quantum limit of imaging on more of the world's largest telescopes and most challenging environments. This is truly exciting science and we’re backing them as they make real breakthroughs.

Quantum photonic chips sit at the heart of many of Europe’s most strategic emerging technologies, including quantum secure communications, quantum sensing and quantum computing.  Our portfolio company Q*Bird is part of Photonics for Quantum (P4Q), a €50 million European project to industrialize the photonic chip technologies that will power the next generation of quantum systems.   Q*Bird is taking on a key role within P4Q as a lead user for the quantum communication use case.  Together with its partners, Q*Bird will work on the designs and perform system-level testing for photonic integrated circuits tailored to quantum secure communication. This includes evaluation of entanglement quality and quantum teleportation capability.  “The challenge is not building a single high-performance component,” said Dr. Joshuan Slater, CTO of Q*Bird. “It is ensuring that components perform consistently, under operational conditions and are producible at high-yield. That is what will define telecom-grade quantum infrastructure.”  “Europe must not only invent quantum technologies, it must also build the capability to manufacture and scale them,” said Dr. Ingrid Romijn, CEO and Co-Founder of Q*Bird.  For Q*Bird, the project reinforces a clear mission to build secure, scalable and future-ready quantum communication systems for Europe and beyond.  “With P4Q now underway, Q*Bird is helping lay the photonic foundations for the next era of quantum secure infrastructure, where industrial-grade performance, trusted security and scalable manufacturing go hand in hand,” adds Remon Berrevoets, CTIO and Co-Founder of Q*Bird.

The best part of investing early? Watching founders deliver on what you saw on day one. @QuantWareHQ just closed a whopping $178 million Series B ⚡️ the largest private round ever raised by a dedicated quantum processor company.

Heading to Q.Stack 2026 in Bologna, Italy next week? Look out for our Investment Director Kris Kaczmarek. Kris will be taking part in a panel discussion on ‘Capital vs Physics: Is Quantum Becoming an Infrastructure Asset Class?’ at the DAMA Tecnopolo in Bologna — home to the Leonardo supercomputer, the IT4LIA AI Factory, and Italy's largest quantum computing infrastructure. Drop us a DM if you’d like to meet up with Kris during the event.

We’re really proud of our portfolio company @QuantWareHQ today as it announces a $178 million (€152 million) Series B round. We’ve backed them from the start, and we’re part of this round too: the largest ever private round by a dedicated quantum processor company. QuantWare has come a long way in a short amount of time. This round comes following the announcement of VIO-40K, a quantum processor architecture for 10,000 qubits, 100x larger than the state of the art today. The company is building KiloFab, the world’s largest dedicated quantum open architecture fab, in the Netherlands – strengthening Europe’s position in a value chain that is of key importance to its global strategic autonomy. QuantWare is the only company that designs, fabricates, and integrates modular quantum processors on an open architecture at an industrial scale. "The promise of quantum computing, capable of solving humanity's intractable challenges, can only happen once it can be manufactured and deployed at scale. That is exactly what we are building," said Matt Rijlaarsdam, CEO and co-founder of QuantWare. "VIO-40K will deliver 10,000-qubit processors on an open architecture that the entire ecosystem can build on, and KiloFab gives us the industrial production capacity to meet rapidly growing global demand. This fundraise accelerates QuantWare, and in doing so, advances the entire ecosystem toward hyperscale quantum compute, and we're proud to do so from Europe." Congratulations to Matt, Alessandro and the whole QuantWare team!

And a new handle too! We’re now @GroundStateVC around here…