Nick Stavronsky has spent the past decade shaking up banking with his financial services firm Revolut. Now the billionaire former Lehman Brothers businessman is looking to accomplish a similar feat in venture capital.
Storonsky has built a quantitative investment firm for early-stage companies that relies on algorithms and artificial intelligence over human input to source deals. Quantum Light, founded in 2022, has invested in about a dozen startups in the past year, after raising about $200 million for the first fund anchored by Storinski.
In recent weeks, the London-based firm took a stake in healthcare-focused startup Rad AI, its fourth round of funding this year despite a slowdown in the venture sector. QuantumLight is currently finalizing another deal, according to a person familiar with the matter.
While many startup investors boast about their savvy use of data, Quantum Light positions itself as an outlier.
“We look quite different than a traditional venture firm,” Chief Executive Officer Ilya Kondrashov, 38, said in an interview at Revolut's London offices. “It's pretty logical that something like what we're doing would exist.”
Storinski, 39, joins a growing number of European tech billionaires investing in venture capital as they grow their wealth beyond their core assets.
Zinal Growth, the family office of Checkout.com founder Guillaume Pousaz, has invested in at least two dozen startups since 2021, while an investment firm for Daniel Eck of Spotify Technology SA last year bought a Swiss Put €10 million ($10.7 million) into a startup that works. Slow aging.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Puzaz and Eck have a combined net worth of about $10.4 billion, while Revolut co-founder and CEO Stavronsky is worth about $4 billion.
More accurate
Revolut revealed its 2023 results this week, showing revenue nearly doubling to $2.2 billion. A timely release of its audited financial results could help the company win approval for a UK banking license, which has been long delayed by Revolut's accounting problems.
Sturinsky, who founded Revolut in 2015, allocated about $60 million to fund Quantum Light. In an emailed statement, he said his venture firm's strategy allows it to make more accurate decisions at a faster rate than humans, and he expects these methods to be used in the market for startup deals. Will play more roles.
“These systematic strategies will make a meaningful contribution,” he said. “As Revolut challenges traditional banks, Quantum Light has ambitions to take on the giants.”
Quant investing has been a powerful force in public markets for decades, but organized players typically haven't touched private assets because a lack of publicly available data has hindered analysts from looking for profitable patterns and dislocations. . That's changing fast as Wall Street firms try to get ahead amid the recent boom in private equity and credit, with firms like Ares Management Corp. and BlackRock Inc. hiring quantitative analysts who typically Found in data-rich sections of finance.
Quantum Light has similarly hired several data engineers among its roughly two dozen employees, though the firm is a relatively small player for venture capital.
Although a number of venture funds have used AI models to screen potential deals, those tools are not as important as an investor network, said Claudia Zeisberger, a senior associate professor for entrepreneurship at business school INSEAD.
“Ultimately, in VC, money is not going to make the difference,” he said. “It's the soft stuff, opening the door and so on.”
Quantum Light bills itself as the “first truly structured” venture firm and raised money from other tech founders and family offices for its first fund.
Kondrashov said his portfolio company executives had access to a “playbook” that helped turn Revolut from a modest business in Storinski into one of Europe's most valuable startups focused on prepaid debit cards. Based on switching experience, provides bank accounts, money transfer and stock trading.
A Cambridge University graduate and former analyst at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Kondrashov previously started his own UK fintech called Kriya. “Storinsky is the main figure behind quantum light,” he said.
“He's part of all the big decisions,” Kondrashov said.
The two first met at a dinner for entrepreneurs in central London before the pandemic and later reconnected when Storinski was starting to build Quantum Light in 2022. The fund, which entered into its first contract in July 2023, allocates approximately $5 million per investment.
Kondrashov said he expects to continue investing at a steady pace for the next three years or so with no immediate plans to raise another fund.
“We're probably going to do about one deal a month,” he said. “We raised all the capital we needed.”