Ground State Ventures, previously known as QDNL Participations, has closed an $88 million fund, 26% above its original $70 million target.
Founded in 2022 by Ton van’t Noordende, this Amsterdam-based investor in early-stage quantum technology started with a €15 million fund, supported only by Quantum Delta NL. Its first investments went to Dutch university spinouts such as QuantWare, Qblox, QphoX, QT Sense, and Q*Bird.
Seeing opportunities worldwide, the firm expanded outside the Netherlands. Ground State Ventures now has offices in Amsterdam, London, and San Francisco, and its team includes physicists with PhDs from top universities like Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and UC Berkeley.
“We’re never looking at a startup map of existing companies. We engage with and talk to the top-tier research groups at leading universities globally — MIT, Harvard, the University of Maryland on the East Coast; Stanford and Berkeley on the West Coast; Oxford and Cambridge in the UK; Chalmers in Sweden. Our original approach is to really engage with these groups before they incorporate… and what we try to do is give these companies their first check,” says van’t Noordende.
Today, the portfolio has five US companies, nine European companies, and one in Switzerland. The firm is also in talks with startups in India and Australia. Ground State Ventures leads the first investment in each company and acts as the investor of record. In less than 15 months, the portfolio’s total value reached $1.3 billion.
The fund usually invests between $500,000 and $1.5 million in the earliest stages. It is also ready to make follow-on investments, especially when a company is solving a key challenge in the quantum stack.
Although quantum technology might seem specialised, the fund invests broadly. It covers the whole quantum stack, from computing and networking to sensing and infrastructure. The main focus is on teams working to solve key problems that must be addressed for quantum technologies to grow and become commercially viable.
“We typically take a board seat in the companies we invest in. We are with the founders and support them in whatever they need after we invest. But the founders are in the driver’s seat. We take a support role and provide more than just capital,” says van’t Noordende.
Quantum is still a fairly homogenous field, especially in technical roles. Van’t Noordende recognises this but notes that Ground State Ventures’ current portfolio is gender-diverse.
“In our current portfolio — 15 companies — I believe six of them actually have a female CEO or co-founder. The VC market in general, and the quantum talent pool, is not necessarily equally distributed. We’re here to figure out what’s the best opportunity and the best thing to invest in, and if in the process we can find teams that are more diverse, that’s a win–win for us, the teams and the market,” notes van’t Noordende.
Looking ahead two to three years, van’t Noordende defines success not only by markups or IPOs but also by performance relative to peers. “The ultimate goal is to ensure we are the best-performing deep tech fund — not just quantum, but deep tech in general — driving returns to our investors. We want to be the best performing fund of our vintage,” concludes van’t Noordende.
With the final close coming up and 15 companies already supported by the first fund, Ground State Ventures plans to invest in about 30 companies over the next few years. The firm believes that backing scientific innovation early is the best way to help build the next generation of quantum infrastructure.
