Having successfully closed its third venture capital fund, IQ Capital Fund III, at $175m, at the beginning of 2019 IQ Capital was poised to deploy its growth capital in a range of AI, machine learning and other deep tech businesses across the region. Mills & Reeve, who advised on the creation of IQ Capital Fund III, then turned its attentions to supporting the fund on its ambitious investment programme.
Fast forward 12 months and what an incredibly busy and productive period it’s been !
Kicking off in February, Closed Loop Medicine, a digital therapeutics company, raised £2.45m with IQ co-leading the round. The business was originally founded with investment from the Cambridge Angels. The investment is being used to support the development of digitally optimised treatment pathways, tailored to the patient. The company targets major health conditions starting with sleep disturbance, hypertension, chronic pain management and diabetes.
In February, the team closed a £5.5m round into Cambridge Communication Systems (CCS) with IQ Capital investing £1m.
Then in March, IQ Capital invested in Neurovalens, which raised a £4.6m seed round. This rapidly expanding business is developing products that improve the lives of people who suffer from neurological issues and has seen some great exposure across the media for its weight loss product, Modius.
April saw Causalens, the next generation of global economic predictive technology company based in London, raising its series A round, with IQ Capital leading.
Also in April, M-Qube raised £4.6m with IQ Capital invested a total of £1.4m. The round included AV8 Ventures, an early stage VC investor headquartered in Palo Alto and London, and JamJar Investments, the Innocent drinks founders' venture capital fund which focusses on investments in digital consumer brands.
In May IQ Capital invested a total of £700k in a revolutionary Oxford based AI digital imaging company for lung cancer detection, Optellum, as part of its £3.2m seed round.
June saw a £1m investment into Cybersmart, a GCHQ Cyber Accelerator alum. This funding will allow CyberSmart to further accelerate its rapid growth, build next-generation technical capabilities and secure Britain’s future as a leader in cybersecurity.
Next up in September was Turing Intelligence Technology (TurinTech), which raised £1m led by IQ Capital.TurinTech is a research-driven Artificial Intelligence company that spun out from University College London (UCL).It specialises in applying cutting edge research in AI & ML to provide machine learning models and optimisation services.
Also in September, Dataswift, a Cambridge-based company that enables individuals to own and use their own data, closed a £1.6m seed fundraising. The round, led by IQ Capital, will enable Dataswift to launch its privacy management product.
Then in November, Cambridge University spin out, Poro Technologies, which designs, creates, manufactures and licenses porous GaN products and technologies, raised a £1.25m seed round, of which IQ Capital invested £750k
Rounding off the year, Pangaea Data, a London based business supported by teams in Munich and Palo Alto which developed a platform for organising biomedical data raised £1.5m seed round, led by IQ Capital.
As well as the investments by IQ Capital Fund III, the team also found time to make its first investment from its recently raised £100m Growth Opportunities Fund, participating in a $40m Series B Round (led by Accel) raised by existing portfolio star, Privitar, the global leader in data privacy engineering which IQ Capital has supported since seed stage. The firm also achieved two cash exits, Spectral Edge and Chargepoint, from its Fund II portfolio
Zickie Lim, Partner at Mills & Reeve said: “Its been a truly exhilarating journey these last 12 months with the IQ Capital Team.IQ Capital’s success in raising their funds demonstrates the continuing strong investor appetite we have in the UK for deep tech growth investments.With multi-million dollar exits to the likes of Apple, Amazon, Oracle, Huawei and Microsoft, this sector remains vibrant and active, despite the backdrop of political and economic uncertainty many UK businesses are working with.”
Max Bautin, Partner at IQ Capital said: “IQ Capital has invested over £32m in the last 12 months into 15 new start-ups and 14 existing portfolio companies. We are excited to be at the forefront of the ground-breaking technology our portfolio companies are developing.Our focus on “deep-tech” across the sectors means that we can be at the heart of machine learning, disruptive algorithms, new human-machine interface, e-health and many other innovations that are fundamentally changing the way we work, rest and play.”
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