Helsinki-based AI startup Qutwo has raised a €25m angel round at a €325m post-money valuation, aiming to become the Palantir of the quantum computing era.
A broad group of angel investors is backing the company, including Yuri Milner from DST Global, Xavier Niel from Iliad, Ilkka Paananen from Supercell, Max Junestrand from Legora and Thomas Wolf from Hugging Face.
Launched in February by three founders from Finnish AI and quantum companies Silo AI and IQM, Qutwo has already hired a team of 50 industry experts.
The startup is working with customers, across the financial services, energy, retail and life sciences industries, on the best ways to exploit the latest AI and quantum technologies. Qutwo already claims to have €20m of contracted revenue with clients, including Finland’s OP financial group.
Peter Sarlin, Qutwo’s cofounder and executive chairman, said that Europe had largely missed the last paradigm shift in computing from CPUs to GPUs, which had powered the latest wave of generative AI. But a new opportunity was rapidly emerging as the industry evolved from GPUs to QPUs (quantum processing units) to power the quantum age.
“We intend to ensure that the globally leading company for the next AI paradigm comes out of Europe,” he told Sifted. We want “to ensure that we are best positioned when this quantum inflection point happens.”
Sarlin, previously co-founder and CEO of Silo AI, said that Qutwo would be agnostic on which quantum modalities and AI algorithms it would use because it was not yet clear which ones would win. But he suggested that hybrid and quantum-inspired approaches were already helping clients address optimisation and simulation challenges in new ways.
Qutwo’s other founders are Kaj-Mikael Björk, former head of research at Silo AI, and Kuan Yen Tan, former CTO of IQM.
Silo AI was acquired by US chip company AMD for $665m in 2024. The Finnish quantum hardware company IQM announced in February it was going public via a SPAC transaction at a valuation of $1.8bn.
