Revolut founder Nik Storonsky’s VC firm QuantumLight has closed a $250m fund, signalling confidence in its much-touted AI-led deal decision-making platform.
As AI models become more sophisticated, VCs are increasingly using the technology to outcompete rivals to the best deals, with Sifted recently reporting around a third of VCs find at least half their deals through such tools.
But QuantumLight takes the data-driven approach up a notch. Since Storonsky and the fund’s CEO Ilya Kondrashov launched the fund in 2022, all 17 of the company’s deals to date have been recommended by its proprietary AI model.
“Our ambition is to build the world’s best systematic venture capital and growth equity firm, and support the new generation of founders by sharing some of the operating principles that we developed at Revolut,” said Storonsky, whose own company Revolut hit a $45bn valuation last year.
AI-led decision making
The firm’s AI-led approach allows it to “almost eliminate human judgement from the investment process,” says Kondrashov, adding that decisions can be made faster and are less likely to suffer from subjectivity and bias.
QuantumLight’s AI model analyses 10bn data points and has tracked more than 700k VC-backed companies, it says.
It’s what sets the firm apart from its competitors, Kondrashov tells Sifted. “Few, if any traditional VCs, have built a truly systematic and data-driven approach.”
Whether that approach pays dividends remains to be seen, but Kondrashov says the firm intends to return to the fundraising market next year.
The fund will back startups in any sector anywhere in the world, at Series B and C. 70% of the firm’s portfolio are US-based, across AI, Web3, Fintech, SaaS and marketplaces.
Storonsky and Kondrashov contributed around a quarter of the funds — with the Revolut founder putting up the majority of that portion. Other LPs weren’t disclosed, but QuantumLight says include fellow billionaire tech founders, VCs and institutional investors.
The Revolut playbook
QuantumLight takes a hands-on approach with the startups it backs, and looks to instil the operating principles Storonsky used to scale Revolut.
Founded in 2015, neobank Revolut is now Europe’s most valuable startup, has 50m users and made more than $1bn pre-tax profit in 2024.
“One thing we did at the beginning is we sat down with Nik to understand how Revolut was able to grow so fast and beat well-funded competition by such a margin,” says Kondrashov.
“We found that the success of Revolut is to a large extent predicated on Nik’s highly systematic approach to company management that we were able to summarise in a suite of detailed operating manuals — we call them ‘playbooks’ — which we believe other founders can adapt to their own businesses.”
QuantumLight previously released a playbook on how to drive high performance among teams, which encouraged frequent performance reviews and said senior leaders should “act on low performance early”.
Today it’s releasing another on hiring — as talent shortages hit startups across Europe.
