Insights

First Momentum backs ZuriQ's $25.5M seed round to commercialize Penning trap quantum computing, the most promising path to thousands of high-fidelity ion qubits.

Munich Startup profiles QTAS, whose quantum sensing technology shrinks the blood volume needed to detect a single rare cancer cell by roughly a million times.

At Festival der Zukunft, First Momentum's Lena Späth drew a shared answer from four investors: capital, conviction, and a market willing to buy early.

Impact Loop VC featured the story of a VC that couldn't find a geothermal company worth backing, so the firm built one: Telura, now backed by a $5M pre-seed round.

Backed by €76M in EU Chips Act funding, TUM spinout QuantumDiamonds is building high-throughput inspection for chip fabs across three continents.

First Momentum backed QuantumDiamonds early in 2023. Three years later, the Munich company works with the world's largest chip companies and is building a €152M production facility for quantum-based chip inspection.

ZuriQ's research on moving ions in three dimensions inside a Penning micro-trap appears in Science Advances, reinforcing its lead in 2D quantum chip architecture.

Europe's spinoff ecosystem is producing successful spinouts, but the IP processes and growth capital to scale them are missing. At the Spinoff Summit 2026, we sat down with academia, government, and philanthropy to figure out why and what fixes it.