Peter Sarlin’s QuTwo is valued at $380 million in angel round

QuTwo, the Finnish AI lab founded by former AMD Silo AI CEO Peter Saarlin, is now valued at €325 million (about $380 million) after raising €25 million ($29 million). It is a sign of continuing tailwinds for artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and sovereign technology, especially for European-made companies.

The name QuTwo is a reference to quantum computing, but it is not limited to quantum computing. Its core product, QuTwo OS, is an orchestration layer that routes tasks to classical, quantum, or hybrid architectures – with the idea that enterprise use cases are often better served by “quantum-inspired” computing, which uses classical chips to emulate quantum behavior on more reliable hardware.

Enterprise AI will be QuTwo’s bread and butter. The company has already secured about $23 million in committed revenue thanks to design partnerships with the likes of retail giant Zalando, which has helped develop its AI assistants. “AI is the north star that we will continue to target,” said Sarlin, who insists that QuTwo is an AI company. “Quantum is just a new kind of computing.”

Momentum has been building around AI labs in Europe, and several have become unicorns overnight. Just last week, former DeepMind researcher David Silver secured $1.1 billion for his new venture, Ineffable Intelligence. QuTwo’s valuation and ring size are fairly modest in comparison, but will allow it to pursue its roadmap under less pressure.

According to Sarlin, who serves as CEO of QuTwo, this was a decision he also made for his previous company, Silo AI, which was acquired by AMD for $665 million in 2024. “I had a lot of investors who wanted to put a lot of money into getting Silo into OpenAI in Europe, but I didn’t believe in that play,” he told TechCrunch.

The main difference is that QuTwo wants the freedom to think long term, with a horizon of five to ten years. “We are on a mission to build the world’s leading AI company for the next model, because Europe has not succeeded in building the AI ​​company for this era,” Sarlin said.

This is not to say that Sarlin is pessimistic about European AI, of which he is a prolific supporter. He’s also not necessarily critical of very large rounds – he volunteered that he is also an investor in Yann LeCun’s Ami Labs, which raised $1.03 billion, and in the British-American venture Recursive Superintelligence, which is rumored to be following the same path. But he didn’t see a $1 billion round as the ideal solution for QuTwo, nor VC money, at least for now.

Until recently, QuTwo was funded solely by Sarlin’s family office, PostScriptum, which has also incubated NestAI, the other company where he serves as executive chairman. But while NestAI raised about $115 million in a funding round led by Finland’s sovereign wealth fund and Nokia, QuTwo was not seeking to raise outside funding.

However, when the lab’s soft launch generated significant interest earlier this year, Sarlin decided he would say no to checks from venture capital firms and strategic investors, but yes to an angel round partly due to the geopolitical moment Europe is currently experiencing.

As Europe increasingly looks to favor domestic alternatives to US technology providers, there are tailwinds for made-in-Finland AI. But there is also investor appetite for a company that promises to facilitate more ambitious RandD initiatives in areas where the region already has strong players, such as the automotive, life sciences and gaming sectors.

Conversely, Sarlin expects QuTwo’s angel investors to be able to open doors across Europe. There are certainly quite a few introductions he could ask for from this group, which includes Yuri Milner, Xavier Neal, Nico Rosberg, Dieter Schwarz, and Niklas Zennström, as well as several startup founders from Hugging Space, Legora, Miro, Skype, Supercell, Wolt, and more.

This will also support QuTwo’s growth. They recently expanded to Sweden and are hiring. According to Sarlin, about 50 quantum and AI scientists have joined the team, which includes two other entrepreneurs for the second time: its former Silo founder, Kaj Mikael Björk; and Quan Yin Tan, one of the founders of IQM, the Finnish quantum company that is set to go public.

QuTwo’s connection with IQM is also a reminder that the company believes we are about to enter the quantum era, but it can’t wait. “The question posed to iterative founders is e.g [us] is how we can have a greater impact. In the long term, it is important for Europe that we build the next model AI company outside of Europe. But in the short term, we can have a significant impact in stimulating ambitious RandD projects in Europe.