01 · The map
Where they are. What's next.
No "where do I start." No parallel spreadsheets. The current piece of work is visible, and so is the one after it. You would be surprised how often that alone unblocks a founder.
Live · A DeployQuantum product
Quantum ventures fail grow up in business, not in physics.
VentureQu is the quantum venture-building stack. Built for the funds, studios, and programs writing the first check into quantum — and handed to every company on the cap table.
The product
It is a running workflow, not a deck.
A founder opens the app and knows exactly what to work on today. What "good" looks like. Which rooms their answer will not survive. The decision is in front of them, not buried in a playbook. Most quantum founders are not avoiding the business side. They are drowning in it.
Live dashboard · IonBridge
02 · The deliverables
Structured, not blank-page.
Every piece of work is a filled-in template, not a prompt to an empty document. Competitor tables. Revenue models. IP strategies. Each field comes with a warning about how it usually goes wrong — and what it looks like when it is right.
03 · The briefings
Why this matters. Done when.
Short. Specific. Written in the voice of someone who has sat in the room where the question got asked. Pitfalls named by the actual company that made them. Consulting prose has been quietly deleted.
04 · The advisor
Pushes back. Politely.
Reads the founder's own work before it answers. Won't let them skip ahead to the exciting part. Refuses to invent a number that isn't grounded. A surprising amount of value comes from the advisor declining to help.
05 · The rehearsals
Meet the room before the room.
A founder who has already been interrogated by a simulated partner at a Series A firm is a different founder in the real meeting. Practice is cheap. The meeting is not.
06 · The stops
Permission to say no.
Four points in the journey where someone has to decide, on record, to keep going. This is the quiet superpower for anyone allocating capital: an agreed place in advance to stop, so that stopping does not require a fight.
For the first quantum check
Give every company on your cap table the same instruments.
Nine companies in the sector raised more than $100 million each. Combined revenue across the nine is below ten million. That is not a physics problem. It is a reading-the-instruments problem, and it is sitting in somebody's book right now.
VentureQu runs inside a fund, a studio, a cohort. Every company you back produces the same shape of evidence. What is validated, what is assumed, what a partner will ask at the next round. You can read across the book in one place. Founders walk into their partner meetings already knowing what they will be asked. You keep the seat and the relationship. We keep the method current.
Four points where someone has to decide, on record.
Gate 1
Product strategy
Weak quantum-advantage theses drop out before the money is spent.
Gate 2
IP & revenue model
Unsustainable burn is cut. A real revenue model is on the table.
Gate 3
First paying customer
No paying customer means no Series A. The round waits, or doesn't happen.
Gate 4
Kill switch
Ventures that can't earn the next round are closed honestly, not bled.
Past Gate 1, weak quantum-advantage theses drop out. Past Gate 2, unsustainable burn is cut. Past Gate 3, no paying customer means no Series A. Past Gate 4, the venture is honestly closed — not quietly left to bleed.
Capital efficiency, gated.Gate 2 forces a real revenue model at Step 12. Gate 4 is an explicit kill switch at Step 28. The method stops burn your LPs would otherwise carry.
Proof, not promise.109 fields. One real quantum company example per field. Warnings and good-looks standards. Zero AI hallucination.
Defensible to LPs, deans, and boards.Published methodology, documented gates, 81 quantum startups tracked, $11.8B of funding analysed. No vendor fluff to defend.
Your brand on rigour.Co-branded cohort instances. You become the partner that shipped companies, not the one that funded zombies.
Investment fundsQuantum VCs · deep-tech
Venture studiosQuantum · deep-tech
Corporate investment armsCVCs · innovation labs
UniversitiesTech transfer offices
Research centresNational labs · accelerators
Any teamwith a builder mandate
52%Stuck in perpetual pilot
<$10MRevenue across the 9 biggest raises
<0.01Capital efficiency ratio
81Companies studied
$11.8BRaised by those companies
The evidence
Where the capital actually goes missing.
52%
of named quantum pilots never leave the pilot. They do not fail loudly. They quietly do not convert, and the contract quietly does not renew.
9
quantum companies each raised more than a hundred million dollars. Combined revenue across the nine is less than ten. Capital efficiency under 0.01 is not a price of doing business. It is a fire.
81
companies studied in detail. Every template field in the product is grounded in a pattern observed across this set, with the specific company named. Nothing invented.
$11.8B
raised by those companies between them. The money was not the constraint. The method for turning the money into a company was.
The method
Three acts. Four places to tell the truth.
01 · VALIDATE
Validate
Is this real?
- Quantum advantage thesis01
- Technical feasibility02
- Problem validation03
- Product strategy · Gate 104 →
- Target customer05
- Customer discovery06
- Competitive landscape07
- Value proposition canvas08
02 · BUILD
Build
Can we ship?
- Technology architecture09
- Hardware selection10
- Proof of concept11
- IP strategy · Gate 212 →
- Revenue model & BMC13
- Financial model14
- Capital efficiency15
- Pricing16
03 · SCALE
Scale
Does it grow?
- Team & hiring17
- Talent strategy18
- Partnerships19
- Pilot strategy20
- First paying customer22
- Sales · Gate 323 →
- Funding & data room26
- Kill switch · Gate 428 →
Inside one piece of work
"Who are we actually competing with?"
The competitive landscape question is where a lot of quantum ventures start quietly lying to themselves. VentureQu forces the answer to be specific. Real algorithm. Real company. Real outcome. Here is what the founder sees when they open that piece of work.
⚠ Warning · come back to this when
A competitor raises a Series B.
That is commercial traction by another name, and it tells you the market is real. Or when a well-funded player announces a product in your specific use case. Thirty minutes a quarter on competitor press and job postings catches the signal early enough to matter.
✓ What good looks like
One page. Specific algorithm. Specific buyer. Honest number.
Not "quantum ML" and not "quantum optimization". Name the actual algorithm — QAOA, VQE, Grover's, HHL, QSVM, amplitude estimation — and the software stack. If the answer does not fit on a page, the thinking is not done yet.
★ A named example
Schrödinger, QC Ware, Zapata — three positions, three outcomes.
Schrödinger runs a drug-discovery platform with classical, ML, and selective quantum inside it. About $170M in ARR as of 2024. QC Ware positioned as "quantum software integration layer," raised $60M, and then pivoted to services. Zapata went public by SPAC and was bankrupt by 2024. Same market, three different stories about what a quantum company is.
Questions that will be asked in the room
What does Schrödinger do that you cannot?
Why would a pharma customer switch from their current CADD suite? What happens if an incumbent's QAOA benchmark improves ten-fold in twelve months? A weak answer to this set of questions does not mean more homework. It means the pass gets declined, on record, so the capital moves on.
Every field works this way. Warning. Good-looks standard. A named company. The method is what lives inside these, not the step numbers.
Backed by data
Not opinion.
Method grounded in 81 quantum companies and $11.8B in tracked funding.
No invented examples. Every template field is backed by a specific pattern observed across this set — with the named company, the named outcome, and the question a partner will ask in the next round. Method current as of 2026.
For founders · free
Founders: get in line.
VentureQu is free for quantum founders, researchers, and academics. You don't pay for it. A partner wrote you in, or you're here early. We onboard cohorts as partners come online.