Revolut co-founder Nik Storonsky is to launch his own venture capital fund, using advances in artificial intelligence to identify potential future unicorns.
The Quantum Light Capital Fund plans to raise $200 million for its inaugural fund, with investments from Storonsky and other investors.
A holding page for the fund states: "QuantumLight is the first truly systematic venture capital and growth equity firm. We are built as a technology company by a team of tech unicorn founders, quant traders, AI scientists and engineers."
According to Forbes, Storonsky intends to mine his own experience raising $1.8 billion to build Revolut, alongside machine learning to identify promising Series B and C startups.
“Based on my experience as an entrepreneur for the last eight years I found VCs’ product pretty frustrating,” Storonsky told Forbes. “In the bad times no one wants to invest, in the good times they all want to invest — so the lessons were that VCs are pretty unstable and there is some element of crowd mentality.”
Storonksy, whose stake in Revolut is worth $7.1 billion, has hired a team of six data scientists and engineers over the last year to mine LinkedIn, corporate filings and other databases to identify fast-growing startups.
He says that exposure to the fund, and his existing angel investments, helped with his day job running Revolut: “I get all this new information about tech trends, who is doing what, this is actually my edge compared to traditional banking CEOs who are not part of the ecosystem.”
Storonsky has previously made angel investments in Swedish open banking vendor Tink, and French digital health company Alan.