Funding the Quantum Middle: Series A/B Capital with Kris Naudts and Zeynep Koruturk of Firgun Ventures

Why This Episode Matters Firgun Ventures launched in late 2025 with a $70M first close anchored by the Qatar Investment Authority and a mandate that doesn't exist anywhere else in the market: lead Series A and B rounds in quantum scale-ups globally. Kris Naudts is a neuroscientist and former Culture Trip founder whose path to quantum runs through a near-fatal medical misdiagnosis. Zeynep Koruturk spent over a decade building the Goldman Sachs Tech Initiative and meeting more than a thousand founders. Both were early angels in what became Quantinuum. If you're trying to understand how quantum companies actually get financed between the lab and the IPO window — or why a specialist fund needed to exist at all — this conversation is one of the clearest views available. It's also a useful frame for founders thinking about what an informed institutional investor actually does in a round. Sponsor This episode is brought to you by Outshift , Cisco 's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It's time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power. Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com . Go deeper with the blog post The switch that quantum networking has been waiting for . What We Get Into Why Kris's ALS misdiagnosis became the conviction event that pulled him from media entrepreneurship into quantum investing How Zeynep's decade at Goldman Sachs Tech Initiative shaped her pattern-matching for deep tech, and where that pattern-matching breaks down in quantum The structural reason Series A/B is the real bottleneck in quantum financing — and why precede and seed capital is no longer the gap people assume it is How Firgun underwrites engineering and execution risk after the scientific risk is largely retired Why a quantum-specialist fund unlocks soft commitments from larger institutions that otherwise stay on the sidelines The role of Firgun's "scientific co-founder" Professor Mete Atatüre and the need for sub-specialist diligence across modalities How Firgun thinks about portfolio construction across silicon-spin/photonic (Photonic Inc.), silicon CMOS (Quantum Motion), and other architectures without picking a qubit winner Why a truly global mandate is a feature, not a focus problem, given how concentrated quantum talent is in roughly a dozen ecosystems How sovereign capital, US equity-stake announcements, and geopolitical fragmentation are starting to reshape who can invest in what Why the binary "fault-tolerant or bust" framing of quantum investing misses the gradient of capability that drives near-term value Resources & Links Guest & Firm Firgun Ventures — The fund's homepage, with the team and "Time to Talk Quantum" podcast featuring the founders' own framing of the market. Firgu