Wittouck family office Artal backs Universal Quantum's more than $100m Series A

Universal Quantum has raised more than $100 million in a Series A co-led by DCVC and Firgun Ventures, with Artal, the Luxembourg investment holding of the Wittouck family, among the investors, Family Office Hub reported.

The company describes the round as the largest Series A ever raised by a quantum firm headquartered in the United Kingdom.

Universal Quantum builds trapped-ion quantum computers on a modular architecture, linking many small chips rather than scaling a single large one, according to the report. The company was founded by Sebastian Weidt and Winfried Hensinger of the University of Sussex, and the design traces to a blueprint paper the two published in 2017.

The proceeds fund continued development and commercialisation, a research and development centre in Singapore that the company says will be its first outside Europe, and expansion in the United States, Japan and Hamburg.

Filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission set out the ownership chain: Stichting Administratiekantoor Westend owns Westend S.A., which owns Artal Group S.A., which in turn owns Artal International Management S.A. and Artal International S.C.A. Eric Wittouck chairs Artal Group; Amaury Wittouck is the sole member of the board of the Stichting and a director of Artal Group.

Artal invests with the help of Invus, the evergreen investment group that advises it and manages more than $10 billion, according to the report. The report does not give Artal's individual commitment or its share of the round.

Family Office Hub argues that deep technology at Series A is an awkward fit for many family offices, because the science is hard to diligence, time to revenue is long and follow-on capital is open-ended, and places Artal in the camp of investors that can carry those characteristics by holding positions for decades rather than fund cycles. The case rests on the holder's time horizon, not on the size of the cheque: with Artal's commitment undisclosed, the portfolio impact of the position cannot be gauged.