Deal news: QT Sense is ready to go to market with a €4m Seed round

QT Sense offers one of the world’s leading examples of commercially viable quantum sensing technology. Now they’re ready to go to market, backed by a new €4 million Seed round.

Our portfolio company’s Quantum Nuova platform measures biochemical activity inside living cells, revealing how they react to drugs in real time.

We were the company’s first investor, and we’re backing them again in this round.

In addition to this core financing, QT Sense has secured €0.4 million through the Quantum Forward Challenge, supporting collaborative projects in which partners will actively deploy and validate Quantum Nuova in real research environments.

How it works

While traditional methods study frozen tissue or dead cells, QT Sense’s Quantum Nuova platform measures real-time biochemical activity in living cells and tissues, opening a new frontier in spatial biology.

Using ultra-sensitive fluorescent nanodiamond quantum sensors, Quantum Nuova detects oxidative stress, metabolic shifts, and free radical kinetics—dynamic signals that drive disease but have remained invisible until now—with single-cell precision.

With this live view of cell behavior, researchers can for the first time see how cells react to drugs, adapt to stress, and diverge into hidden subpopulations. It introduces an entirely new layer of biological insight that genomics, proteomics, and traditional imaging cannot provide.

The technology has already been used to demonstrate the mechanism of action of FDA-approved drug compounds. With new ONCO-Q grant funding, it will now be applied to colorectal cancer—supporting drug development in one of the world’s most heterogeneous and treatment-resistant diseases.

Quantum Nuova will generate the first functional maps of oxidative stress and metabolic vulnerabilities in colorectal tumor models, laying the groundwork for new diagnostics and therapeutic strategies.

Next steps

This seed investment enables QT Sense to transform Quantum Nuova from a high-performing prototype into a ready-to-deploy discovery platform. 

Improvements in hardware robustness, throughput, and integrated analytics will prepare the system for real-world use. Early-access units will soon be placed with strategic partners, enabling mechanism-of-action studies, functional heterogeneity profiling, and rapid, label-free readouts across many samples.

As the first investor in QT Sense, we have seen Quantum Nuova evolve from its beginnings as a bold idea at the intersection of quantum sensing and life sciences.

Today’s round shows how quickly that vision is translating into a real discovery platform for oncology and drug development.

With a team that perfectly blends scientific expertise with strategy execution, QT Sense is exactly the kind of foundational quantum company we aim to support early: world-class science, clear clinical and commercial pull, and the potential to redefine how biology is done in the lab.

– Ton