Revolut CEO to launch ‘AI-powered’ VC fund

The billionaire co-founder and CEO of fintech giant Revolut, Nikolay Storonsky, is launching a new venture fund called the Quantum Light Capital Fund.

Storonsky, along with several other investors, will be putting in around $200m (£161m) into the new fund, which has been described as powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

With a total amount raised of $1.8bn (£1.45bn), Storonsky’s Revolut has become one of Europe’s most valuable startups, hitting a valuation of $33bn in July of last year.

The Revolut boss is now looking to bring his knowledge of the tech startup ecosystem to investing. The Russian-born CEO said he was inspired by what he felt were the flaws in the traditional venture capital system.

“Based on my experience as an entrepreneur for the last eight years I found VCs’ product pretty frustrating,” Storonsky said.

“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.”

The Quantum Light Fund will use an AI-powered system, which has been designed by a team of data scientists and engineers, to scour corporate databases and LinkedIn to identify startups with promising growth without relying on “having human judgement”.

“Different people have different opinions, and this is how you end up with this crowd mentality,” said Storonsky.

This method was inspired by a handful of funds that track databases as a way to find new investment opportunities, although Storonsky believes there is a key difference.

“I interviewed a lot of people from a lot of funds, and they just use data sources to identify breakouts, but this has nothing to do with machine learning.”

The Revolut CEO has previously acted as an angel investor for the Swedish fintech startup Tink, which was later acquired by Visa for $2.1bn.

The half Ukrainian, Russian-born executive earlier this year spoke out to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.