The Finnish founder Peter Sarlin, former CEO of AMD Silo AI, has launched a new company called QuTwo, and has already secured a valuation of 325 million euros (380 million dollars) - and that purely from an angel round. No venture funds, no big Silicon Valley names. Only 25 million euros from private investors with a long-term view.

QuTwo is building an orchestration OS layer that routes computing tasks to classical, quantum or hybrid architectures. The term they are pushing is „inspired by quantum physics" - they use classical chips to simulate quantum behaviour on stable hardware. Part of the industry will say this is marketing, part will say it is a real engineering decision. Sarlin argues that for now this is the only path that makes sense, because stable quantum computers do not yet exist.

Why an angel round instead of venture capital? This is the most interesting part of the story. Sarlin speaks openly about „Europe's geopolitical positioning" and the need for strategic freedom of five to ten years. Translation - he does not want to be locked in by American venture capital that expects an exit in three years. The company was initially financed through his family fund, PostScriptum, before accepting external angels.

The angel list is respectable: Yuri Milner, Xavier Niel, Nico Rosberg, Dieter Schwarz and Niklas Zennström, plus founders from Hugging Face, Miro, Skype, Supercell and Wolt. All European names, or names with European roots. That is not by accident.

QuTwo already has around 23 million dollars in secured revenue through design partnerships, including work with Zalando. The company has hired around 50 quantum and AI scientists, among them Silo's former co-founder Kaj-Mikael Björk and IQM's co-founder Kuan Yen Tan.

„AI is the North Star we will follow. Quantum physics is just a new form of computation," Sarlin said. And a second quote, which is worth even more: „We are on a mission to build a globally leading AI company for the next paradigm, because Europe failed in this era." That sentence is hard to ignore. Sarlin is essentially saying - this AI race was lost before it began, let's build something for the next one.