We invest in world changing companies built from better physics.

Each advance in physics widens the frontier of what civilization can achieve, with profound benefit to humanity.

20th century physics reshaped our world more than once; it's often still considered cutting-edge. We should not rest on these laurels.

Physics tech has powered some of our society's most surprising advances, ones that we didn’t conceive before. Some futures humanity has imagined for a long time (artificial beings, fast travel) but other capabilities we couldn’t even have imagined (superconductors, lasers) before physics taught us what was possible. Physics tech can go beyond imagination, because it comes from nature.

“The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other Essays (1927)

The natural sciences are an ever renewing font of potential capabilities, benefit, and surprise.

While recently there is some investor narrative about the rediscovery of the physical world (and not just software SaaS), there has been stagnation. It used to be that basic research went through big corporate labs then to innovations and new products (GE, AT&T, etc.). Those big corporate pipelines are gone and are being replaced and modernized by venture capital. However VC often hasn’t the focus to go deep for physics tech.

This is not investing in science projects. It is recognizing when science projects or technologies that seem perpetually five years away - Perpetual Five-Year Technologies - can now become products. It is catalyzing this transition and forming the teams to take these products into the (often new) markets that they create. Physics tech is full of “not just better, but different” products and tech.Physics tech rewards early conviction and patient scaling. A global, cross-physics portfolio lets us see inflection points earlier, price risk more accurately, and capture upside across multiple industrial timelines.

Perpetual Five-Year Technologies

Quantum computing, fusion, compact accelerators, directed energy, advanced materials, brain–computer interfaces: each has been five years away for decades. We call these Perpetual Five-Year Technologies, and we do not read the delay as a forecasting error. It is a structural property of technologies that work at the atomic level, where the object and the ecosystem it depends on — instruments, supply chains, standards, skilled people, public programmes — have to mature together. Solve one bottleneck and the next one, invisible until then, appears behind it.

That is why PFYTs are not failures. They are fertile ground for patient, disciplined and strategically structured investment, and they are strategic bets rather than gambles, because they pay along the way. Quantum processors already run useful physics and train a workforce. Molecular simulation already improves drug pipelines. Laser-plasma accelerators already sell compact radiation sources for testing space electronics. Each milestone opens a partial market, sometimes worth billions, while the larger one assembles itself.

PFYTs overlap with deep tech without being the same thing. Deep tech describes what a technology is; PFYT describes how it evolves. Not every deep technology qualifies — semiconductor manufacturing advances through a mature industrial playbook — but the ones that do reward a particular behaviour: arrive before the ecosystem exists, then help build it. We invest in invention curves, not adoption curves.

We set the framework out in full in our 2025 white paper, Investing in Perpetual Five-Year Technologies, and in a peer-reviewed paper, “The Five-Year Horizon: Quantum Computing and the Philosophy of Technical Becoming”, published in Philosophies in July 2026.

Where is physics tech today?

COMPUTE & NETWORKING

Compute is now a primary industrial input, on par with energy and labor—and demand is exploding faster than any software abstraction can absorb. The amount of compute used to train frontier AI models has increased by ~1,000X over the last four years, with individual training runs now costing tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, and global AI capex measured in hundreds of billions annually. This trajectory is colliding with physical limits: power density, heat removal, memory bandwidth, and latency. As a result, the next wave of value creation in compute is not incremental software efficiency, but fundamentally new physical computing substrates: quantum computers capable of new algorithmic scalings, analog and neuromorphic architectures for energy-efficient inference and control, superconducting and cryogenic electronics to break interconnect and noise barriers, and unconventional computing approaches that exploit thermodynamics, reversibility, or physical dynamics directly. Compute is re-entering the domain of physics because the economics now demand it.

Networking is hitting similar walls. Data center bandwidth demand continues to grow at ~30–40% CAGR, driven by AI training, distributed systems, and real-time inference, while electrical interconnects are running out of headroom on power and signal integrity. This is forcing a rapid shift toward optical interconnects, co-packaged optics, and photonic switching, collapsing the boundary between computing and communications hardware. At the same time, semiconductor geopolitics have made advanced manufacturing a strategic priority: next-generation lithography, metrology, and inspection (beyond today’s EUV) are now critical chokepoints for national competitiveness. These systems are among the most complex machines humanity has ever built, relying on extreme light sources, precision vacuum engineering, and atomic-scale measurement. As transistor scaling slows, the economic frontier moves upstream into the physics of fabrication.

The limits of classical networks are driving entirely new physical layers of communication. Power and cooling constraints are pushing advanced thermal materials, new substrates, and cryogenic system design into the critical path of compute infrastructure. Security and sovereignty concerns are accelerating quantum networking, including entanglement distribution for secure communications, clock synchronization, and GPS-independent geolocation. Even niche but high-value markets like high-frequency trading are exploring exotic physical channels—microwave, millimeter wave, and even muon-based communication—to shave microseconds from global latency. Across compute and networking, the pattern is clear: the most valuable problems are no longer abstract. They are physical. And solving them requires physics tech, not just better code.

ENERGY

Energy is a hard constraint on progress: every step up in economic capability has been a step up in energy use. Compute growth has pushed electricity demand into a new regime, with hyperscale facilities now planning gigawatt-scale power footprints and global data center electricity consumption projected to more than double this decade. Incremental efficiency gains are no longer sufficient. This pressure is forcing a return to first principles in energy production. Advanced nuclear fission is re-emerging as a scalable, firm, zero-carbon power source that can be deployed at industrial scale, while fusion is transitioning from pure science into an engineering and capital formation problem, enabled by breakthroughs in plasma control, extreme lasers, and materials. At the same time, the grid must absorb volatility from renewables and compute-driven demand spikes, driving investment into grid-scale energy storage: mechanical, thermal, kinetic, and other physics-based systems.

Transmission and utilization are equally physical problems. New classes of materials—from solid-state electrolytes to high-temperature superconductors—promise step-changes in how energy is stored, moved, and dissipated, collapsing losses that today dominate system-level costs. Advanced sensing technologies, including quantum gravimetry and magnetometry, can reshape resource discovery, enabling more precise mapping of subsurface minerals critical for the growing and improving industrial and energy production. Meanwhile, photovoltaics remain an active materials science frontier: tandem cells, novel absorbers, and nanostructured surfaces are steadily pushing conversion efficiencies beyond what classical semiconductor theory once suggested. Energy is no longer just a commodity market. It is a physics-limited system under unprecedented stress. The next energy supercycle will be built not by policy alone, but by new physical capabilities that redefine what is possible at scale.

SPACE

Space has re-entered a phase of exponential activity. Annual orbital launches have more than tripled over the past decade, rising from roughly 80–90 launches per year in the early 2010s to over 330 launches in 2025, driven by commercial launch providers, mega-constellations, and national security demand. Space is becoming an industrial domain—for communications, sensing, navigation, manufacturing, and eventually computation. As access costs fall and cadence rises, the binding constraints shift away from mission design and toward physics: launch efficiency, power generation, thermal control, precise timing, and survivability in extreme environments.

Launch remains the first bottleneck, with advances in chemical propulsion alongside kinetic launch assist, electromagnetic rail and coil concepts, and hybrid approaches to reduce marginal cost. Once in orbit, systems are increasingly data-centric, pushing secure optical communications via laser links and exposing a deeper dependency: robust timing. Modern space infrastructure from navigation and communications to distributed sensing and financial synchronization depends on precise time. Yet, GPS is fragile and contested. This is driving renewed focus on space-based atomic clocks and resilient timing networks that can operate independently of GPS and survive jamming or spoofing. These capabilities collide with hard realities: heat dissipation in vacuum, radiation damage requiring accelerator-based testing, and the need for remote and in-situ mass spectrometry to understand other worlds at the level of chemistry, not images. Space is no longer just about getting there. It is about operating continuously in one of the harshest physical regimes imaginable. The companies that win will be those that master launch, heat, compute, and radiation as first-class design parameters, not afterthoughts.

SECURITY

Security requires trust in the physical world. As hardware supply chains globalize and chip fabrication fragments across borders, physically uncloneable functions (PUFs) have become essential primitives: binding identity, provenance, and integrity directly to matter itself. This is security that cannot be patched around or brute-forced in software. At the same time, modern conflict and gray-zone warfare have exposed the fragility of satellite-dependent systems. GPS is jammed, spoofed, or denied as a matter of routine, driving renewed urgency around GPS-free navigation based on magnetometry, inertial sensing, and other physics-grounded references. These technologies move navigation from a broadcast service to an intrinsic capability, resilient to interference and adversarial control.

Security is also increasingly about sensing and response in dense civilian environments. Weapons detection in schools, stadiums, transit hubs, and borders requires identifying threats efficiently, pushing advances in electromagnetic, acoustic, and particle-based detection modalities. On the response side, the proliferation of low-cost drones has created asymmetric threats that conventional defenses cannot economically counter. Directed energy weapons, leveraging advances in power electronics, lasers, and beam control, are emerging as the only scalable solution for drone defense, offering speed-of-light response and low marginal cost per engagement. Across domains, the pattern is consistent: durable security advantages are no longer software features. They are physical capabilities, embedded in materials, fields, and energy.

HEALTH

Modern healthcare is increasingly constrained not only by biology, but by physics. Radiation therapies using proton and electron beams are reshaping oncology by delivering energy with millimeter precision, reducing collateral damage while enabling higher, more effective doses. At the same time, demand for medical radioisotopes continues to grow, exposing fragility in global supply chains that rely on aging reactors and limited production capacity. These isotopes would unlock approaches for imaging, diagnostics, and targeted therapies. New accelerator-based and compact production methods could turn isotope generation into a scalable, local, physics-driven capability, directly linking fundamental particle control to clinical outcomes. Beyond cancer, physics is redefining how we interface with the human body. Neurotechnology leveraging optical, ultrasound, and electromagnetic modalities is opening new paths for non-invasive stimulation, sensing, and brain–computer interfaces—treating neurological disease while expanding human–machine interaction. The same physical tools underpin critical but less visible infrastructure: medical device sterilization using radiation and plasma replaces chemical methods with faster, safer, and more reliable processes, while electron-beam treatment of wastewater addresses pathogens and persistent contaminants without introducing new chemicals. Across health, the pattern is consistent: better control of beams, fields, and particles translates directly into better care, greater resilience, and lower system-level cost.

A firm for physics-tech

These opportunities require a VC firm specialized and focused on early stage physics tech. This team needs investors who have been operators; who have been doing the diligence implicitly for decades. A team who can meet founders where they are technically and socially, who can help do early team assembly, who can do their own diligence, and who can effectively tell how the technical milestones of an early stage physics tech company are lining up into the roadmap for a world changing company.

Quantonation is this physics tech venture firm.

Physics advances through a flywheel between scientific discovery and the technology economy. Quantum mechanics led to the solid state transistor that led to Moore’s law that has provided modern physicists with computers to do new (increasingly AI-assisted) scientific research. More scientific discovery leads to more useful technology, driving further investment and eventually future scientific discoveries. The flywheel advances our understanding and allows us to shape reality through tech. This flywheel is diffused throughout the modern economy, but increasing specialization, bureaucratization, and complexity have slowed progress.,, We cannot risk the tech driven growth, on which our society now depends, faltering.

In the long run, we expect our work to continue extending both upwards towards applications and downwards to basic research directions, powering the natural scientific enterprise from the start. We see a vertically integrated network across natural science research and industrialization. This will not be through a single operating company, but a networked portfolio of teams competing in the global marketplace. This is the portfolio that Quantonation is catalyzing.

Teams Matter

Technology and markets are not sufficient alone. Physics tech requires entrepreneurial teams of a special breed: those who can span the science and take it to new engineering. We need first principles engineers who can invent within new domains. We need entrepreneurial scientists who know the difference between shipping a product and shipping a publication. We are curating a network of these physics builders with founders, portfolio companies, studios, universities, and research labs around the world.

Our job is to leverage the expertise and network in the firm to help founders translate technical milestones into company milestones, and company milestones into go-to-market and revenue. We aren’t running a venture playbook that was learned from scaling enterprise SaSS. We are partnering with founders whose unique vision we understand.

While the science is not directly the same, our own experience shows that there is a lot that is transferable in leading and growing companies building across quantum computers, particle accelerators, nuclear reactors, etc. It is a privilege to partner with and support these physics tech leaders and entrepreneurs.

Building a generational firm

Building a generational physics-tech firm requires breaking with several default assumptions of venture capital. We invest globally from the start, because science is global. Breakthrough physics is not concentrated in one geography or one ecosystem. Europe continues to produce world-class fundamental science and physics tech companies; Japan, Australia, Singapore, and the UK are leaders in materials, photonics, semiconductors, and quantum systems. Waiting for this science to be “validated” in Silicon Valley is not just inefficient, it is structurally misaligned with how physics advances. For physics tech, early advantage comes from being present where discovery happens, not where capital is loudest.

We also build relationships before companies exist. Physics-tech founders do not emerge fully formed from accelerators or hackathons; they come from long research programs, labs, and scientific communities. By engaging with scientists upstream before commercialization is obvious, we can help shape teams, identify the right moment to form companies, and avoid the category error of treating deep physics like fast software.

Finally, new physics does not always enter existing markets cleanly. New markets come from new industries, and those industries must be assembled: supply chains that do not yet exist, customers who do not yet know they need the product, partners who must be educated alongside the technology. Taking a holistic view of how physics unlocks entire industrial stacks is contrarian in a world optimized for incremental SaaS, but it is exactly what physics tech demands. Focus is our advantage. By committing deeply to physics-driven domains, we can see around corners that generalist capital cannot and build companies that define categories rather than chase them. And we build the surrounding ecosystem as well as the company. A Perpetual Five-Year Technology scales only when supply chains, standards and public programmes move with it, which is why we work alongside DARPA, the European Chips Act and the national quantum initiatives rather than waiting on their results. Join us.

BUILD PHYSICS TECH.