Insider Brief
- Serendipity Capital Limited announced the company has appointed Andrew Briggs as a Senior Advisor.
- Briggs is considered a leading authority on quantum technologies at the University of Oxford.
- Serendipity Capital is committed to deepening its understanding of developments in quantum technologies and providing early-stage capital to more leaders in this field.
PRESS RELEASE — Serendipity Capital Limited (“Serendipity Capital”), a permanent capital vehicle that invests in disruptive technologies with applications in financial services announced today that it has appointed Andrew Briggs, a leading authority on quantum technologies at the University of Oxford, as a Senior Advisor. The appointment reflects Serendipity Capital’s commitment to deepening its understanding of developments in quantum technologies and providing early-stage capital to more leaders in this field following its investments in Quantinuum and QuantrolOx.
“Professor Briggs is one of the world’s leading experts on quantum technologies, a core investment focus for Serendipity Capital,” said Rob Jesudason, CEO and Founding Partner of Serendipity Capital. “His deep understanding of quantum physics and experience in commercialising research will be an invaluable resource to us as we seek to build our portfolio of investments in world-class quantum computing firms. Oxford and other leading universities in the UK are at the heart of an ecosystem that is producing a new generation of quantum start-ups. They are making increasingly rapid progress towards creating quantum computers that are viable for a huge range of commercial applications, which will have significant implications for everything from national security to financial risk management and climate science. That’s why we’re excited about this field and delighted that Professor Briggs will be working with us.”
“I am excited to be working with Serendipity Capital, which is emerging as one of the most respected investors in early-stage quantum computing firms,” said Professor Briggs. “Quantum technologies are developing very fast and have the potential to deliver transformational benefits to other fields of research and – ultimately – societies. Attracting greater private investment to these technologies will be a critical factor in accelerating the pace of development and capturing those benefits. I look forward to working with Rob and his team as they deploy capital in this sector.”
Professor Briggs is the inaugural holder of the Chair in Nanomaterials at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on nanomaterials for quantum technologies and their incorporation into practical devices. From 2002 to 2009, he held an EPSRC Professorial Research Fellowship, and was Director of the Quantum Information Processing Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration, which served to create new experimental and theoretical capacity in the UK and has since been followed by substantial UK government investment in quantum technologies.
Professor Briggs is well known for his early research pioneering acoustic microscopy for materials characterisation. He received the Holliday Prize, Institute of Materials, in 1984, and the Metrology award for World Class Manufacturing in 1999, when he was also named an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society. In 2021, he co-founded QuantrolOx, a start-up which builds automated machine learning-based control software for quantum technologies.
With over 650 publications with nearly 30,000 citations over the course of his career, Professor Briggs is also a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Fellow of Wolfson College, Fellow of the Institute of Physics, and Member of International Society for Science and Religion and Academia Europaea.
About Serendipity Capital
Serendipity Capital is a permanent capital vehicle that invests in B2B technologies that align with key disruptive trends in financial services, including quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and climate and sustainability. The firm is an investor in Quantinuum, the leading independent full-stack quantum computing company that was created when the UK’s Cambridge Quantum merged with Honeywell Quantum Solutions in November 2021. In March 2023, Serendipity also participated in QuantrolOx’s €3.5m seed funding round. Serendipity Capital is long term investor that is majority-owned and managed by a team with deep industry experience in financial services. The firm is headquartered in Singapore and has recorded an invested capital IRR of 36.6% since its inception in 2020.
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