QT Sense secures fresh capital to push quantum sensing into everyday lab use
QT Sense, a Groningen-based BioTech startup working at the intersection of quantum physics and life sciences, has raised €4 million to accelerate development of Quantum Nuova, its platform designed to monitor cellular stress inside individual living cells in real time. The company says the technology can help researchers observe disease-relevant biochemical processes as they unfold—capabilities it believes could reshape how scientists study conditions linked to oxidative stress, including cancer, sepsis and arthritis.
The financing includes a €3 million Seed round led by Cottonwood Technology Fund, with follow-on participation from existing investor QDNL Participations and an angel backer. In addition to equity funding, the company secured non-dilutive support through a €600,000 ONCO-Q grant and €400,000 from the Quantum Forward Challenge. The raise follows a separate €6 million funding round reported in 2025.
From lab breakthrough to deployable platform
According to Dr Deepak Veeregowda, CEO of QT Sense, the company selected Cottonwood Technology Fund to help move beyond proof-of-concept research and toward a robust product suitable for routine use by biomedical labs and drug discovery teams.
“Cottonwood backs real DeepTech,” Veeregowda said in a statement, describing quantum sensing as “a scientific shift, not an incremental step.” He added that the company is focused on building a system with “scale, reliability, and seamless integration” so it can operate “every day in real labs.”
QT Sense said the new capital will be used to strengthen hardware robustness, increase throughput and expand integrated analytics—steps intended to transform Quantum Nuova from prototype into a ready-to-deploy discovery platform. The company also plans to place early-access units with strategic partners to support mechanism-of-action studies, profiling of functional heterogeneity and higher-volume sample work.
How Quantum Nuova works—and what it measures
Founded in 2024, QT Sense builds on a decade-long collaboration at the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG), where the team has worked with techniques including diamond magnetometry and confocal microscopy in living systems. The company’s core premise is that many disease processes are driven by dynamic biochemical signals—particularly those associated with oxidative stress—that are difficult to capture with conventional approaches.
Traditional tools often rely on frozen tissue, fixed samples or endpoints in dead cells. By contrast, Quantum Nuova uses ultra-sensitive fluorescent nanodiamond quantum sensors to detect oxidative stress, metabolic shifts and free-radical kinetics in living cells and tissues, aiming for single-cell precision. The company argues that this “live view” can reveal how cells respond to drugs, adapt to stress and diverge into subpopulations that may be missed by bulk measurements.
QT Sense said the platform has already been used to help demonstrate mechanisms of action for FDA-approved drug compounds. With the new ONCO-Q grant, the company plans to apply the system to colorectal cancer research, aiming to generate functional maps of oxidative stress and metabolic vulnerabilities in colorectal tumour models—work it says could inform future diagnostics and therapeutic strategies.
Investor thesis: disruptive science with clinical pull
Alain le Loux, a general partner at Cottonwood Technology Fund, said the firm views QT Sense as a “hard science” company with potential to change how disease is studied and treated. He also highlighted regional backing, noting that Cottonwood is supported by the NOM and Innovatiefonds Groningen in efforts to strengthen the Dutch BioTech ecosystem.
Ton van ‘t Noordende, general partner at QDNL Participations, said the round reflects how quickly Quantum Nuova has progressed from an early concept into what he called a discovery platform for oncology and drug development. He pointed to the combination of scientific depth and execution capacity as key to the company’s trajectory.
A broader European context for quantum and BioTech funding
The round lands amid active European investment in quantum and adjacent DeepTech fields. While QT Sense’s raise is relatively modest compared with later-stage rounds seen elsewhere in the sector, recent activity suggests sustained appetite for both early-stage quantum hardware and scaling efforts as technologies approach deployment.
Across Europe, funding has ranged from smaller Seed investments supporting miniaturised quantum hardware to significantly larger rounds aimed at scaling quantum semiconductor approaches, alongside industrial commitments tied to sensing and metrology infrastructure. At the same time, BioTech and biosolutions programmes have continued to expand, reflecting policy and investor interest in platforms that can accelerate discovery and translation.
For QT Sense, the immediate challenge is execution: turning a sophisticated sensing method into a dependable system that integrates into existing workflows and produces repeatable results at scale. If successful, the company believes Quantum Nuova could give researchers a new window into living-cell behaviour—helping identify vulnerabilities, validate drug effects and better understand how disease evolves in real time.
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