Vikram Desai
Vikram tracks capital flowing into frontier technology: government programs, private placements, strategic investments, and acquisitions.
Articles by Vikram Desai
Ondas Closes Three Defense-Tech Acquisitions for $56 Million Plus Up to $32 Million of Earn-Outs, Issues 7.8 Million Shares and Registers Them for Resale the Same Day. The Release Does Not Say How Much Was Cash
The Sept. 23 deals for Insignito, Ottopia Defense and Caribou Labs follow a $205 million purchase of GATE Technologies nine days earlier. The 'less than three times' revenue multiple rests on Ondas' own 2027 forecasts, and the targets' current revenue is not disclosed.
Navitas Is Buying $5 Million of Magnachip Stock at $3.42 a Share, a Premium to the Prior Close. The Filings Say Nothing About the Director Who Sits on Both Boards
Magnachip agreed on Sept. 18 to sell 1,461,988 new shares to Navitas Semiconductor for $5,000,000, with resale registration due within 30 days of closing and no lock-up, standstill or board seat in the agreement. Navitas's own second-quarter 10-Q calls Magnachip 'a related party' because director Cristiano Amoruso serves on both boards; neither company's Sept. 21 filing mentions it.
WithU, MyPass, CHI, Zondii: The Early-Stage Tech Bets Inside ASX: SCP
27 startups across AI, fintech, healthtech, regtech, cleantech and SaaS, sourced before the crowd, held through one ASX-listed share. This is what pre-IPO tech looks like when retail can actually buy it.
Qubic's CA$1.5M Ottawa Award Is a Contract to Buy Hardware, Not a Grant
The Sherbrooke and Waterloo spin-off will ship nine kinetic-inductance amplifiers under Innovative Solutions Canada's Testing Stream. The programme procures prototypes in order to test them, and its published per-contract caps sit below the figure reported.
Analog Devices agrees to buy Alif Semiconductor for $1.35bn cash, plus up to $200m in contingent consideration
ADI said on Sept. 9 it will acquire the Pleasanton-based maker of edge-AI microcontrollers, in a deal it expects to close before year-end 2026, subject to customary conditions and expiry of the Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting period. The headline figure widely reported as roughly $1.4bn is $1.35bn of upfront cash plus a contingent amount that is not yet money in anyone's hands.
Europe picked 13 quantum hardware startups. What they actually won is about €300,000 and four months
The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking's Quantum Grand Challenge is being announced by winners this week as a milestone in European quantum scaling. The Phase 1 award is a short roadmapping contract; the €30m of European Investment Bank venture debt behind it is something the companies still have to go and ask for.
Four of the Nine May Quantum CHIPS Letters of Intent Became Signed $100m Agreements on a Single Morning
Rigetti, D-Wave, Quantinuum and PsiQuantum each announced signed Commerce Department agreements on Tuesday. The Rigetti and D-Wave announcements state the government takes a minority, non-controlling equity stake; Quantinuum's own release and the published PsiQuantum coverage do not mention one.
Gimlet Labs Raises $300m at a $3bn Valuation With Arm and Microsoft's M12. The 10x Speed Figure Is Scoped to One Configuration
Reports on Friday put a $300 million round at a roughly $3 billion post-money valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz. The speed multiples attached to the news trace back to two March documents that state them with very different levels of qualification.
IBM Ventures Backs a Company Selling Quantum Algorithms on Ordinary GPUs, as Quantum Money Moves Down the Stack
BQP took strategic money from IBM Ventures on 2 September, bringing total funding to $8m for a platform that runs quantum-derived solvers on customers' existing CPUs and GPUs. The same day, a four-person Toronto materials startup closed $2.6m to hunt for better superconductors.
Diffraqtion Caps a Pre-Seed at More Than $10m With Lockheed Martin and Sumitomo Venture Arms. Its 20x Resolution Claim Comes From Company Simulations
The Somerville, Massachusetts optical sensing startup has capped a pre-seed round backed by Lockheed Martin Ventures and Presidio Ventures, and says its next step is a fielded camera flown as a hosted payload. The company's headline resolution figure is a simulated result, and its quantum camera contains no qubits and no cryogenics.
A EUR 2.6 Million Pre-Seed for the Cold Electronics Quantum Computers Keep Running Into
S-Transistors, a spinout from Finland's VTT, raised a pre-seed round led by Lifeline Ventures to build superconducting transistors that control qubits from inside the refrigerator. The cheque is tiny by AI-infrastructure standards, but it targets the same bottleneck that two much larger announcements ran into on the same day.
NSF Announces More Than $290m for Eight Quantum Institutes, With a New Princeton-Led Award Aimed at Fabrication
The US National Science Foundation announced on August 25 that eight Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes will collectively receive more than $290m, each award falling in a band the agency puts at roughly $28m to $37m over five years. The Princeton-led MARQUIS institute, at $27.9m, targets the materials and manufacturing bottleneck in superconducting processors; Yale's PRACTIQAL and Maryland's RQS are each reported at $37.5m, slightly above the top of the agency's stated band.
IREN Reports a $702.6m FY26 Loss After $638.8m of Impairments, and Sets Out Two Tiers of GPU Financing
Revenue rose 41% to $707.0m for the year to June 30 while AI cloud services revenue grew from $16.4m to $128.8m. The swing to a loss came almost entirely from writing down decommissioned Bitcoin mining hardware.
Europe Picked 13 Quantum Startups for Its Grand Challenge. Phase 1 Pays About €300,000 Each for Four Months of Roadmap Work.
EuroHPC's selection spans cat qubits, trapped ions, photonics and silicon spin across eight countries. The headline venture-debt figure belongs to a second phase that has not started and is absent from the primary call documents.
Emerald AI Raises $150M Series A at a $1.05B Valuation With Nvidia, Siemens and GE Vernova; Its 100-Gigawatt Grid Claim Carries No Cited Source
The data-center power startup has now raised more than $220 million in total and counts twelve Fortune Global 500 companies as investors. Its release names the IEA for one headline statistic and no one at all for the other, and reports five commercial demonstrations without a single megawatt figure.
Quintessent Raises $40 Million for an Eight-Wavelength Comb Laser. What It Has Started Sampling Is an Evaluation Kit.
The Santa Barbara startup's Series A is led by Cycle Capital, with Ciena among the strategic backers. The proceeds are earmarked for sampling, reliability qualification and a manufacturing ramp, which is another way of saying volume production is still ahead.
Nebius's $5.0 Billion Convertible Notes Are Due to Settle Monday, Taking Its 2026 Convertible Issuance Past $9 Billion
Nebius Group priced an upsized $5.0 billion two-tranche convertible on Aug. 19 — $3.0 billion of 0.50% notes due 2030 and $2.0 billion of 4.50% notes due 2034 — with settlement expected on Aug. 24, subject to customary closing conditions, according to the company's release. Net proceeds were put at roughly $4.94 billion before a $750 million initial-purchaser option. Combined with the roughly $4.34 billion of convertible paper Nebius closed in March, the AI cloud operator has priced more than $9 billion of convertible debt in 2026 alone. As of Monday morning the company had not announced that the offering had closed.
Callosum raises a $100 million seed to route AI work across rival chips. Two things most of the coverage missed: the UK state fund named as an investor had its Callosum stake announced back in April, and the Cerebras quote came from strategy chief Andy Hock, not chief executive Andrew Feldman.
London-based Callosum said on August 20 it had raised $100 million (EUR 85.4 million) in a seed round led by Atomico, with Plural, DCVC and the UK Sovereign AI Fund participating, taking total funding to roughly $110 million. The UK government announced its equity investment in Callosum on April 16, 2026, as part of the first backings from its GBP 500 million Sovereign AI unit. Callosum is privately held; its flagship hardware partner Cerebras Systems has been listed on Nasdaq since May 14, 2026.
Etched's Lead Investor Is Also Its First Customer. Jane Street Wrote the Cheque and Took Delivery of One Rack
A $700 million round at a $21 billion valuation, announced August 18, values the inference chip startup at roughly double where it was marked 26 days earlier. The disclosed customer-contract figure has not moved in seven weeks.
The Air Force Put $7 Million Into Quantum Research on the Civilian Power Grid. Infleqtion Is a Subcontractor.
Eaton disclosed a $7 million, 24-month Air Force Research Laboratory contract to test whether quantum computers can do grid contingency analysis. Infleqtion, one of two named collaborators, has not published the size of its own piece.
New York Opened a $60 Million Quantum Hub Competition. The First Deadline Is Tuesday, and It Is Not the Proposal Deadline.
Empire State Development is putting up to $60 million behind as many as four regional quantum commercialization hubs, with applications due October 14. But the governor's release tells anyone interested to email Albany for an application by Tuesday, August 18. Applicants must hold 501(c)(3) status, and the trade press reading of the request for proposals says the grants pay for construction, equipment and furniture, not for the people who would run the hubs.
BTQ Ended Its Second Quarter With C$9,729,250 In Cash And No Cash-Flow Statement Behind It
BTQ Technologies (Nasdaq: BTQ; Cboe Canada: BTQ) established a C$150 million at-the-market equity program with Cantor Fitzgerald on June 18, in its own release and under its own prospectus supplement. Its August 14 corporate update discloses a single cash line, C$9,729,250, with no interim financial statements attached. Separately, the French Ministry for the Economy and Finance attached named conditions to the company's takeover of quantum-software firm QPerfect.
Pasqal's Nasdaq Vote Is Tuesday. Its $250 Million Convertible Buys $312.5 Million of Principal.
Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II shareholders meet Aug. 25 on a combination struck at a $2.0 billion pre-money equity value for the French neutral-atom quantum company. The filings show $250.0 million of subscriptions purchasing $312,500,000 of convertible bond principal — and a cash-to-balance-sheet line that is not all new money.
A pre-revenue London chip startup just raised $312 million at a $3.3 billion valuation to attack HBM
Olix Computing has tripled its valuation in six months on a photonic inference architecture that swaps high-bandwidth memory for on-chip SRAM — with no silicon shipped and no revenue yet.
DARPA Reopens the Door: Quantum Benchmarking Initiative Solicits New Entrants as 11 Companies Race Through Stage B
With proposals due September 30, the Pentagon's flagship quantum vetting program is expanding its 20-company field — a government stamp that has become one of the sector's most-watched investment signals.