Nik Storonsky is repeating a Revolut hiring trick at his quant VC fund
Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky's love for hiring young bankers and consultants is well publicized. Less so is his tendency to do the same at his quantitative venture capital firm, Quantum Light. The fund is a fraction of Revolut's size, but has been hiring early-career professionals from the likes of Evercore and McKinsey.
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Quantum Light takes a data driven approach. On the latest edition of the 20VC Podcast, Storonsky said many investors are "following the crowd," or doing "emotion driven" investment. Quantum Light is instead comprised of data scientists and engineers to take a "scientific approach." The fund, which invests in series B startups, had ~17 employees in early 2023 and has stayed lean; Storonsky says it only has around 20 today.
The fund is led by Ilya Kondrashov, an ex-Goldman Sachs investment banking analyst who left to co-found payments fintech Kriya. Its head of data science, Anton Trubakov, a Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology graduate, and former machine learning engineer for Russian search engine Yandex.
Quantum Light's 2024 hiring isn't focused on tech staff. It recruited Kunal Barman from the M&A team of boutique bank Evercore in September as an 'investor'. Barman was previously a founder's associate (a role Storonsky claims to have invented) at a stealth startup. The fund also hired two McKinsey analysts, Marty Kang and Louis Fontaine, who joined in May and August respectively.
Quantum Light's website says it has trained its machine learning models based on over 10 billion datapoints from 700k startups. Storonsky gave some insights on what points they track in particular. It looks at which other VCs are investing, and who is leading a fundraising round. It evaluates the "quality of employees" and founders, but he doesn't share exactly how QuantumLight performs its "dynamic evaluation."
One insight that Storonsky shared is that, statistically, founders younger than 25 or older than 35 perform worse, and that 25-35 is the "sweet spot" for the age of a founder.
The novel approach is apparently paying off. Storonsky claimed the fund now performs better than "95% of VCs out there on back test."
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