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Innovation Endeavors

Innovation Endeavors is the Palo Alto deep-tech firm founded in 2010 by former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, organized around a 'Super Evolution' thesis that backs founders rebuilding physical and…

Stage Seed → Series B
Ticket $5M - $20M
Quantum focus Quantum Computing · Hardware, Applications
Geography United States

Investment thesis

Innovation Endeavors is the Palo Alto deep-tech firm founded in 2010 by former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, organized around a 'Super Evolution' thesis that backs founders rebuilding physical and scientific industries with compute, AI and frontier hardware. Quantum sits inside its deep-tech practice through a long-held position in Atom Computing — the neutral-atom hardware company whose $15M Series A (2021) and $60M Series B (2022) Innovation Endeavors co-led with Venrock and Prelude Ventures. Atom Computing has since pushed into the 1,180-qubit regime and partnered with Microsoft to demonstrate record logical-qubit entanglement. Schmidt's parallel role co-founding and chairing SandboxAQ deepens the firm's quantum-AI network, even where the fund itself is not a cap-table investor. Innovation Endeavors writes $2-15M lead checks at Seed and Series A and holds through growth. Conviction level: deep tech actif with concentrated hardware bets rather than a broad quantum index.

Anti-thesis

The patterns that trigger a fast no with this fund.

  1. Passes on pure-play hardware moonshots without a near-term software wedge: their quantum bets (Atom Computing) skew toward teams who can ship a cloud-accessible service inside 24 months, not 7-year cryostat science projects
  2. Allergic to solo-PI spinouts without a commercial co-founder: Schmidt's thesis explicitly favors horizontal platforms over vertical lab tools, a quantum sensing startup pitching one DoD customer will get a polite no
  3. Skeptical of QKD and pure post-quantum crypto pure-plays: they view the TAM as compressed by NIST standardization and hyperscaler in-housing
  4. Will pass if you cannot articulate an AI x quantum or AI x physical-systems story: post-2024 every deep tech memo at IE benchmarks against 'why not just use frontier LLMs plus classical compute'
  5. Avoids capex-heavy fab plays unless paired with a sovereign or strategic co-investor de-risking the first $50M

Notable quantum portfolio

Full portfolio →
Atom Computing

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