Spark Capital leads €28m Series A from Qdrant

Berlin — Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence start-up Qdrant raises €28 million in its Series A finan­cing round. The lead inves­tor in the round was the Ameri­can early-stage inves­tor Spark Capi­tal, accom­pa­nied by exis­ting inves­tors Unusual Ventures and 42CAP.

Qdrant was foun­ded in Octo­ber 2021 by Andre Zayarni and Andrey Vasnetsov in Berlin. The AI start-up is deve­lo­ping a high-perfor­­mance, scalable, open-source vector data­base and search engine that is essen­tial for deve­lo­ping the next gene­ra­tion of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and metric lear­ning appli­ca­ti­ons. Qdrant can process billi­ons of vectors and supports the matching of seman­ti­cally complex objects. This allows complex data such as images, audio tracks and videos to be organized.

Qdrant excels at mana­ging and sear­ching high-dimen­­sio­nal data and proces­sing billi­ons of vectors with unmat­ched effi­ci­ency and scala­bi­lity. It is ther­e­fore indis­pensable for modern AI and machine lear­ning appli­ca­ti­ons in all indus­tries. In the past year, Qdrant has had more than 5 million down­loads and has been widely used by compa­nies such as Deloitte, Hewlett Packard Enter­prise, Bayer and many other Fortune 500 compa­nies. Qdrant has also recently expan­ded its mana­ged cloud offe­ring through part­ner­ships with AWS, Google Cloud and Micro­soft Azure. Qdrant is commit­ted to data protec­tion and secu­rity, which are crucial for modern AI appli­ca­ti­ons. www.qdrant.tech .

The company intends to use the newly raised capi­tal to expand its vector data­base and improve scala­bi­lity and effi­ci­ency for next-gene­ra­­tion AI use cases.

Consul­tant 42CAP: YPOG
Dr. Frede­rik Gärt­ner (Lead, Tran­sac­tions), Part­ner, Berlin Dr. Bene­dikt Flöter (AI/IP/IT), Asso­cia­ted Part­ner, Berlin Alex­an­der Sekunde (Tran­sac­tions), Senior Asso­ciate, Berlin.
Frede­rik Gärtner’s team has alre­ady advi­sed 42CAP on the €2 million pre-seed finan­cing round of Qdrant in 2022 and on the €7.5 million seed finan­cing round in April 2023.

Advi­sor Qdrant Solu­ti­ons GmbH: Green­gate Partners
Marc René Spitz, LL.M. (Lead / Part­ner / Corpo­rate) Dr. Leonie Singer, LL.M. (Asso­ciate / Corpo­rate) Constan­tin Forst­ner (Asso­ciate / Corpo­rate) Alex­an­der Tribess (Part­ner / IT & Data Protection)
Dr. Alex­an­der Raif (Part­ner / Employ­ment Law) Paul Harl­off (Asso­ciate / IT & Data Protection).

Advi­sor Spark Capi­tal: Good­win Procter
Silvio McMi­ken (Coun­sel), Tobias Schulz (Asso­ciate)

Advi­sor Unusual Ventures: Good­win Procter
Sebas­tian Walc­zak (Part­ner), Silvia Rava (Asso­ciate)

About 42CAP

42CAP is a pan-Euro­­pean inves­tor team that invests in early-stage compa­nies with global ambi­ti­ons in the B2B tech­no­logy sector. Without excep­tion, the foun­ders and part­ners are them­sel­ves former successful foun­ders who have made compa­nies big, in some cases over deca­des. Foun­ding inves­tors Alex Meyer and Thomas Wilke built eCir­cle into one of Europe’s largest SaaS compa­nies and sold the profi­ta­ble company to Teradata (NYSE:TDC) in 2012. Moritz Zimmer­mann made the soft­ware company Hybris big before it was absor­bed into SAP. Under the “Credo Peers among Entre­pre­neurs”, they support indus­try and product-orien­­ted foun­ders, extre­mely data-driven busi­ness models and sustainable corpo­rate deve­lo­p­ment. This back­ground is appre­cia­ted by foun­ding perso­na­li­ties such as Nico­las Reboud (SHINE, Paris), Krist­jan Vilo­sius (Katana, Tallinn) and Alex­an­der Igels­böck (Adve­rity, Vienna).

Spark Capi­tal is a venture capi­tal firm in the United States that provi­des early-stage finan­cing to start-ups in the consu­mer, retail, FinTech, soft­ware, fron­tier markets and media sectors. It has offices in San Fran­cisco, Boston and New York City. www.sparkcapital.com

About Green­Gate Partners

With its corpo­rate team, Green­Gate Part­ners specia­li­zes in parti­cu­lar in the areas of M&A and venture capi­tal. Green­Gate Part­ners’ legal exper­tise in the venture capi­tal sector ranges from the foun­da­tion to the various finan­cing rounds to the exit. Green­Gate Part­ners regu­larly sets stan­dards in the German market and offers compre­hen­sive advi­sory services for dome­stic and foreign venture capi­tal funds, stra­te­gic inves­tors, busi­ness angels as well as foun­ders, start-ups and managers.

About YPOG

YPOG is a specia­list tax and commer­cial law firm opera­ting in the core areas of Funds, Tax, Banking & Finance and Tran­sac­tions. The YPOG team advi­ses a wide variety of clients. These include emer­ging tech­no­logy compa­nies and family-run medium-sized enter­pri­ses as well as corpo­ra­ti­ons and private equity/venture capi­tal funds. YPOG is one of the leading addres­ses for venture capi­tal, private equity and fund struc­tu­ring in Germany. www.ypog.law