Atoms · Photons · Qubits.
Intermarium invests in companies solving real physics problems at scale. We organize the entire portfolio under three categories, defined by the physical building block at the bottom of each company’s stack.
In. Any company whose hard problem is fundamentally a physics problem at the atomic, photonic, or qubit level — with manufacturability, regulation, and a credible exit. Out. SaaS. Consumer. AI software stacks. Generalist deep tech without a physics anchor. Intermarium is built for the categories the rest of venture capital is not equipped to underwrite.
The gap between classical and quantum is not linear. It is exponential.
Practical CMOS scaling stops near 2–3 nanometers; single-thread performance saturated a decade ago. Quantum is one of the few credible step-changes left: an n-qubit register encodes 2n amplitudes, and under Rose’s Law qubit counts double roughly every 18 months. Stacked on Moore’s saturation, the capability curve separates structurally. We invest before the crossover, when the science is legible but the market is not.
We read the literature before it becomes a company.
Our diligence starts in the preprint, not the pitch deck — one level upstream of the accelerator and tech-transfer circuit. We track arXiv, the journals, and competitive grant data, read by in-house physicists, so we meet founders while the result is still an equation. It is how Atmos sourced Oxford Ionics.
EXPLORE THE SIGNAL ENGINE →Intermarium: the land between the seas.
The historical Intermarium described the arc of nations between the Baltic and the Black Sea, bound by a shared interest in standing together. We borrow the name for its geometry: a corridor of talent and resolve, now connected to American capital and American science.
It is also, conveniently, a lattice. Nodes that are stronger entangled than alone.
THE FULL STORY →Two ways to enter the lattice.
Whether you are building at the frontier or allocating to it, the door is the same shape.
If your moat is the physics, we want to read it. We meet teams at pre-seed and seed.
Get in touch →Qualified investors can request access to a private overview of the firm and its approach.
LP access →We back the science that is hardest to fake.
Quantum advantage will not arrive evenly. It arrives first where the physics is genuinely hard, the talent genuinely scarce, and the moat is the work itself. We invest at pre-seed and seed, before the crossover, when the science is legible but the market is not yet.
Atoms · Photons · Qubits.
Intermarium invests in companies solving real physics problems at scale. The entire portfolio is organized under three categories, each defined by the physical building block at the bottom of the stack.
In. Any company whose hard problem is fundamentally a physics problem at the atomic, photonic, or qubit level — with manufacturability, regulation, and a credible exit pathway. Out. SaaS. Consumer. AI software stacks. Generalist deep tech without a physics anchor. Intermarium is built specifically for the categories the rest of venture capital is not equipped to underwrite.
The transistor is reaching atomic limits. Quantum is the next compute architecture.
Practical CMOS scaling stops at roughly 2–3 nanometers. Single-thread performance saturated in the 2010s; clock frequencies stopped climbing in the 2000s. Meanwhile AI workloads demand compute and energy at a rate the underlying hardware cannot supply. There is no free lunch in physics — either the architecture changes, or progress slows.
Quantum computing is one of the few credible step-change architectures available. The relevant scaling law is Rose’s Law: qubit counts double roughly every 18 months, and an n-qubit register encodes 2n complex amplitudes versus n classical bits. Stacked on Moore’s saturation, the capability curve separates quantum from classical structurally over the coming decade.
Quantum advantage is not only about computation. Following the recent Huang–Choi–McClean–Preskill taxonomy, quantum sensing, learning, and communications rest directly on the laws of physics — Heisenberg uncertainty, the no-cloning theorem, measurement disturbance — not on unproven complexity conjectures. Those advantages are physics-guaranteed, and several already produce results today: gravitational-wave detection via squeezed light, Army Rydberg-atom RF sensors, optically-pumped magnetometers in clinical pilots.
Intermarium underwrites the early stage of this transition across the full atoms, photons, qubits stack.
Classical effort scales as a polynomial. The quantum approach does not.
Built between the United States and Central and Eastern Europe.
The name Intermarium is a deliberate homage to a containment line of independent, technologically capable nations running from the Baltic to the Black Sea. We are not neutral on geopolitics: the next decade of frontier technology will be built and acquired by the United States and its closest allies, and we are structured to operate at exactly that seam.
From the lab bench to the Department of War, and across NATO.
Deep-physics founders can build the technology. The harder problem is the customer. Our most valuable contribution is the commercial funnel: a transatlantic path from research to defense and allied procurement that most early teams never see clearly. We have walked it, on both shores.