QT Sense (Groningen, Netherlands) has raised €4 million ($4.7 million USD) to accelerate the development of Quantum Nuova, a quantum-sensing platform designed for real-time biochemical analysis in living cells. The funding consists of a €3 million seed round led by Cottonwood Technology Fund, with participation from QDNL Participations, supplemented by a €600,000 ONCO-Q grant and €400,000 from the Quantum Forward Challenge. The capital is allocated toward transitioning the current prototype into a deployable discovery platform for drug development and clinical research.
The Quantum Nuova platform utilizes fluorescent nanodiamond quantum sensors to monitor oxidative stress, metabolic shifts, and free radical kinetics at single-cell resolution. Unlike traditional spatial biology methods that require fixed or non-living tissue samples, this technology utilizes the magnetometry and confocal microscopy properties of nanodiamonds to track biochemical activity in situ. This allows researchers to observe how individual cells respond to external stressors or pharmaceutical compounds without destroying the cellular environment.
Technical milestones for the platform include the mapping of oxidative stress and metabolic vulnerabilities in colorectal tumor models under the ONCO-Q grant. The system has already been utilized to characterize the mechanism-of-action (MoA) for several FDA-approved drug compounds. Future hardware development will focus on increasing throughput, enhancing system robustness for laboratory environments, and integrating automated analytics for functional heterogeneity profiling across multiple samples.
Read the official funding announcement from QT Sense here and additional coverage from EU-Startups here.
February 4, 2026
