Alumni Ventures is backing Yaqumo, a Tokyo startup that uses laser trapped neutral atoms at room temperature to build quantum processors, via a J KISS convertible, a Japanese market instrument that defers the priced round.
Alumni Ventures has wired its first Japan check, and the more interesting part is the instrument it used. The US venture firm, working with its recently established Japan + US Bridge Fund, is backing Tokyo-based Yaqumo Inc. not through a priced equity round but via a J-KISS Series 2 stock acquisition right, a Japanese-market convertible that lets both sides defer a hard valuation until Yaqumo's next priced financing. The seed extension closes a gap Alumni Ventures had not previously filled: a deployed capital position inside Japan, structured to bring US institutional money into Japanese pre-commercial deep tech on Japanese-market terms.
J-KISS (Keep It Simple Security) is the standard Japanese convertible-equity instrument, and the Series 2 designation matters. It defers setting an initial valuation, instead letting the parties agree now on terms that convert into equity at a later priced round. For a hardware-stage company still pre-commercial, that preserves cap-table flexibility; for the investor, it gets a seat at the table before a number has to be printed. The structure signals a thesis about timing: Alumni Ventures wants the relationship and the option, not a fight over today's valuation.
The other half of the structure is the hardware. Yaqumo builds quantum processors using ytterbium, a neutral atom (also called a cold atom) held in place by laser "tweezers" inside a room-temperature vacuum chamber and manipulated with precisely tuned laser pulses. This is a different bet from the superconducting qubits made by IBM and Google, which require dilution refrigerators near absolute zero, and from the trapped-ion approach used by IonQ and Quantinuum, which holds charged atoms in electromagnetic traps. Neutral-atom systems are part of a competitive cluster that includes QuEra, Atom Computing, Pasqal, and Infleqtion, and they have drawn interest from research labs and governments because the underlying physics scales into large qubit arrays without exotic cryogenics. Yaqumo is targeting industrial optimization and quantum chemistry simulation, a use case set that is widely shared across the cluster.
What Yaqumo gets is the more concrete half of the trade. Alumni Ventures operates a network that includes US high-performance computing centers and federal-stakeholder adjacencies, and the Bridge Fund is explicitly structured to plug Japanese deep-tech startups into North American commercial pilots and US/Japan cross-border deal flow. Representative Director and CEO Kazuhiro Nakashoji is the named executive on the company side. What Alumni Ventures gets, beyond the option, is a Japan footprint: a first deployed position that the firm can use to test whether the Bridge Fund works as a pipeline for additional cross-border deep-tech deals, or whether the vehicle stays a one-off.
The deal also exposes what remains unverified. The size of the check is undisclosed. The announcement frames this as Alumni Ventures' inaugural Japan deployment, but the firm did not provide an on-the-record partner quote or a deployment cadence for the Bridge Fund. The competitive context, that neutral-atom is a crowded modality with at least four well-capitalized Western peers, is not addressed in the announcement either. The Yaqumo round should be read as a structural data point about how US institutional capital is choosing to enter Japanese pre-commercial quantum hardware, not as a market-opening event.